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Republicans put fringe front and center

May 19, 2021

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Alan Grayson is apparently a likely candidate for the Democratic nomination to take on Senator Marco Rubio in Florida next year.

You probably don't remember Grayson, but he was briefly a big noise, if not a big deal. Grayson served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives in two different districts, earning a reputation as an irresponsible blowhard — and, eventually, an example of how the two major political parties are not alike. Grayson ran for Senate in 2016 and lost by more than 40 percentage points in the Democratic primary. When he tried to return to the House two years later, he was trounced in that primary by his successor, this time by about 33 percentage points.

I'm not sure what he's been up to since then, but he certainly wasn't given a show on MSNBC. He apparently released a book attacking Donald Trump a couple of years ago, but I'm not aware of it drawing any attention. As for his comeback in 2022? The Cook Political Report's Senate elections maven Jessica Taylor reacted by not taking it seriously at all.

The point is that both parties produce duds of various kinds who find their way into high office once in awhile, but how they handle them is very different. The Democrats didn't exactly cut ties to Grayson, but they didn't do much to encourage him, either. Yes, he was originally given visibility through party-aligned media, but that didn't last long. Once it was clear he was an embarrassment to the party, his strident partisanship couldn't save him, and now he's relegated to the fringes of the party with a comeback unlikely.

On the Republican side, embarrassments are the toast of the party. In the House? There's the one who is being sued by a former staffer for endangering everyone in his office (and using a room in the Capitol as housing for his son). There's the one who has somehow managed to miss a whopping 16% of the votes on the House floor this year, despite the emergency availability of proxy voting. The one in a personal sex scandal. The one who is accused of covering up abuse. The one whose siblings run TV ads against him. The conspiracy-theory spouting one who is apparently stalking a fellow member of the House. The … well, I don't even know where to begin with Lauren Boebert.

This is not close to a comprehensive list, even of current House Republicans. And to be clear: None of these are serious legislators who also happened to be involved in scandal. They're showhorses, not workhorses, and (like Grayson) irresponsible ones at that — partisan blowhards who contribute little or nothing positive to the work of Congress.

Thirty years ago, Republicans would probably have marginalized them and, for those enmeshed in more serious problems, tried to ease them out of office quickly and quietly. Now? They're among the most visible Republicans, not because of scandal-mongering media, but because these are the folks that the party wants to promote. Has anyone in the party even called for Florida's Matt Gaetz to resign if the sex-trafficking charges against him are true? Certainly not many. (Note that parties often have limited ability to actually enforce punishment; the current Democratic governors of Virginia and New York have so far survived pressure to resign after scandal. But we'll see if either of them wins any future Democratic nomination).

The behavior that the Democratic Party tries to winnow out is what the current Republican Party and its party-aligned media rewards. And it's having the effect that one would expect.

1. Dan Drezner on the Biden White House.

2. Joseph E. Uscinski and Adam M. Enders on the history of conspiracy thinking about child sex trafficking. 

3. Mary Ziegler at the Monkey Cage on the Supreme Court and abortion.

4. Matt Yglesias on the policy benefits of bailouts. 

5. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Therese Raphael speaks with the veteran British diplomat Peter Ricketts about post-Brexit U.K.

6. Michael Manville on parking.

7. And Kevin Drum blames Fox News for the anti-democracy turn in the Republican Party. Plausible! But there's another, even better correlation: The elevation of Newt Gingrich to party leader, and then Speaker of the House. So it's complicated. 

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