Andrew Sullivan on a GOP House

Conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan, who remains critical of the current Republican party, offers an interesting take on the potential benefits of a GOP House on The Daily Dish.

But in a strange way, the more anti-debt and anti-spending their rhetoric becomes and the plainer it is that serious defense and entitlement cuts are necessary for the problem to be solved, the more I'd like to see the GOP be deprived of their obstructionist no-responsibility posturing of the last two years. I'd like to see their bluff called on spending to escape the current impasse and get to a real debate rather than a phony one. If they win back the House, as it seems inevitable they will, they will have to offer something at last instead of criticizing everything in comically tired tropes and waiting for 2012, as the president is stymied from enacting the reformist change we elected him for.

So you throw some tea into the mix. The point is not that voters are somehow in an fit of pique backing a party whose policies they actually reject. It is that they want to break the logjam of one-party rule where the opposition party is strong enough to sabotage but denied the responsibility of actual government. And if the Republicans blow it like they did in 1996, Obama is revealed as the transformative pragmatist he has the potential to be - something now obscured by the FNC-RNC's risk-free inflammation. There is, after all, something quite disturbing about a political party as extremist as the current GOP both dominating the debate while bearing no responsibility for anything that actually gets done in the country or world.

--Ballard Burgher