But don’t laugh it off. John Boehner was the Speaker of the House as recently as a single year ago. He is, himself, a conservative Republican. And he is saying, flatly, that the Republican Party has been captured by morons, goofballs, and “Lucifer.” He is saying that the party has moved so far to the right that Ronald Reagan wouldn’t recognize it.
Boehner is validating one of the most persistent and controversial critiques of the modern Republican Party. And he has the authority to do so….
In 2012, the congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein wrote a column for the Washington Post diagnosing what they saw to be the central problem in modern American politics.