Why Republicans Still Oppose Seating Al Franken

On his blog on the Think Progress web site yesterday, Matt Yglesias was trying to understand how and why the Republican Party is still pouring energy into former Senator Norm Coleman's futile litigation to prevent his Democratic opponent Al Franken from being seated in the U.S. Senate, in the wake of a Minnesota court's declaration that Franken won the election. Yglesias marveled at “the level of party discipline that the Republicans have been able to muster in 2009″ which he calls “really impressive.”

But that praise is misplaced, when you consider two underlying facts. First, there is no coherent substantive vision of what the Republican Party stands for, in the wake of their removal from national power last November. In the absence of substance, disputing process (e.g. a close election) is a substitute for thinking. It’s also an unconscious way of refighting 2008 and trying to get a different result. Second, the extremist sloganeering by broadcast bullies like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck has frightened into silence virtually all rational thinkers in the Republican elite, so the only outlet for the party's energy is trying to obstruct Democrats’ consolidation of power and their recasting of the purposes of government, through legislative or legal stunts as in Minnesota or absurdly ascribing socialist motives to a president whose ideology is quite unfrightening. Meanwhile puerile projects like the Fox News-promoted "tea-bagging" protests further define the president's opponents as grasping at straws while pleading for the world to please stop believing him.

It is one thing to muster party unity in the cause of constructive change. It is quite another to apply it to obstruction. The latter is only going to deepen the Republican Party’s association with negative, disruptive news. Until rational thinkers and speakers who have constructive ideas related to real public needs emerge among Republicans, they and their antics will be merely sound and fury, transfixing broadcast reporters and bloggers but very few other Americans outside their dogmatic base.