Governance, Republican Style

This is a portion of a post from Daily Kos, "Spotlight on Green News," on June 8, 2016, by Meteor Blades:

Raúl Grijalva writes - Anti-Government Extremism and Protecting the Grand Canyon:

“This week marks the 110th anniversary of the Antiquities Act, a landmark law allowing presidents to designate national monuments on land owned by the federal government. Its signing by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 began the modern era of conservation, allowing Roosevelt to designate nearly twenty national monuments and protect natural and cultural resources that have come to define our country.

Many of the monuments he established, including the Grand Canyon in 1908, are now among our most popular national parks. The Antiquities Act, by any measure, has been a tremendous and popular success.

Despite that, the law is under constant attack by Congressional Republicans who mischaracterize the authority granted by the Act as a ‘land grab.’ House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Rob Bishop (R-Utah) was recently recorded at a public event saying that anyone who likes the Antiquities Act should ‘die’ so as to get ‘stupidity out of the gene pool.’ The Chairman went on to describe the law as “the most evil Act ever invented.’”

Words of wisdom from the Chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee.

This is what Republicans do. On January 20, 1981, Ronald Reagan made his inaugural speech, which included the following words:

Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.

Along the same lines, Grover Norquist:

I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

Republicans seek to cripple the federal government. When they've defunded and otherwise hamstrung a government department, they point their finger and shout: "See? It doesn't work!"

A key aspect of this is to appoint committee chairmen and agency heads who are committed to disabling the body to which they're appointed. They appoint staunch anti-environmentalists to the EPA; they place coal and oil executives at the head of agencies intended to curb pollution and act as watchdogs on the fossil fuel industry.

How do these bomb-throwers get elected?