If it wasn't already obvious, the past few weeks surely have made it so: The House of Representatives has collapsed. Sure, the buildings are still there: The chamber in the right-hand wing of the Capitol, those dumpy offices across Independence Ave. And the buildings are still filled with representatives and their staff'or will be, once they all get back to town.
But as far as acting as a functioning branch of the federal government, those people might just as well be the walking dead (although that could be a little unfair to flesh-eating zombies).
The House GOP leadership'or what now passes for it'can't even schedule a vote to stop taxes from rising for millions of Americans on New Year's Day, much less come up with a constructive bill for members to vote on.
The speaker of the House, a man just two heartbeats from the presidency, has been reduced to a cipher, watching passively as the Senate (the Senate!) tries to take the lead in finding a way out of a fiscal crisis.
The once mighty Republican machine, which twice in living memory (1995 and 2011) vowed to roll over the White House like an M1 tank, sits paralyzed'rusted frozen, like the tin man in the Wizard of Oz.
The upshot of all this is that the House of Representatives'one of the two heads on the shoulders of our bicameral congressional beast'has been rendered largely irrelevant. The GOP majority can't even negotiate with itself, much less with anyone else.
How did we reach this point? And can a broken House be put back into some kind of working order in time to head off a fiscal disaster? I have serious doubts.
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