No, that’s not very good news. Nobody with an ounce of loyalty to democracy wants to lose Republican aides who kept the government going even as their bosses were trying to destroy it. And that’s what’s happening. The Post has a long article about the changes and Jonathan Chait, at Daily Intel, sounds a warning:
Republicans have defused the bomb before by crafting last-second deals between Mitch McConnell and the White House and working around the anarchists of the House.
But, for one thing, the anarchists have grown increasingly angry at their marginalization, and increasingly determined to force their leaders not to cooperate. For another, McConnell is now facing a tea party challenger stoking conservative resentment over precisely this inside deal-maker role, which means McConnell probably can’t defy the anarchists anymore. If all that weren’t grim enough, Lori Montgomery reports an additional new danger — the small number of rational Republican staffers who cut those deals has cleared out.
John Boehner’s policy aide, Brett Loper, who cut the big budget deal with the White House in 2011 that the House GOP caucus blew up, is now a lobbyist. But the big departure, she reports, is Rohit Kumar, McConnell’s aide and the key Guy in the Room when the administration and the Senate Republicans defused the debt-ceiling bomb. …Chait, Daily Intel
In other words, we’re stuck with the Republican radicals, unleashed and brainless, now that their best advisers are leaving.