Right-wing Kansas Republican Jerry Moran might be facing a primary because he had the temerity to suggest that he might consider voting “No” to Merrick Garland instead of rejecting him sight unseen. Moran flirted with the very far bounds of basic reasonableness, and had his hand chomped off.
Note: Not particularly liberal!
If you are bemoaning how far lunatic right-wing today’s Republican Party has gotten- and you should bemoan it, on a little-read blog, if possible- then it is considered a smart thing to say that “Hell, Nixon would have been too liberal for them.” I don’t need to link to the thousands of times you’ve read this; the most recent example is this Salon article. It’s an interview with Evan Thomas, who has written a book about Nixon*.
Part of that was Democrats on Capitol Hill, but he believed that government had to govern. He passed as much social welfare legislation as Lyndon Johnson. He would get drummed out of the party today as a liberal.
That is true, at least in the beginning. He wasn’t a nihilist about governing. But saying that Nixon would have been too liberal is to ignore who Nixon actually was, or more accurately, how the modern GOP is the ravening child of his mutated vision. He wouldn’t be kicked out today: he would have be leading the charge, with a sense of victimhood and oppression that would make Ted Cruz look honest**.
Shooting Irrelevance 