By Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, Published: April 27

 Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video
asserting that there are "78 to 81" Democrats in Congress who are members of
the Communist Party. Of course, it's not unusual for some renegade lawmaker
from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West's
comment - right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s - so striking
was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional
leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential
candidates.

It's not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme
remarks and views are now taken for granted.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40
years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings,
we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today,
however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem
lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is
ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional
understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the
legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly
impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country's
challenges.

"Both sides do it" or "There is plenty of blame to go around" are the
traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of
bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when
discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in
their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to
the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out
of reach.

It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted
sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right
legislators in the House and the Senate - think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards,
John Danforth, Chuck Hagel - are virtually extinct.

The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of
its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights
revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency,
it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal
policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their
25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal
post.

What happened? Of course, there were larger forces at work beyond the
realignment of the South. They included the mobilization of social
conservatives after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the anti-tax movement
launched in 1978 by California's Proposition 13, the rise of conservative
talk radio after a congressional pay raise in 1989, and the emergence of Fox
News and right-wing blogs. But the real move to the bedrock right starts
with two names: Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist.

--
Ziggy's law, "For every complicated problem there's usually a simple
solution and its always wrong!"