Rand Paul, racism, and prison: the Tea Party is leading the way on criminal justice reform.

• Author: Welch, Matt

Norm Ornstein is one of those Washington "centrist" lifers whom the commentariat loves to deploy against the hard-line partisans allegedly fouling our national discourse. A liberal at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Ornstein helped craft the speech-squelching Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, which the Supreme Court, mercifully, has largely overturned. In April 2012, along with fellow centrist think-tanker Thomas Mann, Ornstein wearily declared in a Washington Post op-ed, "Let's just say it: The Republicans are the problem." In an October 2013 interview with public broadcaster Diane Rehm, he asserted that racism played a "significant" role in the Republican Party's "ruthlessly pragmatic attempt to delegitimize a Democratic president," and in July of this year, he fretted in National Journal that "extremism" has become "mainstream" in the modern GOP.

"I am not suggesting that the lunatics or extremists have won," Ornstein wrote. "Most Republicans in the Senate are not, to use John McCain's term, 'wacko birds,' and most Republicans in office would at least privately cringe at some of the wild ideas and extreme views."

And which beyond-the-pale beliefs are those? In addition to the usual nonsensical quotes about slavery and science that we've come to expect from wild-eyed GOP state senators you've never heard of, Ornstein also included opposition to Common Core curriculum standards, the desire to abolish the Federal Reserve, and the reluctance to impose government penalties against parents who refuse vaccines (a reticence enshrined in almost every state's legal code, in the form of sanction-free opt-outs).

But even more nonsensical than Ornstein's conflation of perfectly arguable policy positions with "extremism" was his massively reductive yet distressingly familiar attempt to sort all elected Republicans into two bins marked "crazy" and "rational." This has been a staple of political journalism since the rise of the Tea Party in 2009, and it has contributed to one of the biggest missed stories of this young century.

When John McCain used the phrase wacko bird in March 2013, he was referring most directly to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the leading member of the 2010 Tea Party class of elected officials. (Paul's 2011 campaign memoir was titled The Tea Party Goes to Washington, and not once during his election night victory speech did he utter the word Republican.) If the Tea Party was commonly portrayed upon its arrival on...