Zero republican votes in the Senate for sanity also does not bode well.

Non-teabagger Republicans in DC might as well be unicorns, based on voting records.

Here’s an example of what “Non-teabagger Republicans” face:

After meeting for over an hour with Senator Lisa Murkowski, it is hard not to feel sorry for the contemporary Republican realist, caught at every turn between rocks of varying sizes and hard places. Senator Murkowski, by implication if not always specific statements, agrees with what is surely the Alaskan common opinion: the shutdown of the government was a very bad idea. Not raising the debt ceiling is even worse.

Yet, somewhere around a quarter of Alaskans think shutting down the federal government is appropriate payback for grievances, real or imagined, and with less certainty, most of them think that not raising the debt ceiling works to cut the national debt. Since expert elitists are suspect, unanimous professional opinion that not paying our bills, by increasing interest rates, will increase debt and could bring on a global depression, can be dismissed.

Sen. Murkowski cannot ignore tea party opinion since she famously lost her primary to a tea party radical. Yes, she came back in a write-in to win the general election with massive help from independents (a majority of registered voters) and Democrats acting outside party guidelines. While one might think that this feat would leave her now above the fray, that doesn’t quite work. The primary lesson is not drawn from her win, a fluke from a national perspective, but from her loss of the primary, an example noted by her colleagues in both chambers.

Read more here: adn.com