Chafee quits Republicans
Admittedly, I have never followed Congressional politics that closely, and given the fact that even the Democratic Congress seems incapable of doing anything other than what the Executive Branch wants, it'll probably stay that way. Having said that, the loss of someone like Chafee is in my mind bad news in the long term for the Republicans.
With the moderates defecting, the only Republicans left will be the hardest of hard-liners and extremists, and that's a recipe for permanent minority or irrelevance, and frankly, for the extremist version of the right-wing, irrelevance is a good thing for the rest of us.
But democracies thrive on competing viewpoints and actors, not single-party rule. No matter its guise, when one party is in power for too long, it becomes corrupt and incompetent. The Democrats need competition to keep them (relatively) honest, and thanks to the electoral system in the US currently, that means the Republicans are it. If they winnow themselves into irrelevance, it won't be just the conservatives who will feel the pain of the consequences.
