Republicans’ dangerous rationality

By Dana Milbank, WashPost, Published: September 23

It has become fashionable to give a psychiatric diagnosis to those Republicans teeing up a government shutdown.

“They’re on a different planet,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), a member of the Senate Democratic leadership, said last week. “Off the deep end.”

Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Republicans “define insanity” with their behavior.

I’ve lapsed into the off-the-rocker shorthand, too, but this misstates — and understates — the problem. The trouble isn’t that Republicans on the defund-Obamacare mission are insane. It’s that they are being entirely rational.

Certainly, what they are doing is dangerous to the country and to the GOP brand: A minority are saying that if their demands are not met, they will throw the nation into default and shock the economy by closing down the government.

But this doesn’t mean that the 228 House Republicans (joined by two Democrats) were acting irrationally when they voted Friday to keep the government operating only if Obamacare is jettisoned. Most of them were acting in their own rational self-interest, doing what’s necessary to survive in a political system gone mad.

(More here.)