Well, what about the next Speaker of the House of Representatives, second in line to the presidency? It could be Daniel Webster, the Republican Congressman from North Florida whose district disappeared yesterday! thanks to GOP gerrymandering judged to be illegal by the Florida Supreme Court. On the other hand, as the website OpenSecrets details, Congressman Webster lacks the political money-raising clout of, say, Congressman Paul Ryan.
And what about Ryan, whose penchant for the political limelight resembles a moth circling a flame? Yesterday, gaggles of cameras reversed roles, chasing the congressman who is off for a week back in Wisconsin to "consult with his family" about taking the job. He most certainly will accept the job, "for the good of the party and the nation".
Ryan emerged to the national stage as the telegenic, young second fiddle to Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP candidate for president who really did lose to Barack Obama. Back then, Salon published "Five crazy things Paul Ryan actually believes". Among the highlights:
If Grover Norquist -- he of the immortal "bathtub" quote -- were going to take a male lover, it would be Paul Ryan. When the CBO projected the impact of Ryan's Republican budget proposal's over the next four decades, it found that government would be cut to its smallest level since 1950. According to an analysis by the Washington Post, Ryan would cut 40 percent from transportation, 40 percent from education and training, 30 percent from "income security" programs for the poor. As Derek Thompson pointed out in the Atlantic, if you project forward Ryan's defense spending plans, he would cut 91 percent from all other non-discretionary spending. No, that is not a typo.
In other words, Ryan is the perfect serum to the radical right that first poisoned the GOP and now wonders why so many, many Americans consider the party toxic to the future of this great nation. That is, unless cooler heads prevail and a candidate emerges who could also garner enough votes from Democrats to prevail in a majority vote for the next Speaker.
That outcome is improbable because any Republican with a cooler head in Congress has already been decapitated by the radical right. The sheep cower in a corner of a meadow. The wolves circle.
Who bears responsibility for the slaughter?
Look no further than those who populate the stage to be Republican candidate for president in 2016. These won support by embracing the notion: save the United States by destroying its government. If it can't be done by legislation, create carnage by hobbling the mission of agencies; starving budgets, cutting science in favor of ideology, putting lobbyists for industry in the middle ranks where they can be wrecking balls, far from the prying view of reporters or TV cameras. This is not made up. These methods are trumpeted as virtue by every GOP candidate for president.
Government doesn't work because it is designed to fail. That is the GOP's signal achievement of the last 30 years.
The biblical admonition, "whatever a man soweth, that shall he reap", applies. The GOP's hard drive is damaged; the massing images on the jumbotron screen hooked by optical cable are jumbled, tying back to corrupted files and empty ideas -- Freedom Caucus, Freedom Works -- , hollow except to voters in red states like South Carolina who pray to God to stop the floods even though their GOP Congressmen unanimously voted against national flood insurance because government must be shrunk to the size it can fit in a bathtub and be drowned.