Nullificationist Republicans show no sign of "the fever breaking"

Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein wrote one of the best analyses yet of the still-current asymmetric partisan polarization in US politics, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism (2012). Still current, but the problem has become far more intense, to the point of the Republican President inciting an armed mob to attack the Capitol building and attempt to murder members of Congress.

One of the insurrectionists favorite symbols, of course, is the Confederate battle flag. So it's interesting to note how Mann and Ornstein used the Confederate and segregationist concept of "nullification," which they applied to the Republicans' aggressive obstructionist tactics in slow-walking and blocking Obama's appointments, even in his first term:

Republicans' efforts in the tacit cause of partisan rivalry to block the confirmation of nominees - to embarrass the president and hobble his ability to run the executive branch-are troubling enough. But the new strategy has an additional, even more disturbing element: blocking nominations, even while acknowledging the competence and integrity of the nominees, to prevent the legitimate implementation of laws on the books. In many cases, if no person is running an agency charged with enforcing a law, the agency can't easily implement or enforce the law; career bureaucrats are reluctant to make critical decisions without the imprimatur of the presidential appointee who should be running the agency. We call this - together with other tactics, including repeal of just-enacted statutes, coordinated challenges to their constitutionality, and denial of funds for implementation - the new nullification, in reference to the pre-Civil War theory in Southern states that a state could ignore or nullify a federal law it unilaterally viewed as unconstitutional. [italics in original; my emphasis in Bold]

This is why continuing the 2009-style Democratic fantasies about Bipartisan harmony is so dangerous for the effectiveness of the Biden-Harris Administration.

Mann and Orstein wrote during the last year of the Obama-Biden Administration about the radicalism behind the new nullification as the Republicans applied it to the nomination of Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court (The Grim Reality of American Politics The Atlantic 03/17/2016):

On the policy front, the Republican Congress has made the unprecedented decision to portray a president with almost a year left in his term as not simply a “lame duck” but utterly bereft of any legitimacy to carry out the responsibilities of his office. Both House and Senate have declined to recognize the budget the president submitted in January, refusing even to hold the customary hearings with the head of the National Economic Council and the director of the Office of Management and Budget. And within an hour of the announcement of the sudden death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made it clear that the Senate would not recognize any nominee put forward by Obama—no vetting, no hearing, not even the customary individual meetings with Judiciary Committee Republicans. [my emphasis]

It's pointless and even counterproductive to speculate hopefully in the current moment about how they hope "the fever will break" on the Republican side without very substantive signs from Republicans themselves that they are changing course. The fact that a big majority of Republican House Representatives voted for the coup attempt even after the invasion of the Capitol is a sign the "fever" is raging right along. (John Bowden, The Republicans who voted to challenge election results The Hill 01/07/2021)

It would be appropriate for everyone to refer to everyone on that list with the description "seditionist" prefacing their names.