On Which Garbage Heap Will Jim DeMint Turn Up Next?

Who remembers Jim DeMint? He was an ad guy in Greenville, South Carolina who was elected to the House in 1998 and then the Senate in 2004. He was a Tea Party guy before there was a Tea Party and was the staunchest proponent of ending Social Security and of reactionary politics in general while he served in Congress, often a pariah among establishment Republicans. Reelected to the Senate in 2010, he resigned 2 years later to become president of the Heritage Foundation, then a somewhat staid right-wing think tank. He was fired on Friday for... being the kind of asshole Jim DeMint has always been. 5 years of it was too much for Heritage and the Board of Directiors is behind a move to finally oust him.

DeMint’s short tenure was fraught with controversy as he tried to change Heritage from a research-oriented think tank that had good relations with most Republicans into a hard-edged activist organization that frequently provoked anger from GOP leaders.

According to multiple people familiar with DeMint’s time at Heritage, his confrontational political strategy was initially welcomed by the majority of the non-profit’s board members who had received negative reviews from donors large and small about how Heritage conducted itself during the term of former president George W. Bush. During those years, Feulner and his top aides cultivated close relations with the White House. But when Bush’s political popularity collapsed thanks to Hurricane Katrina and continued violence in Iraq, Feulner’s low-key, policy-centric approach was blamed by Tea Party-aligned conservatives as feckless.

DeMint was eventually promoted as a man who could save Heritage from irrelevance due to his fame among conservatives for angrily opposing Senate Republican leaders. His oft-repeated claim that he could accomplish more with 30 hardcore conservatives than with 60 moderates became a bit of a catchphrase among some activists. Although some Heritage staffers remained suspicious of his politician pedigree, he initially faced few complaints. Soon, however, his fiery style and the inexperienced staffers he brought in began to rankle some of the more scholarly Heritage employees. A number of them began heading for the exits, particularly as DeMint and a newly created lobbying sister organization, Heritage Action, eagerly joined a foolhardy GOP bid to shut down the government in 2013. Republican politicians who had long relied on the Heritage Foundation to make them smarter were incensed that the think tank was promoting stupidity.

DeMint dialed back his flinty style afterwards but his reputation was severely damaged among some employees and donors who had previously reserved judgment. The writing was on the wall for DeMint after that.

The crazy, right-wing Washington Examiner website painted a picture of hysteria at Heritage on Friday with neo-fascist snowflakes weeping and weeping and melting away to nothing-- and referring DeMint's ouster as "a putsch" with staffers "drawing battle lines on an otherwise sunny day."

"It's shameful how all this is being handled," an irate department director said. "I just can't believe Heritage brought DeMint in from the Senate, then stabbed him in the back. I guarantee they purge his people next."

So far, though, Heritage hasn't issued an official statement. Communications staffers have been warned not to speak with media. And after multiple interviews with current and former Heritage employees speaking on condition of anonymity, a prevailing narrative has emerged:

DeMint lost his job, in large part, for crossing Heritage Action CEO, Mike Needham.

Dismissing reports that DeMint was ousted for being too political, the department director argued instead that "basically this is one big Mike Needham power play." According to the source, Needham has been "trying to take over Heritage forever" and will use Feulner "as proxy to control the place."

Needham, who served as Feulner's chief of staff, did not respond to requests for comment.

While both men tend to agree on ideology, they disagree on method. A senior policy expert complained that DeMint wanted to remake Heritage in his own image, pointing to the policy services and outreach department as well as the organization's media arm, the Daily Signal (where I used to work).

"Basically he treated the place like it was his giant Senate office," the policy expert said. "That ended up being a significant departure from the vision set out by the board and Feulner."

While Needham helped bring DeMint to Heritage in 2013, their relationship began to fray during the presidential election. It reached a breaking point, two separate sources confirmed, after DeMint suggested making major changes to Heritage Action or abolishing it altogether.

"That really wasn't a smart move," the policy expert explained, "because Needham is Feulner's guy."

When the board asked DeMint to step down last weekend, the fiery conservative refused and has tried lobbying board members to keep his job. If he doesn't go quietly into the dark, the board can vote him out as soon as Tuesday when they convene in Washington, D.C.

DeMint was making over a million dollars a year and his contract was going to expire at the end of 2017. It was DeMint who got right-wing ideologue Neil Gorsuch, who Trump had never heard of, onto the Supreme Court.

Can Progressives Get Beyond Dead On Arrival?

Budgets are about making choices and setting priorities. Thursday morning OMB Director Mick Mulvaney called Trump's first budget proposal "an America First budget." In reality, it's a Trump first budget that doesn't make America great but would make America second rate. Contrast this: the budgets for the National Endowment for the Arts and for the National Endowment for the Humanities was $148 million a year. The cost of security for Trump Tower is $183 million a year. By the end of this weekend, Trump will have spent $12 million of taxpayer money on the festivities at Mar A Lago. That's 2 million of the Meals on Wheels (at $6 each) that the "America First" budget eliminates. Yes, for every day that he spends at Mar A Lago, 166,000 seniors will go hungry. Some people might even wonder why doesn't he cut his trips and golfing excursions and just leave Meals on Wheels alone. And by the way, aside from eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Trump and Bannon have also decided to jettison the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Legal Services Corporation, which finances legal aid groups. Priorities.

But those national endowments are just for a bunch coastal elites, you mutter? (Not you-- your brother-in-law who exists on disability and who lives on Staten Island.) Well, the Trumpanzee budget would defund a commission that invests in jobs in Appalachia where recovery is slow, screwing his electoral base. He won West Virginia, Kentucky and the Appalachian parts of Pennsylvania and Ohio massively-- and yet, sadly-- budget proposal kills the Appalachian Regional Commission (regional economic development) and the Chemical Safety Board which is investigating the devastating West Virginia chemical spill from 2014.

So that job-creating infrastructure explosion he campaigned on all last year? How does that jibe with his proposal to cut 13% from the Transportation Department? Yeah, yeah... I know. They have to pay for the billionaire tax cuts somehow-- not to mention the $1.5 billion dollar border wall boondoggle Mexico isn't paying for but that Trump included in his budget. And what did vulnerable Republican Senator Dean Heller of Nevada say about Trump's proposal to fund turning Yucca Mountain into a nuclear dumping ground? "As has been stated in the past, Yucca is dead and this reckless proposal will not revive it. Washington needs to understand what Nevada has been saying for years: we will not be the nation’s nuclear waste dump. This project was ill-conceived from the beginning and has already flushed billions of taxpayer dollars down the drain. Members of both parties keep trying to revive this dead project via the budget and appropriations process, but I will continue to fight those efforts."

Ruben Kihuen (D-NV) was just as alarmed as Heller about the inclusion of a nuclear waste dump in his backyard. "Yucca Mountain has been dead for years. Now, President Trump wants to run roughshod over the people of Nevada and throw away funding that could be better spent on infrastructure and creating jobs. Nevada is not a dumping ground for the rest of the country's nuclear waste and our rights shouldn't be trampled over just because President Trump wants to put an unsavory waste facility in our backyard. The Nevada delegation was united in sponsoring the Nuclear Waste Informed Consent Act earlier this year, demanding that states be consulted before nuclear waste repositories can be built by the federal government. I urge President Trump and Secretary Perry to reconsider their reckless and haphazard scheme to throw away federal tax dollars, especially without thinking about the safety and well-being of the people of Nevada."

At this point it looks like the only way Trump's ill-conceived dead-on-arrival budget will even get introduced is if Pelosi has a Democrat bring it up to force Republicans to go on the record voting against it (or, better yet, for it). For example, the EPA would be decimated. "The budget calls for the elimination of about 3,200 staff positions-- over 20 percent of the department. It would also eliminate all funding for enactment of the Clean Power Plan, the regulations designed to curb greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. It would also discontinue funding for climate change research and international climate change programs."

Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) is the Vice Ranking Member of the House Budget Committee, and she was pissed off when she started reading through the proposal-- especially the way it "slashes $54 billion in investments important to working families, communities and public safety... The Trump budget proposal is a real punch in the gut to the American people. It makes abundantly clear that every critical domestic program important to working families is on the chopping block... Our nation’s budget represents our moral values and our commitment to the future of our country. The Trump budget is a clear betrayal of those values. No lawmaker, Democrat or Republican, can say they support their constituents and vote for this proposal."


Jerry Nadler (D-NY) tore the Trumpanzee budget apart from top to bottom. I found this part particularly important to pay attention to: "The Trump budget frivolously ramps-up military spending in a chauvinistic show of force that won’t make our country any safer and may well provoke friend and foe alike.  It makes devastatingly unrealistic cuts to the State Department, which would cripple our diplomatic efforts to prevent and solve conflicts peacefully thereby reducing the need for military force. Everyone should oppose this budget, which doesn’t even achieve Republicans’ long-stated goal of deficit reduction, but does threaten the lives of every single American. It's time to wake up to the malignant lies of the Trump Administration before he turns this country into an autocratic state that sacrifices the health, safety, and security of American families in favor of an agenda fueled by nationalist propaganda."

Friday we looked at polling from Arizona that showed how Flake could lose his Senate seat in 2018. All he'd have to do is start going along with some of these extremist positions Trump is staking out. One of the questions got right to the heart of it;

After hearing some key information about what AHCA would do, 57% of people would be less likely-- 47% much less likely-- to support Senator Flake or their Member of Congress if they supported this bill. 58% of Independents are less likely to vote for someone who [votes for] this bill.

But Flake is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Most Arizonans don't want anything to do with TrumpCare-- which is really just an extension of the Trump budget-- but Trump has been threatening to support one of the neo-fascist primary opponents challenging Flake, once considered the most conservative member of Congress from Arizona. One of the crackpots running against him is TRumpist Kelli Ward who is already shouting about how very enthusiastic she is about the DOA budget. She claims that the Trumpanzee budget "begins the process of draining the swamp by eliminating dozens of unconstitutional, duplicative and unnecessary federal programs that should be run by the states, if at all. I hope our five Republican House members stand united with the president in support of this plan. [It] eliminates wasteful spending and redirects dollars to the Constitutional functions of border security and national security. I know both Senators have had their differences with the president with Jeff Flake even admitting he voted for liberal independent Evan McMullin against President Trump. But I hope both will put politics aside and stand with the president as he makes the most significant reduction in federal spending in our lifetimes."



Theo Anderson, writing for In These Times did a deep dive into how the Heritage Foundation, closely allied with Pence, found the perfect tool for their 4 decades worth of extreme and whacky concepts about how to return about to the 1920s. Dozens of Heritage staff crackpots worked on the Trumpanzee transition team and are still laboring away in the bowels of the Regime to wreck America. "Trump’s election," he wrote, "is the culmination of a radical right-wing movement that began with the founding of Heritage in 1973. 'We are different from previous generations of conservatives,' Weyrich said in the early 1980s. 'We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of this country.'  Trump is that movement’s best hope yet for achieving its great dream of gutting government. Heritage isn’t an appendage of the Trump administration’s radicalism. It’s the heart of it. Trump is just a tool... Last year, Heritage published a blueprint for bringing the federal budget into balance that calls for reducing spending by $10.5 trillion and cutting taxes by $1.3 trillion over a decade. It aims a wrecking ball at virtually every law, program and institution that defends the environment or promotes green energy. It calls for opening up “all federal waters and all non-wilderness, non federal-monument lands to exploration and production” to fossil fuel, mining and other commercial interests. According to Greenpeace, Heritage received at least $780,000 from ExxonMobil between 1998 and 2012, and more than $5.7 million from foundations associated with fossil-fuel industrialists the Koch brothers between 1997 and 2014." Sound familiar? The psycho-killer who drafted the budget is Paul Winfree, former director of Heritage’s Institute for Economic Policy Studies, now the White House director of budget policy.

We can only guess at the havoc of the coming gouging of the federal budget, but several red states provide a clue to what “freedom” looks like in practice.

The Tea Party helped propel a Republican landslide in the 2010 midterm elections. It picked up 19 new statehouse chambers, giving it 55 overall and full control in 25 states. That takeover cleared the way for ALEC-- Heritage’s state-level sister organization-- to push through right-wing legislation.

States like Kansas and Wisconsin get most of the spotlight: Kansas because its governor, Sam Brownback, very proudly and aggressively made his state an experiment in “economic freedom,” and Wisconsin because the ALEC model cuts directly against its long tradition of progressivism. But Indiana, in its own quiet way, has been at the cutting edge of this rightward push under its last two governors—Mitch Daniels, who served from 2005 to 2013, and his successor, Mike Pence.

In 2011, through ALEC’s influence, Indiana became the first state to prohibit its cities and towns from raising their minimum wages. About 20 states have followed its lead. And in 2012, Indiana was at the leading edge of a new wave of union-busting “right-to-work” legislation. The laws allow workers to benefit from union representation without paying union dues.

Pence was likely thinking of these reforms, and of the cut in the state income tax he spearheaded, when he proclaimed in 2014 that Indiana was “blazing a trail for low taxes, balanced budgets and economic freedom in the Midwest.” In truth, Indiana was blazing a trail to the bottom. The state’s poverty rate rose by more than one third from 2007 to 2013, and the median household income declined nearly 11 percent. Indiana performed worse than any neighboring state on both counts.

One of Pence’s proudest achievements as Indiana governor was a budget surplus: Indiana closed the last fiscal year $2.24 billion in the black. That surplus came from Indiana’s failure to invest in public resources and institutions, which is to say, in the future. In the 2014-15 fiscal year, for example, its public health budget was just $12.40 per capita, or 46th in the nation-- down from $17.43 per capita, and a rank of 37th, two years earlier. In 2015, it ranked in the top 15 in rates of tobacco use, obesity, diabetes and physical inactivity among adults. In a January 2017 Gallup and Healthways report on U.S. wellbeing across the states, Indiana placed 47th, based on a range of indicators that included financial, community and physical well-being.

Indiana’s fall from bad to worse illustrates the cycle of dysfunction that takes hold in states that apply the Heritage- and ALEC-driven model of economic freedom. Public investment declines, even as government passes laws to curb unions and suppress wage growth. The low wages hollow out the tax base, which means there is less money for public investment, which worsens things like public health and education. Their sad condition is then used to justify applying “free-market” reforms to the public sector.

Under Pence, Indiana was, naturally, at the forefront of the push for public-school privatization. It has the most robust voucher program in the nation-- using taxpayer dollars to send students to private schools.

While Indiana’s right-to-work law passed before he took office, Pence did his part to advance ALEC’s wage-suppressing agenda. Pence consistently opposed any increase to the state’s $7.25 minimum wage. The Indiana Institute for Working Families calculated in 2015 that a hike to $10.10 would benefit about one-fourth of the state’s workforce. And in 2015, he pushed to repeal a law in effect since 1935 that mandated “prevailing wages” on construction projects, usually in line with union wages. In signing the repeal, Pence said that wages should be set by the marketplace.

The federal equivalent of that wage-protection law is the Davis-Bacon Act, which passed in 1931 and has long been in the crosshairs of conservatives, including Heritage.

The hollowing out of states like Indiana has been a major victory for the Right. As Heritage and its allies move to bring the same radical project to the federal level, the court of public opinion will be progressives’ most powerful tool.

“Freedom” may resonate with Americans as a slogan, but they hate the Right’s version of freedom in practice. When Trump tapped Pence as his running mate, he was among the most unpopular governors in the nation, with an in-state approval rating in the 40s. And when Trump threatened to repeal Obamacare, protests erupted. “They thought [repeal] was a slam dunk,” says Liz Ryan Murray, policy director for People’s Action, a progressive nonprofit. “They didn’t understand: People will fight for this. And I think the same thing will happen as the magnitude of these cuts becomes apparent.”

A vast amount needs to be done— by the grassroots, by the independent media, by the Democratic Party and by every other resource we can muster-- in the realm of simple storytelling and education. The federal budget is a convenient target for demagogues because most Americans have little to no idea how it’s actually spent. PBS and NPR, for example, are about 0.01 percent of the budget. In surveys, people estimate they’re about 5 percent.

Progressives might take a page from Citizen Action of Wisconsin (CAW), which released a progressive “alternative budget” in advance of Gov. Walker’s own proposed budget. The goal, says CAW executive director Robert Kraig, is to make the case for “big investments that would strengthen every community across Wisconsin and improve opportunity for everyone.”

“We’re experimenting with trying to change the debate,” Kraig says. “The research is really clear that the way progressives often talk about problems with government actually undermines people’s regard for government and makes them feel hopeless and disengaged. So there needs to be a healthy dose of aspiration: What could we achieve?”

However the budget fight plays out, the most critical insight from the past half century of U.S. politics may be that conservatives have both a story and a long-term vision that lets them take losses in stride, fortified with plenty of funding. The movement originated in the aftermath of what seemed like conservatism’s collapse through the 1950s and 1960s. Among Weyrich’s greatest gifts, said Ed Feulner, the former president of Heritage, was an “unerring eye for spotting the path to victory in the midst of seeming disaster.”

Heritage’s use of an ideological cipher like Trump to carry out an agenda that seemed hopelessly stuck just four years ago is the latest example of the movement’s resilience. If Trump is impeached and removed from office, they will be happy to have Pence.

If there is much to rage against in the Right’s agenda, there is also a perverse element of hope for progressives in the story of its 50-year ascent. The seeds of long-term success, it turns out, can take root and grow in the midst of seeming disaster.

Really? With people like Rahm Emanuel, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Chuck Schumer, Steny Hoyer, the New Dems and the Blue Dogs in control of the Democratic Party? I'm not as optimistic.

Next generation of crappy Democratic Party leadership in Congress

Republican Party War Against Infrastructure And Growth

I suppose if a major bridge collapses-- 63,522 of them are obsolete or in need of crucial structural repair-- the Republicans will snap to and stop obstructing the transportation bill. Short of that… they'll give the president some crumbs to avoid a fuss in the media. The average additional cost of vehicle maintenance to motorists due to sub-par road conditions is around $440/year across the country. Here in L.A. it's $832 and it's $782 in San Francisco, $700 in Milwaukee, $625 in Seattle… And it's not just in blue areas where people are feeling the pain the GOP is inflicting on the nation again. In Tulsa the average annual additional cost/motorist is $784 and it's just $2 less in Oklahoma. In Colorado Springs they may think they can pray for better roads but the average additional cost per motorist is $589 and it's $601 in Metro Birmingham, Alabama. The congressmen from Tulsa (Jim Bridenstine), Oklahoma City (James Lankford), Colorado Springs (Doug Lamborn), and the Birmingham 'burbs (Spencer Bachus) all have something in common besides being over-the-top right wing extremists. They all oppose spending money on fixing the roads, bridges and transportation infrastructure.

In Tulsa the 11th Street Bridge over the Arkansas River-- completed in 1916-- is so structurally unsound that it was locked in 2008 so that not even pedestrians can walk across it. It was replaced by the I-244 bridges but those are no longer safe either and the westbound bridge was demolished in 2011. The new $41 million modern bridges are right alongside the Cyrus Avery Bridge, which is falling apart. It's supposed to open to traffic in 2015.

If Bridenstine was to vote to shut down funding for it, he might not be able to show his face in Tulsa again-- ever-- but he would be reelected, since the DCCC isn't even running anyone against him in November. Bridenstine's crackpot allies at Heritage Action (DeMint's crazy outfit) and Club For Growth have both come out against even the Republican pale compromise of a bill Obama has agreed to. They are threatening Republicans who vote for it, calling the legislation "a bailout."

In an attempt to compromise with the less insane right-wing Republican anarchists, Obama, who had requested $302 billion for 4 years worth of infrastructure and maintenance, has agreed to the niggardly House GOP offer of $10 billion through May.

“With surface transportation funding running out and hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk later this summer, the administration supports House passage of H.R. 5021,” the White House said in a statement. “This legislation would provide for continuity of funding for the Highway Trust Fund during the height of the summer construction season and keep Americans at work repairing the Nation's crumbling roads, bridges, and transit systems.”

The White House lamented that lawmakers have largely ignored Obama’s transportation proposal, which relies mostly on using $150 billion from closing corporate tax loopholes to close a shortfall in federal infrastructure funding that is predicted to be $16 billion per year.

“Congress should work to pass a long-term authorization bill well before the expiration date set forth in H.R. 5021,” the White House said before referencing Obama’s proposal.

The traditional source for transportation funding has been revenue that is collected from the 18.4 cents per gallon federal gas tax. The tax has been stagnant since 1993, however, and has struggled to keep pace with infrastructure expenses as cars have become more fuel efficient.

The federal government’s current transportation funding level is about $50 billion per year, but the gas tax only brings in approximately $34 billion annually.

Lawmakers are considering using revenue from other areas of the federal budget like pension changes and custom fees to pay for a temporary extension of the current transportation funding level.

The White House said that Obama’s proposal, which would increase the annual funding level to about $75 billion per year, is “fully paid for through existing revenues and by reforming business taxes to help create jobs and spur investment while eliminating loopholes that reward companies for moving profits overseas.”

The White House reminded congressional Republicans that "A high quality transportation network is vital to a top performing economy. Investments by previous generations of Americans-- from the Erie Canal in 1807, to the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, to the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s and 1960s-- were instrumental in putting the country on a path for sustained economic growth, productivity increases, an unrivaled national market for good and services, and international competitiveness. But today, current estimates indicate that America’s transportation infrastructure is not keeping pace with demands or the needs of our growing economy, for today or for future generations. A well-performing transportation network keeps jobs in America, allows businesses to expand, and lowers prices on household goods to American families. It allows businesses to manage their inventories and transport goods more cheaply and efficiently as well as access a variety of suppliers and markets for their products, making it more cost-effective for manufacturers to keep production in or move production to the United States. American families benefit too: as consumers, from lower priced goods; and as workers, by gaining better access to jobs. The economic benefits of smart infrastructure investment are long-term competitiveness, productivity, innovation, lower prices, and higher incomes, while infrastructure investment also creates many thousands of American jobs in the near-term."

•  Today there are more than 4 million miles of road, 600,000 bridges, and 3,000 transit providers in the U.S. And yet, over the past 20 years, total federal, state, and local investment in transportation has fallen as a share of GDP-- while population, congestion, and maintenance backlogs have increased.

•  The U.S. lags behind many of its overseas competitors in transportation infrastructure investment. In the most recent World Economic Forum rankings, the U.S. had in less than a decade fallen from 7th to 18th overall in the quality of our roads.

•  65 percent of America’s major roads are rated in less than good condition, one in four bridges require significant repair or cannot handle today’s traffic, and forty five percent of Americans lack access to transit.


The costs of inadequate infrastructure investment are exhibited all around us. Americans spend 5.5 billion hours in traffic each year, costing families more than $120 billion in extra fuel and lost time. American businesses pay $27 billion a year in extra freight transportation costs, increasing shipping delays and raising prices on everyday products. Underinvestment impacts safety too. There were 32,000 traffic fatalities last year alone and roadway conditions are a significant factor in approximately one-third of traffic fatalities. Such fatalities occur disproportionately in rural America, in part because of inadequate road conditions.

UPDATE: Truncated Highway Trust Fund Bill Passes

The House, despite the demented threats from Heritage and Club for Growth, just passed the bill 367-55. Bridenstine voted no and so did the knucklehead from Oklahoma City, James Lankford, who's now running for the U.S. Senate.

Republican Civil War Isn't Just About Money… Bigotry And Racism Are Big On The Right As Well

Matt Bevin, the radical right's McConnell slayer?

Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of Dreamworks Animation, is probably the most prodigious Democratic bundler in California. It was huge news when he backed Obama instead of Hillary in 2008. Today's news was that he's back on board with the Clintons. In the last 2 cycles, plus this year, he's personally donated over $3.5 million to Democratic organizations and candidates, particularly Priorities USA Action. Between 1990 and 2008, he wrote checks for $1.3 million. Jeffrey Katzenberg doesn't contribute to outfits like Blue America; he gives to the DCCC, DNC, DSCC and to Democratic Party organizations in states. And those organizations guard their big donors like ravenous wolves. When a Florida local elected official agreed to contribute to Blue America, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz went ballistic and threatened to "cut him off." I'm certain (really, I am) that this is just a coincidence, but he was found dead a few weeks later.

Another of L.A.'s biggest donors had been trying to get me to join the board of one of her companies and I had explained I didn't have the time or space. She's a smart cookie and she offered to throw a fundraiser at her Beverly Hills mansion for one of the Blue America candidates. I agreed to meet her to talk about what I'd have to do on the board. That evening, she entered the room, saying, "Oh, Howie, I just got off the phone with Steve [Israel] and he said your candidate has no chance and won't even wind up running in the end." That candidate, as it turned out, nearly did win, coming closer to beating the longtime incumbent since the district was first created! He lost because Steve Israel sabotaged his campaign with easily-manipulated Democratic contributors who don't know they're being played for fools by the Israels and Wasserman Schultzes.

And the Republican versions of Steve Israel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, it was reported by Jeremy Peters in the NY Times this morning, are working hard to de-fund the grassroots GOP organizations on the right. Same boss-like mentality from the Beltway Establishment careerists who seek to control the political life of the country. Of course, with their crackpot candidates, the Republican Establishment at least has a legitimate reason to undermine their own extreme right wing. Israel, Hoyer, Crowley and Wasserman Schultz don't. They just have that ole lust for power and control.

One of the biggest challenges for Republican leaders in the 2014 midterm elections will be how to hang on to the Tea Party support that has been so instrumental to the party’s growth, while winning back voters alienated by hard-right candidates. These conflicting goals were evident last week as Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio shelved plans to tackle immigration reform in the House, bowing to pressure from conservatives.

“We’re not picking a fight with the basis for the Tea Party,” said Scott Reed, the senior political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who noted that most Republicans were sympathetic to the free-market, small-government philosophy that inspired the movement. “But some have hijacked the Tea Party model and taken it to an extreme level.”

The chamber has become one of the establishment’s most powerful forces this year by taking the highly aggressive step of working in primaries to defeat Republicans who are seen as unelectable and damaging to the national party.

“Let’s not screw around eating our own,” Mr. Reed said. “Let’s win a seat.”

Tea Party groups and other conservatives who are challenging the traditional party leadership say the pushback this year is as hostile as it has ever been.

“I’ve been told by a number of donors to our ‘super PAC’ that they’ve received calls from senior Republican senators,” said Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, which is supporting challengers to Republican incumbents across the country. The message from these donors was blunt: “I can’t give to you because I’ve been told I won’t have access to Republican leadership,” Mr. Kibbe said. “So they’re playing hardball.”

Few have fought rougher than Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, who is facing a primary challenger at home and Tea Party angst in Washington.

Under his direction, the National Republican Senatorial Committee cut ties with a prominent Republican advertising firm and pressed individual senators to do so as well because of its work with a group that targets incumbent Senate Republicans, the Senate Conservatives Fund. That group has accused the McConnell campaign of pressuring its bookkeeper into resigning because she feared that she would never get work from Republican candidates again.

“He’s essentially joined the I.R.S. in targeting conservative groups,” said Matt Hoskins, the executive director of the Senate Conservatives Fund. “It’s all meant to intimidate.” Aides to Mr. McConnell had no comment.

In other races, the party’s mainstream elements have been pushing back quickly, albeit with less brute force.

In Alaska, Joe Miller, the Sarah Palin-backed candidate who in 2010 tried to unseat Senator Lisa Murkowski, a moderate Republican, is running again this year and faces a crowded Republican primary. But when he sat down with the staff of the National Republican Senatorial Committee to gauge its support, members came armed with polling data and warned him that he was too unpopular to win.

In West Virginia, the Chamber of Commerce is working to neutralize opposition to Shelley Moore Capito, the leading Republican candidate. They have already claimed one casualty: A former State House member, Pat McGeehan, who claims to hold the record for the most “no” votes cast. He dropped out.

“Pat is a little bit on the ...” said Steve Roberts, president of the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce, trying to find diplomatic words. “I’m just going to say he has a little bit of an ideological edge to him. We certainly let it be known by running our ads and so forth that Shelley would be a better candidate.”

In South Dakota, Senator John Thune, a member of the Republican leadership, has thrown his support behind Mike Rounds in the race for the seat being vacated by Senator Tim Johnson, a Democrat. Mr. Rounds, a former governor, is being opposed in the primary by several candidates, including one, Stace Nelson, who was banned from the Republican caucus in the State House after being too combative with other members.

Ground zero in the establishment-strikes-back fight may be the House race in Idaho between Representative Mike Simpson, an eight-term member, and Bryan Smith, a lawyer who has the backing of the anti-tax, anti-spending group the Club for Growth. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has started running ads depicting Mr. Simpson as the true conservative, rebutting Mr. Smith’s claim that he is a “RINO”-- Republican in name only.

Mr. Smith said he had anticipated the pushback, but was seeing encouraging support locally. “I always knew that a 15-year incumbent who’s a close ally of John Boehner’s was going to outraise me,” he said before ticking off some recent triumphs. “We’ve raised over half a million dollars. Last week I got two more endorsements from the Republican Party on the county level.”

Mr. Reed, of the chamber, said he had it on good authority that his message to the more recalcitrant Republicans was sinking in.

“Boehner has told me that in the House caucus meetings there are a lot more guys sitting up straight,” he said. “They aren’t sitting in the back with their feet up on the chairs hurling spitballs.”

Mr. Black, the Virginia state senator, said he bore no ill will toward the friends who endorsed his opponent. But he does question what kind of shape his party is in if its leaders go on attacking the movement that is the source of so much grass-roots energy. “So many of the big-money interests are very antagonistic toward the base,” he said, “and I’m not sure where the Republican Party is headed.”

And, of course, on the GOP side, it isn't only about the loot, like it mostly is on the Democratic side. Jim DeMint's proto-fascist operation, Heritage Action, is viciously trying to undermine the Chamber of Commerce passed on ideology. Republican grassroots groups can let their racist hair down more freely than the Establishment groups, who need to persuade independents and moderates they're not exactly the same thing as Nazis (they are), care to. Earlier today DeMint's stooge, Michael Needleman, claimed that the comprehensive immigration bill passed by the Senate last year with some Republican support-- Lamar Alexander, Kelly Ayotte, Susan Collins, Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, Lindsey Graham, Orrin Hatch, Dean Heller, John Hoeven, Mark Kirk, John McCain, Lisa Murkowski, and Marco Rubio (FL)-- is the result of "corporate cronyism" and was "written behind closed doors by the AFL-CIO and the Chamber of Commerce."

This morning the Tampa Bay Times confirmed the rumor that former Florida state Rep. Ana Rivas Logan had left the Republican party and is re-registering as a Democrat. "The GOP of today is not the party I joined," said Rivas Logan, who also served on the Miami-Dade School Board. "It's not the party of my parents. It's a party that has been radicalized and held hostage by a group of extremists." She pointed out that the Republican Party "a party that attacks women and minorities-- and one that asked me, and my former Hispanic Republican colleagues in the Florida legislature, to turn on their own people by supporting extreme anti-immigrant policies." I wonder how she'll define being a Democrat.

Another right-wing PAC, FRC, ran this radio ad against mainstream conservative Republican Richard Hanna (NY) who teabaggers deride for being insufficiently extreme. Obama tied both McCain and Romney in Hanna's R+3 upstate New York district (Utica, Rome, Binghamton) and this one could easily fall to a Democrat if… oh, never mind… Steve Israel neglected to recruit a Democrat gainst one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the Northeast.

Listen.

Is Michael Needham Ready For His National Coming Out Party?

Michael Needham first started appearing on the pages of this blog just over a month ago, in a story about how the Republican Party is being Cruzified. Needham is a spoiled, slimy little operative for the right-wing extremists around Jim DeMint and his Texas protégé, Ted Cruz. Needham was celebrated by the Wall Street Journal at the time as one of "the masterminds behind a new generation of young conservatives." He likes taking credit for the government shutdown and promises there's plenty more like that to come. A Republican Party Madame Thérèse Defarge, Needham is deciding who's a real conservative and who's just a faker.

Yesterday, Chris Hayes sat down with Julia Ioffe, author of the much-noted New Republic Needham exposé, A 31-Year-Old Is Tearing Apart The Heritage Foundation. Needham credits his demented strategy to a shiny new millennial mindset-- rather than to America's existentially dangerous and brutally ravenous plutocracy. Even admirers say, "I consider him a friend but he’s a huge asshole." The asshole has managed to utterly take over and remake the Heritage Foundation in his own asshole image.

Needham is the 31-year-old CEO of Heritage Action, the relatively new activist branch of the Heritage Foundation, the storied Washington think tank that was one of the leaders of the conservative war of ideas ever since it provided the blueprint for Ronald Reagan’s first term. Although DeMint is Heritage’s president, it was Needham who had designed much of the defund Obamacare strategy. Beginning in 2010, when Heritage Action was founded, Needham pushed the GOP to use Congress’s power of the purse to eviscerate the Affordable Care Act. He formed a grassroots army, which he used to keep congressional Republicans in line. “They make six hundred phone calls and have a member of Congress in the fetal position,” says one GOP congressional staffer.

After months of furious lobbying, Needham sold, at most, 20 members of the House on his plan of attack. In the end, this was enough to cement the party line—and lead the GOP to a spectacular, deafening loss.

Sorting through the wreckage, Washington conservatives can barely contain their anger at Needham for his ideological inflexibility and aggressive, zero-sum tactics. “Their strategic sense isn’t very strong,” griped a prominent Republican lobbyist. “They’ve repeatedly been wrong about how to handle this.” Says a senior House Republican aide, “Mike Needham played a large role in defeating ideas that would have worked out better.”

But the wrath is not solely reserved for Needham; his employer now inspires plenty of disgust among conservatives, too. Increasingly in Washington, “Heritage” has come to denote not the foundation or the think tank, but Heritage Action, Needham’s sharp-elbowed operation. Instead of fleshing out conservative positions, says one Republican Senate staffer, “now they’re running around trying to get Republicans voted out of office. It’s a purely ideological crusade that’s utterly divorced from the research side.” (“If Nancy Pelosi could write an anonymous check to Heritage Action,” adds the House aide bitterly, “she would.”)

As a result, the Heritage Foundation has gone from august conservative think tank revered by Washington’s Republicans to the party’s loathed ideological commissar. “It’s sad, actually,” says one Republican strategist. “Everybody forgets that Heritage was always considered the gold standard of conservative, forward-looking thought. The emergence of Heritage Action has really transformed the brand into a more political organization.”

Needham’s strategy has also sparked a war inside the halls of the foundation itself, where many feel duped by the stealthy yet brutal way the Heritage Action takeover went down. Some now wonder whether the foundation can ever recover its reputation as a font of ideas. “I don’t think any thoughtful person is going to take the Heritage Foundation very seriously, because they’ll say, How is this any different from the Tea Party?” says Mickey Edwards, a former Republican congressman and a founding trustee of the Heritage Foundation. Looking at the organization he helped to create, Edwards finds it unrecognizable. “Going out there and trying to defeat people who don’t agree with us never occurred to us,” said Edwards. “It’s alien.”

…Like all good revolutionaries, Michael Needham had a sterling upbringing, the kind that allows a young man to pursue ideological purity free from worry about consequence or reality. Needham’s mother is a former Saks Fifth Avenue executive; his father runs a boutique investment bank. The future Tea Party rabble-rouser grew up on the Upper East Side. He attended Collegiate, a prestigious New York prep school, then Williams. As a political science major and, eventually, the editor of the college newspaper, Needham loved to provoke his liberal classmates, arguing that Social Security was unnecessary and that the minimum wage hurt the working poor. “It’s amazing how little reflection he’s given to his privilege,” says a classmate. "It was all kind of a game to him. It was an experiment in winning.”

…On issue after issue, Needham’s ideological flame-throwing has made Heritage Action enemies in even the most conservative corners of Congress. Says the House GOP aide, “People on the Hill are very much rubbed the wrong way by a former Giuliani staffer who is around thirty years old, running around and determining whether they’re conservative or not.”

With DeMint’s arrival, Heritage’s government relations team, which once boasted the ability to meet with 250 GOP and as many as 40 Democratic congressmen on any given day, disappeared. “The people at government affairs would go down to the Hill, and they had Hill folks saying, ‘Listen, we don’t want to meet with you because of what the folks at Heritage Action did yesterday,’” says the former Heritage staffer. Heritage analysts now have a hard time getting meetings on the Hill, even with Republicans. The congressional staffer told me that, for many Republican members of the House, “their research staff is probably not dealing much with Heritage anymore. They’re systematically going elsewhere for their information.”

Shortly after this summer’s farm bill debacle (Heritage Action pushed members to rid the bill of its food-stamp half, then still sent out a “no” alert on the revised bill, hanging out to dry members from agricultural districts), the outrage was such that the Heritage Foundation was banned from the weekly lunches of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), a conservative caucus of House Republicans. This was particularly ironic as the RSC and Heritage were once interwoven: In the 1970s, Feulner had been the RSC’s first executive director. “It really speaks volumes about a betrayal of trust,” says the Republican strategist. The House GOP aide puts it more starkly: “There are over two hundred thirty bridges to be burned in the House. Over two hundred of them are burned, and they maybe have about thirty more left.”

The frustration grew in the build up to the budget fight as Heritage Action organized DeMint’s nine-city tour, and Needham blitzed the conservative media--giving constituents the impression that defunding Obamacare in one knockout move was perfectly plausible. In meetings, congressional staffers couldn’t even get Heritage Action to entertain the possibility that the strategy might fail. “They never wanted to discuss anything past defund,” recalls the Republican staffer. “We would ask, ‘What if [Democrats] say no and don’t budge, what do you do then?’ They kept saying: ‘That’s not our role. You figure it out.’” In an August interview with CSPAN, Needham was asked a similar question: How can Republicans achieve their goal of defunding Obamacare without control of the Senate or the White House? “I think that, rather than trying to figure out where we’re going to be at the end of September,” Needham said, his underbite jutting contemptuously, “we should actually fight for something.”

But congressional staffers couldn’t fully ignore Needham. Heritage Action sent e-mails out to its grassroots army, telling its foot soldiers to press their representatives to hold the defund-or-else line. Many Republicans, who felt less than certain about the defund strategy, felt entrapped, especially when these angry constituents confronted them at town halls. “They created this false narrative,” says the Republican staffer. Inevitably, the semi-regular Hill meetings between staffers and Heritage Action grew tense. As the staffer explains, “People came away with the feeling that they’re willing to drive a truck off a cliff, but with no purpose.”

On the morning of October 16, just hours before a deadline whose crossing could have pushed the United States into default, and hours before a deal averted that possibility and ended the 16-day government shutdown, after weeks of pushing House Republicans not to back down from the defund Obamacare plan that had gotten everyone to this point to begin with, Needham appeared on Fox News. “Everybody understands that we’re not going to be able to repeal this law until 2017 and that we have to win the Senate and we have to win the White House,” he said.

The hypocrisy was not lost on many House Republicans, who, for all those weeks, had lived in fear of Needham and Heritage Action. As the day wore on, the video made the rounds to much indignant headshaking. “A lot of people were upset,” says the Republican staffer. “If it was impossible, then why was he going around the country convincing other well-intentioned people that it was absolutely doable? To suddenly say at the end that we knew this all along struck a lot of people as disingenuous.” It struck others as a lily-livered delusion. “It was like a general applauding himself for reaching the top of the hill, while the army is being slaughtered at the bottom,” says one Republican strategist.

And yet Needham’s blithe remark came as no surprise to the former veteran staffer at the Heritage Foundation. “One of the hallmarks of that millennial profile is an inability to acknowledge mistakes,” the staffer said, sounding equal parts bemused and exasperated. “Everything is right and nothing was a mistake, and they can spin it any way they want.”

In keeping with this philosophy, later that morning, Heritage Action would issue another alert. Despite Needham’s admission that the imminent repeal of the Affordable Care Act was a lost cause, the alert warned House members to vote against the budget deal. “Heritage Action opposes the Senate-negotiated proposal and will include it as a key vote on our legislative scorecard,” it said. To this day, Needham stands by his strategy. It “may feel like bullying to a member of Congress,” he told Politico Magazine, “but it’s the reality of the world that we live in.”

How Many House Republicans Are Up For Cruzification?

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal was celebrating a shady, little know right-wing ideologue and GOP operative for the glory the Republicans have heaped on themselves in recent weeks with the government shut down and impending default debacle. As you probably guessed this whole calamity for the nation has more authors than just Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and a bunch of fringy Michele Bachmann/Louie Gohmert loons in the House. Michael Needham is the 31-year-old president of Heritage Action, DeMint's attack machine. "I really believe we are in a great position right now," he told the Journal.

Though Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is the public face of the high-risk strategy to "defund" ObamaCare, the masterminds behind it are a new generation of young conservatives, chief among them Mr. Needham. From a tactical view, the strategy has been deployed with precision. In August, only Mr. Cruz and a band of renegade tea-party Republicans in the House favored this approach, and the media collectively scoffed. But by September, House Republicans couldn't pass a budget without attaching the defunding rider that has grounded much of government.

"We rallied the conservative grass roots across the country," Mr. Needham says, and ran ads in more than 100 districts on the health law. It worked. During the August recess, these activists demanded that their members of Congress stop ObamaCare.

To most observers, who think the GOP is losing this fight, Mr. Needham's optimism that Republicans will carry the day may seem astonishing. But Mr. Needham says the second-guessers are wrong.

…Mr. Needham is not apologetic at all for the shutdown that he sees as regrettable but necessary collateral damage if it focuses the public on the horrors of the health-care law. "I think people who don't follow politics as closely as you and I do, which is most normal people, only pay attention when something major's going on. Why is there a government shutdown going on? Because the Republican Party wants to get rid of ObamaCare," says the highly disciplined Mr. Needham, who rarely strays from that message.

Mr. Needham and another young activist, Tim Chapman, wrote the business plan for Heritage Action four years ago. The idea was to tap Heritage's network of conservative donors across the country and create a political lobbying machine to carry conservative ideas across the goal line.

"We were always frustrated that whenever we met with Congress, there were always 30,000 lobbyists lined up in the waiting room on the other side," he says. "We felt that to market our policy ideas successfully in 21st-century Washington, D.C., required going above the heads of members of Congress directly to their constituents who shared our conservative values."

…Mr. Needham is a Stanford business-school grad, conservative to the core, uncompromising and skilled in the smash-mouth politics now played in Washington. His first job was as research assistant-- then speech writer and eventually chief of staff-- for Heritage founder Ed Feulner, who stepped down as president in April. (Full disclosure: I worked for Mr. Feulner from 1983-88.) Mr. Needham's new boss at Heritage is Jim DeMint, the former South Carolina senator whose former aides populate the staff of Sen. Cruz and other conservative groups and work closely with Mr. Needham.

Mr. Feulner was famous for preaching that "in the war of ideas there is no room for pacifists," and Mr. Needham has taken those words to heart. To his admirers, he has pushed the Republicans to show backbone and stand up for principle. His detractors, many of them inside the party, denounce him as everything from cocky to a GOP wrecking ball.

Several sources I have interviewed inside and outside of Heritage have complained of late that Mr. Needham's $7 million lobbying shop has become the tail that wags the $75 million think tank. "I hope that's not true," he responds. He says Heritage Action amplifies the message of Heritage scholars.

These pages have disagreed with the shutdown strategy, though certainly not the goal to end ObamaCare, so I press him on whether this high-risk strategy has really been worth it. Here he becomes slightly defensive.

"Look, ObamaCare is going to be the end of the American free-enterprise health-care system. We needed a plan to stop it. And if anybody has a plan other than what we're proposing, let's discuss it," Mr. Needham says, adding that his is the only game in town.

He says the path to victory now is for the House to keep passing bills to open up popular agencies of government, such as the national parks, the National Institutes of Health and Veterans Affairs: "I don't think that the Senate can keep refusing to open up these agencies as the shutdown drags on and on and on."

Mr. Needham thinks, by the way, that the stalemate may drag on well beyond Oct. 17, the day the U.S. Treasury may reach the federal borrowing limit. He has little problem with the latest strategy to pass a temporary debt-ceiling extension, viewing the debt-default debate as a distraction from the battle over the future of ObamaCare funding.

President Obama is the one in an "untenable position," Mr. Needham says. It is "totally unfair to say, 'We're going to give a delay of the employer mandate, but we will not give that same delay to the individual mandate, and we're going to exempt members of Congress.' A united conservative party making the case, day in and day out, about the fundamental unfairness of the way the president is implementing this law is a winning argument," he says. And it "inspires people and gets them on our side."

< …The concern of many Republicans, including strategist Karl Rove, is that Heritage Action's take-no-prisoners approach is hurting the party. The latest Gallup poll shows the GOP is viewed favorably by only 28% of Americans, down 10 points since September.

Mr. Needham blames the GOP for not focusing enough on ObamaCare, adding that "there is nothing in my mission statement that says anything about the Republican Party. Our mission is to advance the conservative agenda. We are nonpartisan and we really mean it." He's confident that Republicans will do fine in the 2014 elections if they stand firm in the fight, and he blames Mr. Rove and others for criticizing Ted Cruz.

So what is the endgame-- is there any exit strategy short of Mr. Obama rolling over? Mr. Needham admits that ObamaCare will never be repealed as long as Mr. Obama is president, but he still thinks it can be defunded or delayed: "Look, Democrats usually win these fights because they do a better job of not cracking. Obama says he will never blink and we believe him. They're very good at this. We're obviously very bad at it."

At some point, doesn't there have to be a compromise? That's the way the system works, after all. Yes, Mr. Needham agrees, "at some point in this fight somebody has to blink." His mission, he says, is to persuade "the House not to blink first."

Just as it was becoming clear-- through the release of a spate of new polls-- that the American people have overwhelmingly rejected Needham's and Cruz's radical right approach-- and that the Republican Party is in danger of losing independent voters in a way that could result in the loss of as many as 30 House seats (and control of that chamber), one of the most extremist and noisy gatherings of Republicans, the Values Voters Summit, met over the weekend and voted to back Cruz for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. With 42%, Cruz won the straw poll that the delusional, proto-fascist group held on Saturday. Sucking up Cruz's dust were a physician, Ben Carson, unknown outside of extreme right Hate Talk radio circle (13%), failed politician Rick Santorum (also 13%), Rand Paul (6%), and Marco Rubio (5%). I think Paul Ryan had a scattering of voters as well, but not enough to register on the radar. Last cycle at this time, the Values Voter crackpots had handed the nomination over to Hate Talk Radio host Mike Huckabee. Even before Cruz's straw poll victory, Dana Milbank was writing in the Washington Post about how the Cruzification of the GOP was leading the congressional party to doom. Rights who follow Cruz, like Colorado's Mike Coffman, are likely to lose their seats next year. Coffman says he doesn't care what his constituents tell the pollsters, he's doing what he thinks is right (using dangerous and extreme tactics to deny health insurance to millions of Americans).

Skeptics warned from the start that it was a suicide mission for Republicans to shut down the federal government in a long-shot attempt to defund Obamacare. Now that such dire predictions have come to pass, the lawmakers who engineered the shutdown are getting the conflagration-- and the martyrdom-- they sought.

Call it the Cruzifiction of the GOP.

At least so far, the standoff has been a political bloodbath for Republicans. And maybe that’s exactly what was needed to right the political system: The effort to gut Obamacare had to crash like this so that Republican leaders and lawmakers would find the courage to stand up to tea party toughs, and so that business leaders would decide to stop funding a small band of right-wing activists whose interests are antithetical to their own.

A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that Americans, by 53 percent to 31 percent, blame the Republican Party for the shutdown more than they do President Obama-- worse even than Republicans fared during the 1995-96 shutdown that also proved ruinous to their party.

The poll, confirming earlier results, found the Republican Party and the tea party had both reached all-time lows. Americans now favor a Democratic Congress to a Republican Congress by eight percentage points. And the percentage of Americans who think Obamacare is a good idea is up seven points from last month. Seventy percent say Republicans are putting politics ahead of the good of the country.

The small-but-vocal tea party had been seeking just such a confrontation since the 2010 election, and they opposed compromises by Republican leaders that postponed the showdown until now. Conservative groups that advocated for a standoff spoke openly about their motives. At a breakfast with reporters Wednesday, Michael Needham, chief executive of the conservative group Heritage Action, freely admitted that he was “pretty optimistic” that we will soon see a crackup of the old Republican order.

The lure of martyrdom has always been part of the tea party’s creed. In rally posters, online and in speeches, there are invocations of Thomas Jefferson’s quotation: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

Perhaps now the tea party’s manure can be used to grow a healthier political system. There are encouraging signs that the shutdown has awakened the rest of the electorate to the outsize clout exercised by this minority.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who just nine months into the job led the shutdown strategy that has caused so many in his party to be Cruzified, has seen his reputation take a 16-point negative turn in the national Gallup poll since June. Cruz’s partner in the rebellion, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, has seen a 20-point negative swing in his home state over the same time period.

The shutdown and debt-limit standoff, by crushing consumer confidence and roiling markets, has brought home to business leaders the realization that they don’t have common cause with the tea party activists they’ve been supporting. My Post colleague Philip Rucker reported that Michigan businessman Brian Ellis is launching a Republican primary challenge to Rep. Justin Amash, a prominent tea party figure. Meantime, the New York Times reported last week about the possibility of “open warfare” between business and the tea party, noting that several trade associations are weighing the financing of primary campaigns against Republicans responsible for the shutdown.

Even the infamous Koch brothers, financiers of the tea party, are distancing themselves from the shutdown contretemps. Koch Industries announced this week that it “has not taken a position on the legislative tactic of tying the continuing resolution to defunding Obamacare nor have we lobbied on legislative provisions defunding Obama­care.”

The Boston Globe recently reported that David Koch gave MIT $20 million for a child-care facility, because “I got a tear in my eye” hearing about researchers’ need for child care. Maybe the lachrymose Koch will weep for his country when he realizes the economic destruction caused by the groups he bankrolled.

As we've pointed out before, radical right Republicans in rural southern and Mormon districts with off-the-chart Republican PVIs-- Tea Party crackpots like Steve Stockman (R+25), Louie Gohmert (R+24), Jason Chaffetz (R+28), Steve Scalise (R+26), Randy Neugebauer (R+26), Tom Graves (R+26), Rob Bishop (R+27), Markwayne Mullin (R+20)-- have no worries. The majority of their constituents are victims of Hate Talk Rafio and they live on Planet Cruz. But it's the 40 or so Republicans in swing districts-- GOP incumbents dependent on independent voters to make common cause with Republicans-- who are freaking out over the Cruz/Needham extremism that is now dominating their party-- and dominating it in a way local voters disapprove… heavily.

Fred Upton, for example, has managed to thrive in a western Michigan swing district since 1987, despite Obama's victory there in 2008 and convincing wins for both Democratic senators Debbie Stabenow and Carl Levin. Polling released by PPP last week, however, shows voters in MI-06 have had it with Upton playing footsie with the Tea Party radicals. If the election were held today, Democrat Paul Clements would beat Upton 51-38%. Clements has not been embraced by Upton-pal Steve Israel and Israel has ordered the DCCC to give Upton a pass. But the poll shows that if Clements has the money to make sure voters know that Upton voted for the government shut down, the margin of victory increases substantially and Clements would win 56-36%. Many of the most vulnerable Republicans aren't being engaged by the DCCC at Steve Israel's direct orders. Lee Rogers leads Buck McKeon in suburban L.A. 51-42% when voters are made aware McKeon backed the government shut down (up from a Rogers margin of victory of 46-44% as of right now), but, once again, Israel refuses to engage in this district. Ditto for Dave Reichert's district east of Seattle, where Jason Ritchie leads Reichert 49-42% today, a score that rises to 52-40% when voters are told that Reichert backed the government shut down.

In Miami-Dade, where Debbie Wasserman Schultz has persistently prevented any plausible Democrats from running against her buddy Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Obama won her district last year by a convincing 53-47%. PPP shows that a Democrat campaigning against Ros-Lehtinen who exposed her voters to shut down the government would beat her 53-42%. Another district that Steve Israel has taken off the table. There are lots of them-- in every part of the country, which is why we've been advocating that Pelosi fire him before its too late and replace him with someone who wants to take back the House (like Grayson or Ellison).

While Israel wastes money with his Blue Dog/New Dem candidates-- like anti-Choice, gay-hating, anti-minimum wage, coal-loving, NRA-backing corporate shill Jennifer Garrison in an R+8 district she will never win-- there are dozens of R+4, R+3, R+2 and even R+1 districts where vulnerable Republicans need independent voters to win and where Steve Israel is letting them off the hook. These districts-- winnable seats with no DCCC presence-- no recruiting and no help for grassroots candidates running:

R+4

• FL-07- John Mica
• MI-03- Justin Amash
• IL-16- Adam Kinzinger
• CA-49- Darrell Issa
• PA-16- Joe Pitts
• NJ-05- Scott Garrett
• IL-06- Peter Roskam
• MI-11- Kerry Bentivolio
• VA-04- Randy Forbes
• OH-10- Mike Turner

R+3

• WI-01- Paul Ryan
• CA-25- Buck McKeon
• NY-22- Richard Hanna

R+2

• VA-10- Frank Wolf
• WA-03- Jaime Herrera Beutler
• MI-08- Mike Rogers
• PA-15- Charlie Dent
• MN-02- John Kline
• PA-07- Pat Meehan
• PA-06- Jim Gerlach
• WI-07- Sean Duffy
• WI-08- Reid Ribble
• FL-27- Ileana Ros-Lehtinen

R+1

• WA-08- Dave Reichert
• MI-06- Fred Upton
• NY-02- Peter King
• NJ-03- Jon Runyan

D+1

• NJ-02- Frank LoBiondo

Bolded districts are the ones where Obama won in 2008 and/or 2012. Meanwhile, well-meaning (and well-funded) but basically naive operations like Americans United For Change are all too eager to take their walking orders from the DCCC. This week, Americans United For Change started running a series of ads in the hopeless Steve Israel-sanctioned districts, like OH-06, and ignoring the districts we just spoke about above. Here's a complete waste of money on behalf of a quasi-"Democrat," Jennifer Garrison, who is no better than Republican incumbent Bill Johnson on a wide range of crucial issues. Americans United For Change did a half dozen like this one, mostly wasting their donors' money and probably unaware that they are helping to promote a candidate they-- and their donors-- would recoil from with horror.