What's Wrong With The Republican Party?

I know... it would take too long and it's all been said before. And whatever it is, let's all hope they choke on it and writhe around in pain before finally expiring. But let's look at it from the perspective of people who don't want to see piles of congressional Republicans on the floor screaming in agony and begging God for their own deaths to come as fast as possible. Bob Dole, who was the Senate Republican Leader for what seems like decades long before he was either the GOP presidential nominee or a Viagra salesman, doesn't wish any ill on his GOP colleagues and friends. But he was on Fox News Sunday tearing them a new one this past weekend. "I doubt [I could fit in with the modern party],” Dole said. “Reagan wouldn’t have made it, certainly Nixon wouldn’t have made it, because he had ideas. We might have made it, but I doubt it." Fact of the matter is, no one who puts country over party-- or, more precisely, crackpot, extremist ideology, can possibly make it in today's Republican Party. You want to find "your father's Republican Party?" That's now called the New Dems and the Blue Dogs.

Anyone with any ideas of appealing to a national mainstream might as well do what conservatives like Florida Republicans Charlie Crist and Patrick Murphy did-- quit the GOP and started working to make the Democrats more conservative.

And Tuesday morning on MSNBC, former Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) explained why she agrees with Dole that the Republican Party should be "closed for repairs" before they seriously run any national races again. "I certainly do agree with the former majority leader, Bob Dole, with whom I worked when I first entered the Senate and who was a consensus builder and understood what was essential and important for the Republican Party brand-- what was important for America and that unfortunately has been lost today on Capitol Hill... The Republican Party is undergoing some, you know, significant and serious changes and they are going to have to rethink their approach as a political party and how they are going to regroup and become a governing majority party that appeals to a broader group of Americans than they do today."

But do they even care about becoming a governing party again? The power inside the party has shifted to the nihilists, fascists, ignorant teabaggers and radicals and Greg Sargent says the whole "governing thing" isn't something they take seriously. Wrecking the government... that they're good at. But working for the betterment of ordinary American families? That's antithetical to the interests who finance their plush careers.

I’m not sure anyone could consciously create a headline that more perfectly captures the current GOP’s fundamental unseriousness about governing than this one from The Hill:

Senate GOP feels jilted after being wined and dined by Obama on deficit talks

As Jed Lewison points out in a good post, it’s stunning that Republican Senators actually feel no sense of embarrassment about making this self-refuting claim. Their complaint, per The Hill, is this:

Senate Republicans who shared laughs with President Obama over dinner at the Jefferson Hotel in March are grumbling there has since been little follow-through from him on deficit talks. [...]

Some Republicans think the president has become distracted from the deficit by intensified public controversies over the attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of Tea Party groups and the Justice Department’s investigation of the Associated Press.

Of course, Republicans themselves are the ones that are working feverishly, often in the face of clear and unequivocal evidence to the contrary, to tie Obama to these “public controversies.” What’s more, the GOP leadership has said that no budget compromise is possible if it involves any concession on revenues, which is to effectively say that no compromise is possible unless Democrats make 100 percent of the concessions. And not only that, but as Steve Benen notes, Obama has already offered Republicans the entitlement cuts they claim they want as part of a larger deal, only to have Republicans suddenly decide they no longer want those cuts, after all.

Yet for Republicans, the problem continues to be that Obama isn’t sufficiently wooing them adequately. As The Hill puts it, paraphrasing one senator who remained anonymous but whose sentiments echoed many others: “The lawmaker said Obama needs to sit down regularly with about five or six GOP senators to begin making substantial progress toward a deficit-reduction deal.”

Yeah, that’ll work.

Even as Senate Republicans call for Obama to woo them harder, their leader, Mitch McConnell, is absurdly claiming that Obama’s plan to nominate people to fill vacancies on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals amounts to an effort to “stack the court.”

And we can't just blame Miss McConnell-- all 45 Senate Republicans, every single one of them, who have been obstructing the president's appointments since the day he took office-- signed a brief to the Supreme Court calling Obama's recess appointments an unconstitutional abuse of power. Unhinged right-wing sites are drumming up a "stacking the courts" jihad to help raise money for reactionary nihilists.

President Barack Obama is planning to simultaneously push through the appointments of three judges to what has been called the second-most-important court in the country, in a move seen by Republicans as an attempt to stack the court toward a liberal agenda.

...McConnell and other GOP lawmakers reportedly are preparing to challenge the appointments. One plan involves shifting the three empty slots from the court to other parts of the country. Failing that, Senate Republicans could filibuster the nominees if they can pull together 41 of their 45 members.

...Democrats say that if Republicans move to block Obama's three nominations in close succession, the public will take notice and disapprove. With a tide of public opinion in their favor, Democratic leaders argue, they could try to change Senate rules to prohibit filibusters on judicial nominations, even though Democrats themselves have blocked Republican judicial nominations in the past by using the filibuster.