Yup: Radicalized GOP is what killed expanded background checks

By Greg Sargent, WashPost, Updated: April 23, 2013

As I noted this morning, the primary culprits in the killing of the Toomey-Manchin compromise are the GOP and the 60-vote Senate, despite the best efforts on the part of some to blame Obama’s lack of “arm twisting” for the debacle.

Steve Benen reminds us that the death of Toomey-Manchin is also another reminder of just how radical today’s GOP is in historical terms:

There’s an ongoing reluctance among many to appreciate the scope of Republican radicalization. For many, especially in media, there’s an assumption that there are two major, mainstream political parties — one center-left, the other center-right — and an effective president can govern through competent bipartisan outreach. 

Those assumptions are wrong. As we discussed in January, outreach doesn’t work because Republicans have reached an ideological extreme unseen in modern American history. It’s a quantifiable observation, not a subjective one. Even if GOP policymakers were inclined to work with Obama, they realize that they’d be punished soon after by a primary challenge — and they know this to be true because it’s happened more than a few times in recent years (look up names like Crist, Specter, Bennett, Lugar, etc.).

(More here.)