Your parent’s Republican Party is dead.  The center-right politicians that used to be the leaders of the Republican Party are now called RINOs by the forces that staged a hostile takeover of the party.  And like many hostile takeovers, what is left is simply a brand name that is a shell of what it used to be.  If the Republican Party was a business, consumers would simply gradually realize that its product and services had declined and would eventually switch to competitors.  While the workers and customers of that company would suffer during the death spiral, it would have limited impact on the rest of us.

Unfortunately, a political party is not a company, and the death spiral of a political party can have significant impact on everyone.  And we are seeing that play out  in real time in Washington.

Once again, we are facing the inability of the Republican Party to be able to unite behind a leader.  In a functioning party, the choice of a leader is an internal party decision, and, when the time arrives for the whole House to confirm the majority party’s leader, the members of that party support its chosen leader.  Because the modern Republican Party is not really a political party and is instead a disjointed collection of individual attention seekers vying to be the most outrageous, it is almost impossible to get 218 Republicans on the same page. Continue Reading...