What Do The Liberty Caucus Extremists Want? Are We Certain They're All Nihilists? Justin Amash For Speaker!

The 40 or so far right-extremists and libertarians who topped Boehner and denied McCarthy the speakership and are now deciding Paul Ryan's fate, are easy targets because they are generally misogynistic, homophobic racists. Some are neo-Nazis and even more are Confederates. But does that mean they're always wrong about everything? And, more to the point, what does that say about the bottom-up congressional rebellion they're leading against the House leadership rules now? Forget for a moment ,if you can, that Mo Brooks (R-AL) is a crackpot racist who's basically never right on any policies. In the clip above, though, Lawrence O'Donnell talked with him about what the Liberty Caucus is getting at from their own perspective. (Hint: he didn't say it was seceding from the Union again.)

Probably the least objections member of the Liberty Caucus is Just Amash, a Michigan libertarian-- and the only Republican Blue America ever found preferable to a Democratic opponent, rancid conservaDem Steve Pestka, who Amash beat. Amash would make a much better Speaker than Ryan but no one has been tossing his name around. Yesterday, though, Politico's Jake Sherman featured him a big way in a major piece about the Liberty Caucus, which he referred to as the Freedom Caucus (although maybe they're separate groups with the same members and goals). Sherman marveled that Amash wanted to talk about process (rules) at a Grand Rapids town hall.

How he believes John Boehner didn't follow them, and how the chamber’s next leader needs to. Amash and his crew want a robust committee process. They would like more amendments and no more end runs to fast-track legislation to the House floor. If the next leader does those things, he or she might not have to constantly worry about the Freedom Caucus. Return to “regular order,” and the Republican Conference just might be able to return to normal.

“The problem isn’t that he isn’t conservative enough,” Amash told about 40 people here during a town hall meeting Wednesday evening, referring to John Boehner, who announced his resignation amid growing pressure from Amash’s group. “The problem is he doesn’t follow the process. He operated a top-down system, and still operates a top-down system because he hasn’t stepped down yet. Which means that he figures out what outcome he wants, and he goes to the individual members and attempts to compel and coerce us to vote for that outcome.”

Amash, a 35-year-old libertarian-minded Republican first elected in the tea party wave of 2010, is at the heart of a new power center in the House Republican Conference. With roughly 40 members, the Freedom Caucus has an outsized role in selecting the next speaker of the House. If its members vote as a bloc, which they say they intend to do, it essentially gives them veto power over the next speaker of the House.

Republican leaders see Freedom Caucus members as a bunch of bomb-throwing ideologues with little interest in finding solutions that can pass a divided government.

But that's a false reading of the group, Amash told his constituents. Their mission isn't to drag Republican leadership to the right, though many of them would certainly favor more conservative outcomes. It's simply to force them to follow the institution's procedures, Amash argued.

That means allowing legislation and amendments to flow through committees in a deliberative way, and giving individual members a chance to offer amendments and to have their ideas voted on on the House floor. Instead of waiting until right before the latest legislative crisis erupts, then twisting members’ arms for votes, they argue, leadership must empower the rank and file on the front end and let the process work its will.

“In some cases, conservative outcomes will succeed. In other cases, liberal outcomes will succeed. And that’s OK,” said Amash, who was reelected overwhelmingly last year after the U.S. Chamber of Commerce backed his Republican primary rival. “We can have a House where different coalitions get together on different bills and pass legislation. And then we present that to the Senate and we present it to the White House.

“The worst scenario,” Amash continued, “is where you have one person or a small group of people dictate to everyone else what the outcome is going to be in advance.”

And that reminded me of an amendment-- which started as a bill be co-wrote with progressive Democrat John Conyers in 2013 in an attempt to rein in the unconstitutional surveillance of Americans by NASA, the LIBERT-E Act. The bill attracted awesome progressive Democrats like Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), Jerry Nadler (D-NY) and Judy Chu (D-CA) as Libertarian-leaning Republicans like Amash, Thomas Massie (R-KY), Walter Jones (R-NC) and Tom McClintock, as well as crackpots from both parties, like Kyrsten Sinema (Blue Dog-AZ), Paul Broun (R-GA) and Ted Yoho (R-FL). It didn't attract anyone from Boehner's circle.

In the end it was introduced as an amendment to a Defense Appropriations bill and was narrowly defeated 205-217 by Obama and Boehner. 111 Democrats and 94 Republicans voted in favor and they were edged out by 134 Republicans and 83 Democrats (mostly wretched Blue Dogs and New Dems like Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Jim Himes, Steve Israel, the same Kyrsten Sinema who claimed to be a co-sponsor, John Delaney, Jim Cooper, Ann Kuster, Sean Patrick Maloney, Lipinski, Hoyer, Cuellar, Costa... all the dreck) voting against.

Thinking about that amendment took me back to Michael Gurnow's 2014 book, The Edward Snowden Affair: Exposing the Politics and Media Behind the NSA Scandal, which talked about how Amash attempted to address the unconstitutional spying on Americans in the face of an unsympathetic Speaker (Boehner).

The LIBERT-E Act had over 50 sponsors. It was the product of two Michigan politicians. Amash, a Republican with Libertarian leanings and the sixth-youngest representative, had been joined by Conyers, a Democrat born in 1929 who was the second-longest serving incumbent on Capitol Hill now in his 48th year in Congress. But the two politicians knew the controversial law would not pass on its own. They judiciously took another approach. The decision wound up testing the moral fabric of democracy.

Unlike the Senate, where all members can force a vote, the House Speaker reigns supreme. If the speaker doesn’t deem a topic worthy of consideration, it isn’t put on the docket. Amash walked gingerly around Speaker Boehner, who had already decreed Snowden a traitor. He made his bill into an amendment to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2014. Any lawmaker can propose an amendment to a bill so long as it can be proven to relate to the legislation it is trying to piggyback. The amendment’s relevance was obvious and irrefutable. It dealt with defense spending. Amash was calling to cancel the NSA’s authority to conduct blanket surveillance. There were two sides to the legislative coin. In theory, Amash’s proposal should have been agreeable to the fiscally conservative Republican-led House because it would cut costs. In reality, House Republicans strongly supported national defense, which the bill sought to limit. It was nonetheless Amash’s best bet for getting the law passed.

It was also a prime example of why politicians hate amend ment riders. Piggybacked legislation frequently puts them in a difficult position with their party, campaign donors and constituency. In the case of Amash’s proposal, a lose-lose scenario ensued. If the amendment was attached, a House member would be simultaneously voting for and against national defense, and the press and public rarely issued benefit of the doubt after final votes were cast. Because of this, leaders of the House started humoring the unthinkable. The amendment process was a liberty which assured all voices were heard. Talk about limiting the number of amendments to a bill began to circulate. Democracy remained intact for one reason. If an actual move toward blocking a vote on the amendment ensued, Amash’s legislation had enough support for the entire Defense bill to be held up. Republicans reluctantly consented. The amendment was ruled to be in order on Monday, July 22. It was then scheduled to be debated on Wednesday evening, July 24, before going up for a tentative vote the next day.

The White House was so nervous, it broke character. Carney publicly denounced the pending legislation during a press conference on Tuesday, “[ ... ] we [the White House] oppose the current effort in the House to hastily dismantle one of our intelligence community’s counterterrorism tools. This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open or deliberative process. We urge the House to reject the Amash Amendment, and instead move forward with an approach that appropriately takes into account the need for a reasoned review of what tools can best secure the nation.” The White House chose to ignore the irony of the statement being made moments after another closed-door briefing had come to an end.

The Republicans had a right to be worried. After 15 minutes of debate the day before, Amash’s amendment was narrowly defeated 205-217 on Thursday. Ninety-four Republicans and 111 Democrats voted in favor, 134 Republicans and 83 Democrats had been against the legislation. Surprisingly, the author of the PATRIOT Act, James Sensenbrenner, voted has come to stop it.” Since a majority of Democrats supported the amendment, it would have likely passed in the Democrat-led Senate. Aside from what might have been said by Alexander, a look behind the campaign contribution curtain suggests Lon Snowden was right. The 217 “nay” voices received 122 percent more money from the intelligence and defense industries than the 205 “yea” voters.

The $594 billion Defense bill was passed with over 60 amendments by a vote of 315 to 109. The tab was five billion dollars below current spending and the White House threatened to veto it in order to continue to fund the Pentagon. Its emotional appeal was that the reduced budget would force compensatory cuts to other programs such as health research and education.

However, one of the amendments that did pass relates to U.S. government surveillance. It was put forth by Mike Pompeo of Kansas and declares that the NSA cannot use its budget to “acquire, monitor, or store the contents [ ... ] of any electronic communication” of a U.S. citizen. It passed by a vote of 409-12. The reason Pompeo’s law was met with little fanfare and passed by an overwhelming margin is because it is essentially flaccid. It prohibits what the NSA stated it was not doing and currently steering around. Pompeo’s legislation does not ban the bulk collection of metadata.

Boehner has something in his eye-- Justin Amash

Bitter In-Fighting Has Turned The GOP Into A Stalinist Nightmare-- And The Response From Mainstream Republicans Has Been Like Refusing To Get Chemotherapy Because You Want Your Body To Unite With Your Cancerous Tumor

There are few substantive issues that I would find much agreement on with mainstream conservatives like Charlie Dent (R-PA), Chris Gibson (R-NY), Bob Dold (R-IL), Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Chris Smith (R-NJ), Richard Hanna (R-NY), Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) or Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ). My heart goes out to them, though. But none of these congressmen are crackpots, nihilists, infants, sociopaths or anarchists who want to make the country ungovernable if they can't get their way. David Brat (R-VA) is. If you missed Brat arguing with Charlie Dent on Meet the Press Sunday, watch the video up top. Hugh Hewett, the first talking head questioning the two Republicans, is very much a right-wing GOP kook. And even he's sick of the backbiting Republican extremists that are grinding the whole country to a halt and making it impossible for a government to function in an orderly and efficient way.

It goes beyond the grotesque corruption inadvertently exposed by the Speaker-who-never-was when he admitted Trey Gowdy's phony-baloney Benghazi Committee was never anything but a sick, partisan witch hunt at the taxpayers expense. But there is something we can learn about the GOP's willingness to feed their extremists red meat from that sordid episode. There needs it be an investigation of the investigation. Why haven't Trey Gowdy and Darrell Issa resigned from Congress yet?

The House Select Committee on Benghazi is reeling again after a fired GOP investigator accused the Republican majority of conducting a politically motivated probe of Hillary Clinton-- accusations the right says are an attempt to get the committee to pay him a settlement.

Major Bradley Podliska, who left the panel in June after about 10 months on the job, told CNN on Sunday he was fired because he refused to conduct a partisan probe of the former secretary of state. He said the panel has veered off its original course to investigate the Sept. 11, 2012, attack that left four Americans dead-- instead zeroing in on Clinton following news that she used private email while secretary of state.

...Podliska is a Republican and believes the Benghazi investigation holds merit, making his criticism of the panel all the more stinging for the committee. A lawyer for Podliska said he was not partisan and never authorized anyone to go after Clinton.

"I'm scared. I'm nervous. I know that this is, you know, I'm going up against powerful people in Washington. But at the end of the day I need to live with myself," he told CNN. "I told my wife, I will view myself as a coward if I don't do the right thing here."

...Podliska, an Air Force Reserve intelligence officer, plans to file a lawsuit against the panel next month for wrongful termination. Podliska said the termination was twofold: because of his unwillingness to focus his probe solely on Clinton and State but also for taking a leave of absence to fulfill military service obligations.

"I was fired for going on military service, and I was fired for trying to conduct an objective, nonpartisan, thorough investigation," Podliska said.

Meanwhile Bill Scher, a conservative Democrat, begged the conservative Republicans he sometimes makes common cause with to not give in to far-right bullies, telling them that "[p]utting party first has proved to be their fatal error. Instead of standing up to the far-right bullies who perennially take the government hostage for the conservative outrage du jour, Boehner and McCarthy have effectively let them dictate how the House is run." He wrote at Real Clear Politics that Boehner and the mainstream conservatives in the GOP should "have it out for good with what had been known as the Tea Party. He could have drawn a red line by refusing to allow a shutdown in 2013, or forcing a vote on bipartisan immigration reform."

Boehner chose a different path, allowing the inmates to run wild in the asylum while trying to contain the havoc they wreaked. He let them learn the hard way that a government shutdown would hurt Republican poll numbers. He shelved the immigration reform package he said he wanted, shifting the blame to President Obama. He prevented an automatic yet politically suicidal cut in Medicare doctor reimbursements-- opposed by right-wing fiscal scolds-- by sneaking it through the House on a hastily called voice vote.

One can understand why Boehner would go to great lengths to avoid a Republican civil war, especially before the 2014 midterms. Control of the Senate was in sight, as well as a broader House majority. Theoretically, that would free the Republican leadership from the nihilists, and allow them to pass problem-solving legislation that could frame the debate for 2016 on their terms.

But theory was not reality. Only days after the 2015 congressional swearing-in, the House Freedom Caucus formed and painted a target on the speaker’s back. Nonstop fractiousness made the most basic legislative tasks a protracted grind, sidelining any hope of rebranding the party with a shiny new legislative agenda. With greater power did not come greater responsibility.

Something had to give. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s “no more government shutdowns” ultimatum suggested that the Republican leadership finally had enough. Boehner no longer had the option of letting the hard right learn the hard way all over again. A showdown was unavoidable. Then Boehner slunk from the fight.

It’s not as if Boehner doesn’t agree that his right flank has become detrimental to the party. “We have,” he said in that CBS exit interview, “members of the House and Senate here in town who whip people into a frenzy believing they can accomplish things that they know, they know, are never going to happen.”

And he knows they cannot be allowed to control the House and represent the face of the GOP if the party is to be competitive in presidential election years. Yet he is allowing that to happen. Abdication doesn’t remove the tumor. The cancer attacks whomever comes next.

I have no doubt that a full-blown confrontation would be as brutal as chemotherapy. Boehner was not wrong that his allies would face primary challenges. Several could lose. What would emerge after the civil war is uncertain. But letting the Freedom Caucus cancer metastasize is an untenable prospect for a major political party.

What’s maddening about this Republican rift is how small the ideological gap is between the factions. This is not a Whig Party torn apart over slavery. That schism led to the creation of the Republican Party. One hundred and sixty years later, the Grand Old Party is breaking apart, not over fundamental philosophic disagreement but over tactics.

And not even the tactics of winning, but the tactics of losing-- how Republicans should handle proposals that cannot survive a Senate filibuster or presidential veto. By putting party unity above all, nearly everyone in the party lost. John Boehner lost his job. Kevin McCarthy lost his ambitions. The party as a whole lost its chance to prove it can govern competently.

Republicans may try to paper-over the rift yet again, praying that Rep. Paul Ryan has the credibility to keep the Freedom Caucus in line. But you can’t remove a cancer with a faith healer.

But with the really craziest of the extremists Ryan has no credibility whatsoever. And that is very upsetting to elderly Republicans. "Anyone who attacks Paul Ryan as being insufficiently conservative is either woefully misinformed or maliciously destructive," said Tom Cole, a very conservative Republican from southern Oklahoma. "Paul Ryan has played a major role in advancing the conservative cause and creating the Republican House majority. His critics are not true conservatives. They are radical populists who neither understand nor accept the institutions, procedures and traditions that are the basis of constitutional governance." What Cole, an old fashioned Republican and ally of Boehner, doesn't understand about the new brand of Ted Cruz neo-fascist Republicans dominating his party is that "constitutional governance," itself, which depends on compromise, is viewed with outright hostility and fury.

Over the weekend Matthew Yglesias, writing at Vox suggested one of the options open to House Republicans now "would be for the House to simply not elect a new speaker. Boehner has made it clear that he remains in office as speaker until a successor is chosen, and if the GOP caucus can't pick a successor, that means Boehner sticks around. Since Boehner is already in office, he doesn't need 218 votes. And since he isn't trying to keep his job, he doesn't need to worry about placating the right. A Boehner-led House would simply do very little. 'Must-pass' measures like the debt ceiling, appropriations bills, and disaster aid would simply be hashed out between the White House and GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, and then Boehner could bring them to the floor, where they would pass with a mix of GOP and Democratic votes... A more creative, but structurally similar, scenario would involve 50 or so House Democrats joining with the bulk of Republicans to elect an orthodox conservative Republican to serve as speaker. In exchange, the GOP caucus would need to agree to buck the Freedom Caucus crowd on must-pass legislation and agree to bring these compromise bills to the floor. Legislative outcomes would be essentially identical to the ones we've been getting, but there would be less posturing and drama, and we would simply skip to the part where McConnell-Obama compromises pass the House despite opposition from many House Republicans."

This is the time when a competent DCCC would come into play-- and elect a Democratic House. Unfortunately, a decade of unbelievably bad leadership from Rahm Emanuel, Chris Van Hollen and Steve Israel has rendered the DCCC so incapable of winning and so structurally compromised that there's a better chance that the country will wind up with an honest-to-God Stalinist government than there is that the DCCC will come even close to winning back a House, something that should be nearly a sure bet at this point. Pelosi's worst failing was the DCCC and it has been absolutely catastrophic for the Democrats... and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. The Republicans could turn the House floor into a real life scene from a chillingly gruesome Hieronymus Bosch painting and Steve Israel and his sock-puppet Ben Ray Luján would lose anyway.

GOP Extremists About To Be Hoist On Their Own Petard?

Mainstream conservatives in Congress are begging Boehner to make a deal with Nancy Pelosi to pass some of the urgent items on the national agenda, particularly lifting the debt ceiling. Their attitude is "screw the assholes in the Liberty Caucus; they brought this on themselves." Long Island Republican Peter King said Boehner can make these kinds of bold moves now because only a caretaker Speaker now and "doesn't have to worry about losing votes." And notice that of the 3 sponsors of this letter to Boehner asking him to do something about runaway gun violence, 2 of them are Republicans!

Dear Speaker Boehner,

Gun violence affects every District and every community in America. We were all shocked and saddened by the senseless deaths of the victims of the Sandy Hook tragedy and have vowed that we would not let this happen again. Sadly, since then, America has been witness to at least 53 mass shootings. Every day in this country, more than thirty people die as a result of gun violence. This does not even address the individual victims of domestic violence or other vicious crimes that destroy families and communities.

Our children should be safe in schools. People should be allowed to worship without threat of violence. Walking the neighborhoods of our cities should not be a high risk activity. It is a long time past that Congress addresses this national epidemic. We must ensure that guns do not make it into the hands of criminals, domestic abusers and the dangerously mentally ill. We can do this without infringing on Constitutionally guaranteed rights.

We call on you to bring to the Floor legislation that can protect innocent lives while safeguarding the rights of law abiding gun owners. No legislation will stop every tragedy, but passing commonsense gun laws will at least stop some. It is the least we can do to honor the memory of those we've lost to gun violence and prevent that list from growing.

There's a sense of irony that the extremists who pushed Boehner out are now making it easier for him to ignore them, cast partisan considerations to the wind and just do what's good for the American public. Jason Chaffetz, orginally elected as a teabagger by ousting a long-time, mainstream conservative, Chris Cannon, headed up the Republican-dominated Committee charged with investigating the far-right's fake Planned Parenthood "scandal." The far right wasn't happy with what the investigation turned up and now they want another committee to give them the outcome they're demanding. Does Boehner have any incentive to play these games with these crazy people any longer?

For Republicans reality always stings

Amid speculation that these extremists ended Boehner's career because he didn't hate Obama enough, or wasn't willing to sacrifice the country on the right-wing's alter of Obama hatred, mainstream conservatives are starting to deal with the reality of turning to Pelosi to make up for the defections from their own political fringe. Charlie Dent (R-PA) is even threatening the extremists with the possibility of going to the Democrats to help them elect a Speaker. "In order to pass any bill around this place, everybody knows we need to assemble a bipartisan coalition. I suspect at some point, if we can't get 218 Republicans to vote for a speaker candidate, we'll have to assemble a bipartisan coalition to elect a speaker."

So now that the extremists, nihilists and Confederates have pushed mainstream conservatives Boehner and McCarthy out and are even working to destroy GOP leaders as far right as Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, they've created a situation that may make them wish they had never heard of Ted Cruz. Boehner can't leave until they elect a new Speaker, which seems more and more impossible by the day. What leverage do these radicals have left? Steve Stivers, an Ohio conservative but not an anarchist: "Sometimes the dog catches the car and doesn't know what to do."

"While we go through this process, we've got to continue to address the people's priorities. This institution cannot grind to a halt," Boehner told Republicans Friday morning in a closed-door session. "It is my hope-- and indeed it is my plan-- for this House to elect a new speaker before the end of October. But at the end of the day, that's really up to the people in this room."

Excerpts of Boehner's remarks came from an official who was in the room. Not authorized to disclose them publicly, the official requested anonymity.

Facing a fall of fiscal fights with the Obama administration, Boehner has said he doesn't want to leave a "dirty barn" for his successor. The toughest item, by far, is legislation that must pass by early November or so to increase the government's borrowing cap so it won't default on its bills. Last year, Boehner orchestrated a debt ceiling increase by relying on just 28 Republicans and 193 Democrats-- the exact opposite of the way the House is usually run.

Then there are ongoing talks about easing spending curbs that have frozen the budgets of both the Pentagon and domestic agencies.

"John is going to try to clean the barn up as best he can," said Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa. "He's not going to clean the whole thing, but we can probably dispose of the debt ceiling. I hope we can reach a budget agreement."

Boehner's penchant for relying on Democrats to make up for tea party defections on legislation like a 2013 tax increase and last month's temporary government funding bill got him in trouble with the right. There's little they can do if he follows the same strategy on the debt limit and a budget deal.

"It is ironic how smart John Boehner's looking," said Rep. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D. "Frankly, all this talk of a fresh new face sounds very sweet on the surface, but we're not electing a student council president. His stock rises with the prospects of an alternative and the steadiness of his hand, the clarity of his positions-- whether you like them or not-- and the fact he's not prone to panic. It's all looking really good right about now."

Conservatives suffered a setback on Friday when emboldened GOP moderates orchestrated a rarely successful petition drive to force legislation reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank onto the floor agenda later this month. The roster of more than three dozen GOP signatories included many Boehner loyalists.

The 13-term lawmaker not only supports reviving the bank, which helps overseas sales of U.S. goods, he called an additional minutes-long House session on Monday that, under the arcane rules governing such petition efforts, sped up the House vote on the measure to the end of October rather than into November.

His office says that wasn't the motivation for the unexpected pro forma session.

A Boehner aide noted that the speaker has said he won't change his way of approaching this fall's treacherous set of issues. For instance, Boehner marched ahead last month with legislation to temporarily fund the government and rejected tea party calls to "defund" Planned Parenthood at the risk of a government shutdown.

Typically on tough votes it often looks like many GOP lawmakers cast "no" votes-- to insulate themselves against criticism from conservative talk radio and Washington-based outside groups-- while secretly rooting for the legislation to pass.

The crowd that votes "no" but roots for bills to pass, however, appreciates it when Boehner turns to Democrats to extricate them from a tough spot.

"That's what we're dealing with: Hope yes, vote no," said Dent. "Same thing will happen on the debt ceiling, same thing will happen on a budget agreement."

Boehner's political maturity is a commodity that's sometimes in short supply in the House, making some Republicans wistful.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., said the speaker's election should be postponed until next year, with Boehner remaining as speaker in the meantime.

"I hope he can stay-- if he's willing to forgo some of his golf games and time with his grandbaby," she said, adding that she thinks Boehner would agree to serve into next year.

Certainly not what the Liberty Caucus misfits or their allies at Hate Talk Radio wanted or expected. But absolutely what they deserve.

The Far Right Continues To Work To Defeat Mitch McConnell

Almost all the Koch-funded far right extremist groups have now joined the battle to nominate teabagger Matt Bevin over McConnell in the May 20th Kentucky primary. The latest, this weekend, was the Republican Liberty Caucus. The group, which has been around since 1991, has also endorsed Milton Wolf over Pat Roberts in Kansas, Lee Bright over Lindsey Graham in South Carolina, Pat McGeehan in West Virginia instead of the Establishment corporate shill (Shelley Moore Capito), and Owen Hill in Colorado (instead of Ken Buck, the other extremist lunatic in the race). They claim the endorsement of Matt Bevin over McConnell was "unanimous."

“It is time that the career professional politicians more interested in being  Washington insiders step aside for new voices who will represent their constituents' desire for lower taxes and less government interference in their family affairs and their personal lives,” said RLC National Chair Matt Nye.

Nye said it was a thorough process to compare the incumbent Sen. Mitch McConnell and Matt Bevin, and the RLC deliberates carefully when the incumbent is a Republican.

…“But in the end, it was clear that Matt Bevin, unlike the incumbent, will stand up for individual liberty, limited government and Constitutional principles.

He will hold Washington accountable for its actions that impact the lives of hard-working citizens who know better than government how to manage their lives,” Nye said… “We believe that Matt Bevin is the best hope for the citizens of Kentucky to be secure without government prying into their private lives,” Nye said.

The congressional Liberty Caucus, chaired by Justin Amash, must be asking for extra helpings of the cherry Coke they all drink. McConnell could help Boehner squash them like bugs if he got the idea any of them-- particularly Kentucky teabagger Tom Massey, who represents the northeastern part of the state across from Cincinnati. The GOP Establishment is already at war with these Members, who they see as troublemakers and rebels-- especially Amash, Raul Labrador (ID), Mick Mulvaney (SC), Thomas Massie (KY), Mark Meadows (NC), Tom Graves (GA), and Jim Jordan (OH). Friday, though, Charlie Spiering at the right-wing website, Washington Examiner, opined that the RNC is trying to make nice with the extremists.

Liberty Republicans. They are the young, more libertarian-minded, grassroots supporters that used to be identified chiefly by their favorite Republican presidential candidate, former Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas.

Now, as the Republican National Committee tries to repair relationships and increase outreach to all political groups, they are doing their best to entice more libertarian Republicans into the fold.

Some of these supporters were turned off by what was described as the "railroading" of Ron Paul supporters by RNC Chairman Reince Priebus during the 2012 convention in Tampa.

But the RNC wants to appear welcoming to the libertarian element in their party, which more established members of the party once derided as "Paultards" after they disrupted events in favor of their candidate.

…During the party's winter meeting in Washington on Friday, the RNC passed a resolution renouncing the National Security Agency’s surveillance program for its abuses of private liberties… Spiker cited it as a key step going forward in making sure that libertarian issues were part of the Republican Party.

"There are things like wireless wiretaps, surveillance programs on people-- that's not going to earn the trust of young people, so our party has to be the party that defends civil liberties and it needs to be a big cornerstone of the party, protecting private property rights and individual rights," he told the Washington Examiner after the resolution passed.

I guess they missed Speaker Boehner on Jay Leno's show the night before.

Leno: Let me ask you about Snowden. I guess Mike Rogers…

Boehner: Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee

Leno: He seems to think that Snowden was working with Russia as a spy?

Boehner: Ahhh… That may or may not be true. All I can say is that I think Snowden is a traitor to the country...

Leno: I agree with you

Boehner: I think that the NSA may have made mistakes but, let's understand something: the NSA is there to keep Americans safe here and abroad. They've got a big job to do. We're gonna take a look at what needs to be tweaked.

Leno: Israel spies on us…

Boehner: And we spy on them. We spy on everyone else. Let's all just get over it. It's been going on for thousands of years…

Leno: Exactly, exactly…

I wonder if Amash watched that performance and how many "liberty Republicans" think Boehner was trying to earn the trust of young people.

Meanwhile, on Saturday the Arizona Republican Party formally censured Sen. John McCain, citing a voting record they say is insufficiently conservative. According to the resolution, McCain has campaigned as a conservative but has lent his support to issues "associated with liberal Democrats," such as immigration reform and campaign finance reform and for voting to fund the Affordable Care Act. The party, which is controlled by far right-wing extremists rebuked McCain and called his record “disastrous and harmful."

Saturday’s censure came two weeks after the Maricopa County Republican Party passed a resolution to censure the senator on a 1,150-to-351 vote.

The state GOP party’s censure passed by acclamation, meaning by a voice vote. It has no practical effect, but serves as an attempt to embarrass the senator.

McCain and his office have not commented on the county censure although his supporters point to the party’s reputation for ultra-right partisanship… The resolution condemns McCain “for his continued disservice to our state and nation,” and said state Republican leaders “will no longer support, campaign for or endorse John McCain as our U.S. Senator.”

Justin Amash Knows That The Most Extreme Right Members Of Congress Only Drink Cherry Coke

Above you see a new 6-figure Club for Growth ad for one of their threatened incumbents, Michigan Ayn Rand fanatic Justin Amish. They are attacking his Establishment opponent Brian Ellis who is backed by Karl Rove and "business interests" openly-- and by Boehner and Cantor surreptitiously.

Ellis is Amash’s business-backed challenger and he is opting for a horseshoes strategy against the incumbent; he wants to hit Amash from both the left and the right. When it comes to defunding Obamacare and shutting down the government, Ellis will portray Amash as an uncompromising ideologue. On foreign policy and other issues, Ellis will say Amash isn’t enough of a Republican team player.

For example, Amash has emerged as a leader in the bipartisan coalition to rein in the federal government’s data-gathering and surveillance practices. Ellis emphasizes that he thinks Edward Snowden is a “flat-out traitor.”

So according to Ellis, Amash is too much like Ted Cruz and Ted Kennedy. But he’s careful not to take the critique too far. He says he is just as gung ho against Obamacare. And he is also willing to rein in the National Security Agency.

In 2012, when Amash was a vulnerable freshman running for reelection in his west Michigan district centered on Grand Rapids and Battle Creek (MI-03), the Democratic Party put up a corrupt conservative hack, Steve Pestka, who could never beat him. Amash was a better choice than Pestka and beat him 53-44% in a district that should be winnable for Democrats. Obama had narrowly beaten McCain in 2008, but fell short against homeboy Mitt Romney, 177,772 (53%) to 153,053 (46%). Almost 10,000 of those Obama voters didn't bother casting ballots for Pestka-- an anti-Choice fanatic-- that day. He only one one of MI-03's five counties, Calhoun, and only with 51%.

After getting Paul Ryan to kick Amash off the Budget Committee and putting him on Issa's ridiculous Witch Hunt Committee, Boehner and his clique want Amash out of Congress altogether this year. And they know better than to count on an incompetent loser like Steve Israel to get the job done. Israel hasn't even bothered to recruit an opponent for him this cycle, preferring to put all the DCCC's money into a ridiculous race against hapless backbencher Dan Benishek in a much tougher district than Amash's (PVI is R+5 as opposed to Amash's R+4). Israel recruited a very conservative, anti-Choice, former Guantanamo comandante, Jerry Cannon, no one's idea of a plausible Democratic Party candidate for anything (other than "ex"-Blue Dog Steve Israel). If Amash out-maneuvers Boehner, as looks likely, he'll be home free for another two year term. Thanks for nothing, Steve Israel and the incompetent DCCC… which has turned losing into a very lucrative art form.

And that leaves Amash to go on his merry way, galvanizing an even more anti-working family bunch of extremist kooks in Congress than they already have. The National Journal reported this morning that even the neo-fascist Republican Study Group isn't far enough to the right for Amash and his closest cronies, particularly hard-right sociopaths Raul Labrador (ID), Mick Mulvaney (SC), Thomas Massie (KY), Mark Meadows (NC), Tom Graves (GA), and Jim Jordan (OH).

The House Liberty Caucus, chaired by Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, quietly launched last year with five or six lawmakers attending a hastily choreographed meeting. Now the group holds a biweekly, invite-only luncheon that draws some two dozen lawmakers and is rapidly becoming an ideological home base for those "core" House conservatives who say the RSC's swelling membership is diluting its ideological intensity.

…The biweekly gathering, held in whatever meeting room is available inside the Capitol complex, is a simple affair. Lawmakers pick from platters of bread and deli meat, cheese and olives, and wash down their meals with cold cans of Cherry Coke, the group's soda of choice. With the exception of Amash's employees, staff members are not permitted, giving the gathering an intimate-- and even secretive-- feel.

…The ascent of Amash's right-wing group has not occurred in a vacuum. Rather, it roughly coincides with a power shift on Capitol Hill that saw momentum swing back toward the establishment after the government shutdown in October and Paul Ryan's budget compromise in December. Some RSC members, upset that the organization did not aggressively combat these forces, say its massive membership has turned the group into the proverbial big ship that turns slowly.

…"The RSC today covers a fairly broad philosophical swath of the party. It's no longer just the hard-core right-wingers," Mulvaney said, adding: "If you want to pay dues, you can get in."

Indeed, any Republican lawmaker may join the RSC by shelling out $5,000 from his or her office accounts. That the group lacks any ideological threshold or litmus test for membership has long been a dilemma for the founders of the group, but increasingly the younger members closer to the grassroots movement are voicing their displeasure.

"There is a concern about the RSC being a group everybody has to belong to so they can go back home and tell their constituents that they're conservative," said Labrador, who was elected in the tea-party wave of 2010. He added: "Every single member of my class was told they needed to join the RSC to show their conservative bonafides back home."

Despite their criticisms, members have been quick to emphasize their approval of RSC Chairman Steve Scalise, whom they say has an unenviable task in leading the largest RSC in the group's 40-year history.

Still, it's apparent that some members have grown restless with the group's alleged lack of aggressiveness. Scalise, who has chaired the group since last January, has made a concerted effort to restore the group as a "member-driven organization" that welcomes wide-ranging dialogue in hopes of producing organic policy solutions the caucus can rally around. But in attempting to facilitate a dialogue between nearly 180 members, some say the group has forfeited its traditional roles of strategic planning and legislative activism.

"The question is, what is the RSC supposed to do?" said Mulvaney, who has been mentioned as a possible successor to Scalise. "I think the RSC is going through an existential type of conversation without even realizing it. Is it going to be a conservative debate club? Or is it an activist organization?"

The verdict, it seems, is already in. Several members likened the RSC to a think tank. Mulvaney said the group is a "conservative debate club." And Labrador, in a separate interview, concluded of the RSC: "It's a debate society."

That's a far cry from how lawmakers characterize their new Liberty Caucus. Several described Amash's group as "intense," partially because the members are friendly enough with one another that they pull no punches. As opposed to RSC meetings that are often consumed by individual member initiatives and requests for legislative cosponsors, Liberty Caucus gatherings are geared toward tackling specific policy dilemmas and deliberating on how conservatives can best address them.

The DCCC is incapable and uninterested in combatting this kind of extremism and never thinks beyond the current quarter. With a landslide of 2010 proportions building against House Democrats, brought primarily by corrupt conservatives inside the Democratic House Establishment, particularly Steve Israel, Steny Hoyer and Joe Crowley, the only hope Democrats have for regaining Congress is in 2016, when Hillary is likely to be a popular nominee with long coattails and Israel is likely to have been replaced after two cycles of disastrous non-leadership. There are probably no House Democrats Pelosi could have picked who would have been more clueless and unable to exploit the Republican Civil War than Steve Israel.