It’ll Take More Than an Apocalypse to Unseat House Republicans

By Jonathan Chait

There is a morally intuitive connection between crime and punishment that is leading many people in Washington to speculate that the dysfunction of the Republican House could cost the party in the midterm elections. If House Republicans are preventing any alternative to terribly designed budget sequestration, blocking agreement on immigration reform, and threatening fiscal and economic crises in order to posture against Obamacare, the fair and rational thing would be for voters to punish them. Such ideologically diverse analysts as Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, Byron York, and Ruy Teixeira have all floated variations of this possibility.

Unfortunately, life isn’t fair or rational.