Is the GOP House Majority Forever?

My new favorite blogger, Jonathan Chait, posted a sobering piece yesterday on the apparent imperviousness of the GOP’s House majority, at least until after the next reapportionment, notwithstanding their eye-popping lunacy and cruelty.

It’s gratifying to know that we’ve done what we can do by sending Bill Foster and Tammy Duckworth to Congress to be voices for sanity and responsibility.  But we can’t afford to be complacent about these successes or discouraged about the larger prospects.  What we can – and must – do here is to keep the good guys in there so, if and when the tide turns and there’s a Democratic majority again, we’ll be in a position to help move the ball forward as a country.

Meanwhile, here’s Jonathan Chait (Excerpts, and emphasis added.  Click through to read the whole thing):

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

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. …

Unfortunately, life isn’t fair or rational.

The main issue is that most voters don’t pay attention to Congress. Political scientists have found they hold the president accountable for everything, so that the in-party only really gets punished if voters are mad at the president and they’re the same party. …

…

There is one way the House Republicans’ extremism is hurting the party: by poisoning the party’s general brand, reinforcing the Democratic loyalties of the younger cohort that has lifted Obama into office twice. In particular, if Republicans kill immigration reform, then I suspect it could cement the hostility of Latinos for years and years to come.

Those voters can hurt Republicans over the very long run, and in presidential elections in the short run. But the House map will allow the Republican majority to survive with almost all white voters for a long time.

…

… In the meantime, they can inflict an awful lot of damage to the country at very little cost to themselves.