Are You Watching The Republican Party Disintegrate Before Our Eyes?

That interview Ted Cruz did with Chuck Todd made it pretty clear how intensely the Texas neo-fascist hates the traditional establishment politicians in his own party. And this week, in an interview with CNBC's John Harwood, a very frustrated Rand Paul actually called for fellow Republicans in Congress to resign if they can't accept his radical crackpot flat tax agenda.

HARWOOD: Talk about tax policy for a second. You're for a flat tax. Critics say: 'regressive, would add to the deficit.' What have we seen in the last generation that makes us think a flat tax is achievable?

PAUL: I've done three five-year budgets that balance with significant tax cuts. So not only would I cut money that goes into government, and I've had critics on the conservative side say, "Well, government would be $3 trillion short." Well, let's cut government. I want a much smaller government. I want a federal government that does a lot less in Washington. And we send most of that power back to the states, into the private economy.

The majority of Republicans want revenue-neutral tax reform. And I tell people, "If that's what we're for, I'm going home." Because that means half the country will pay more, half the country will pay less. And the net effect is zero. They want to simplify taxes. But they don't actually want to lower the burden and make government smaller.

It won't happen with the same people. So what you have to have is a wave of new people. In 2010, there were, like, 80 some odd new congressmen. only if I were the nominee and win the presidency, only if someone who is dramatically willing to change government, to stand up to big government and actually change it, if that person were elected, that means that a majority of the public wants that.

HARWOOD: So you need Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, John Boehner, Kevin McCarthy-- you need those people out of there, and a whole new group?

PAUL: I think that turnover's a good idea. I've been in favor of term limits since I began. People get beaten down by the system. And the longer people are here, the less likely they will be involved in change. There's enormous amount of inertia.

Is the Republican Party self-destructing right before our eyes-- or are they on a healthy path to renewal and regeneration? And, if so, at what cost-- to the party, the career politicians that lead it and to the nation itself? Right-wing South Carolina loon Mick Mulvaney, called it creative destruction.

“People think we are supporting Webster because he’s the most conservative,” Mulvaney told the Daily Signal. “But the man has a centrist voting record. We are looking for creative destruction in how the House operates. And we don’t care who takes the lead on doing that.”

This idea of creative destruction was echoed by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who chairs the conservative Senate Steering Committee. He argued in a Federalist op-ed that what matters is “not who the next speaker is but what the next speaker does.” He called for “open source policy innovation” that decentralizes power in Congress and opens the legislative process to new ideas.

According to a document leaked to Politico, and confirmed by the Daily Signal, the proposed reforms include opening up the process of committee selection, allowing committee chairmen more control, and creating more transparency in the way bills are brought to the floor. They also want a return of the “Hastert rule,” which requires a majority of Republicans to support any bill brought to a floor vote.

“We want to change it from being the speaker’s House back to the people’s House,” said Matt Salmon, a Freedom Caucus founder from Arizona. “In the last 20 years, it became the speaker’s House, because the speaker has incredible power, where they and their staff determine the legislation, what’s in it, and what amendments are involved.”

Between their inability to elect a House Speaker to their Deep Bench turning into a frightening clown car right in front of the public, the Republicans have gone so far off the deep end that the newest ABC News/Washington Post poll is showing Obama with his first positive approval rating in 2 years (51%) which contrasts to a 24% approval rating for Republicans in Congress (11 points lower than the Democratic Party congressmembers approval).

GOP differences over the next House speaker are not being well received: Just 29 percent of Americans see this as “healthy debate,” while 59 percent see it as “a sign of dysfunction” among House Republicans. Even among self-identified Republicans, more than four in 10 see the leadership battle as a sign of dysfunction within their party. That rises to 59 percent among independents and 72 percent of Democrats.

Among those who see the disagreement as dysfunctional, only 15 percent approve of the House Republicans’ overall job performance. That compares with 40 percent approval-- better, but still well under half-- among those who see it as healthy debate.

The GOP’s fractious situation is evident in its weaker in-party ratings. While only 31 percent of Democrats disapprove of the Democrats in Congress, 51 percent of Republicans disapprove of the Republicans in Congress. Similarly, in ideological terms, just 39 percent of liberals rate the Democrats negatively, while 64 percent of conservatives disapprove of the Republicans.

Vanderbilt University Law Professor Ed Rubin asserted at Salon yesterday that the extremists inside the GOP-- the various Tea Party factions-- hate the Republican Party and the country and want them both to fail. "Instead of showing that they have a better way to govern," he wrote, the Tea Party crackpots "are trying to stop the existing government from functioning. They want it to fail. They hated the effort to rescue the American economy after the 2008 recession and only intensified their dislike when that effort succeeded. They oppose any regulatory program to combat global warming, but rather than favoring market-based alternatives or technological remedies, they simply refuse to deal with the issue by declaring it a hoax. They don’t like the regulatory aspects of Obamacare, but they have no alternative to offer. When they couldn’t overturn the program by constitutional means, their solution was to try to block passage of the entire federal budget, which not only would have created administrative chaos in the country, but wrecked our national credit and our public finance system.

Freedom Caucus candidate for Speaker, Taliban Dan Webster

"Now they have demonstrated that they even don’t want their own political party to govern. They don’t want the Republicans to be in a position where they can advance constructive alternatives to Democratic policies. They don’t want it to be able to propose legislation that will carry out its program. If the Republicans won’t commit themselves to the Tea Party program, which is to stop American government from functioning, then the Tea Party will try to stop the Republican Party from functioning. In other words, they are a disloyal opposition. They don’t understand what American democracy is all about and what has made it work so well. That’s the real reason why the name the chose for themselves is the wrong one. The original Tea Partiers were American patriots; the current Tea Party is the opposite."

And I guess that explains this chart from the ABC/Washington Post poll cited early/ It shows that Republicans overall are very enthusiastic about the Republicans in Congress but on the far right of the party, the disdain for Republican congressmembers.