The Republican Hardliners Aren't Conservatives, They're Radicals

A capricious amendment to the Affordable Care Act offered by Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, moved senators and their staffs off the federal employee health marketplace and onto the new Affordable Care Act exchanges, but it left ambiguous whether their subsidies would remain. For the past month or more, Senator David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, has blocked every significant action in the Senate, whether important for national security, homeland security, or the ability of Senate committees to function, in return for his demand to knock those subsidies out. Rod Dreher, writing in The American Conservative in a piece called "Republicans, Over the Cliff," eloquently makes the same point. A lot of it is an emotional, zealous reaction to America today - an ardent willingness to break crockery and demolish existing institutions to achieve the goal of eviscerating government as we know it, the good with the bad. As Dreher put it, "When I think of the Republican Party, I don't think of principled conservative legislators who are men and women of vision strategy. I think of ideologues who are prepared to wreck things to get their way. They have confused prudence - the queen of virtues, and the cardinal virtue of conservative politics - with weakness."

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