For what it’s worth, local newspapers noticed how irrational the recent dumping of seemingly pretty common sense regulations was for Congressmen from New Fucking Jersey (God bless the Garden State Parkway!) to vote for.

Hey Leonard Lance (R-NJ7), Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ11) and Tom MacArthur (R-NJ3),   do your constituents really think it’s okay for coal companies to dump industrial waste in streams and rivers?  Or that investment firms shouldn’t have to be bound to work in the fiduciary  interest of their clients?

Frank LoBiondo (R-NJ2) and Chris Smith (R-NJ4), do your constituents believe that oil companies shouldn’t have to reveal when they receive payments from foreign countries? Or that people with severe mental disabilities should have guns?

Notice the hilarious language that NRA licksplittles use:  when asked about whether it makes sense for mentally disabled people to have guns, they deflect and abstract it by saying it’s about the Second Amendment.  They don’t use the word “guns.”

“This is a slap in the face for those in the disabled community,” House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) told USA Today. “It assumes that simply because an individual suffers from a mental condition, that individual is unfit to exercise his or her Second Amendment rights.”

In other words, the GOP is OK with the next Adam Lanza having a Bushmaster.

Interviewers have to push back every time they say “Second Amendment” and repeat that it’s about actual people who are too disabled to handle their own finances to possess deadly firearms, not an abstraction.

“It’s all ideological for Republicans, not logical,” Rep. Frank Pallone (D-6^th) said Friday. “Many of the regulations in place now are responses to the financial crisis or decades of pollution. Again and again, we’ve seen deregulation cost lives and money. Republican are apparently content to deregulate, cross their fingers and hope for the best.”

These NJ Republicans represent the difference between today’s monolithic GOP and the past:  20 years ago a Republican from NJ would most likely not have voted with his Southern and Western counterparts in favor of the NRA and the extractive industries. Even NJ Republicans that represent people who work on Wall Street would have seen the basic logic of the protections of Dodd-Frank and the consumer-centric Wall Street reforms like the fiduciary rule.