Reservoir Dogs in Washington

Fascinating Molly Ball column on the mood among Washington's Republicans:

For the Republicans running the government, Capitol Hill has become a workplace with extremely poor morale. The moderates fear for their careers, while the conservative true believers see little to hope for. When the liberal magazine Mother Jones credited Representative Justin Amash of Michigan with being the first Republican to raise the possibility of impeachment, the office of Representative Carlos Curbelo of Florida called to request a correction: Curbelo had gone there first.

But for the most part, his party has not openly turned on Trump. What would be the point? Behind closed doors, a longtime House Republican staffer told me, a few lawmakers still wholeheartedly defend the president; among the rest, there are differing degrees of fatalism. One group thinks it is possible to fight through the crisis, while another is resigned to “a long slow death,” as this staffer put it, potentially culminating in a Democratic-controlled House beginning impeachment proceedings in 2019. “This is like Reservoir Dogs,” the staffer said. “Everyone ends up dead on the floor.”

American politicians are not, for the most part, slow-thinking types devoted to taking the long view. They tend to be a bit flighty and short on attention span, often caught up in the emotions of the moment. So it does not surprise me to hear that many are distracted by Trump-mania and losing their focus. Plus I think there may be many Representatives who enjoyed being the disloyal opposition more than they like trying to come up with a budget or a health care bill. So I am willing to grant that the mood in many Congressional offices may be sour. But moods change fast, so I wouldn't count out the Republican Congress yet. They may still find the resolve to do all sorts of things. The budget has to be passed, and if it all these distractions mean it ends up being passed in a crazy flurry of last-minute deals, who knows what might be in it?