Eric and Irene

“Have you left no sense of decency?” That’s the question Joseph Welch famously asked Joseph McCarthy, because the red-baiting demagogue tried to ruin yet one more innocent citizen. And these days, it’s the question I notice myself wanting to ask Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, who has done over anyone else to form policy blackmail — using innocent Americans as hostages — standard operating procedure for the G.O.P.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Cantor was the onerous man in the confrontation over the debt ceiling; he was willing to endanger America’s money credibility, putting our whole economy at risk, so as to extract budget concessions from President Obama. currently he’s doing it once more, this point over disaster relief, making headlines by insisting that any federal aid to the victims of Hurricane Irene be offset by cuts in other spending. In effect, he’s threatening to take Irene’s victims hostage.

Mr. Cantor’s critics have been quick to accuse him of hypocrisy, and with sensible reason. After all, he and his Republican colleagues showed no comparable interest in paying for the Bush administration’s huge unfunded initiatives. in particular, they did nothing to offset the price of the Iraq war, which currently stands at $800 billion and counting.

And it seems that in 2004, when his home state of Virginia was struck by Tropical Storm Gaston, Mr. Cantor voted against a bill that would have required a similar pay-as-you-go rule that he currently advocates.

But, as I see it, hypocrisy is a secondary issue here. the primary issue ought to be the extraordinary nihilism currently on show by Mr. Cantor and his colleagues — their willingness to flout all the usual conventions of truthful play and, well, decency so as to urge what they want.

Not back then, a political party seeking to change U.S. policy would try and achieve that goal by building common support for its ideas, then implementing those ideas through legislation. That, after all, is how our political system was designed to work.

But today’s G.O.P. has decided to bypass all that and opt for a quicker route. Never mind getting enough votes to pass legislation; it gets what it wants by threatening to harm America if its demands aren’t met. That’s what happened with the debt-ceiling fight, and currently it’s what’s happening over disaster aid. In effect, Mr. Cantor and his allies are threatening to take hurricane victims hostage, using their suffering as a bargaining chip.