The mood is so bad at the U.S. Capitol that.....

[Ford_Prefect]

21. The people recruited into the GOP who are now in office in Congress and the Senate are the

end result of decades of careful pruning of the party by its leaders and patrons. The members who now reside were selected and vetted to be perfect zealot material: They believe the BS they spout not because it is measurable fact but because they have been told so by their leaders. They have been inoculated against reasoned debate and independently verifiable information by years of programming to the view that anything said by a Democrat, or a liberal, or a Federal agency, or a network news source must be a lie or based upon one. They do not think independently because they can't. It is why they were recruited in the first place.

Many of them believe that their duty is to overthrow and demolish from within federal authority that does not conform to their distorted vision of America. They also believe that they are a sort of secret army elected to that purpose. That is not hype nor exaggeration for effect. They really believe that crap and aren't just saying it to please the base. They also believe they are immune from rules of society, law, and the institution they inhabit. They are no less radicalized than the people who broke into the Capitol and beat the police. I cannot imagine sharing an elevator or a lunchroom with them.

Our local county commissioners have gone that way. I used to go to meetings on issues I needed to speak about. It mattered because the record counts and 35 of us responding to a proposal versus 5 of "them" used to have impact. Now they go through the motions of allowing people to speak but it no longer matters if 100 of us showed up or only 2. The hostility they have towards those who dispute their wisdom is palpable. They write down what people say for the record but decisions are made based on private consultation between commissioners, their patrons and special advisors from outfits like ALEC. That became established SOP under Trump. The only thing that slows them down now is a lawsuit and even that seems to have limited effect. They refused to enforce the mask mandate here and went so far as to officially doubt that it was needed. This in the town that hosts the NIH Rocky Mountain Lab.