Their Own Worst Enemies

The Republican Party's biggest opponent is no longer the Democrats — it's the Republican Party.

One of the more notable rifts is between Karl Rove and the Tea Party Patriots. After Rove announced that he was going to make sure that candidates like Todd Akin would never happen again, the Patriots sent out an email portraying Rove as a Nazi (yeah, he does bear a passing resemblance to Heinrich Himmler if you put a mustache on him...). Newt Gingrich has entered the fray on the Tea Party side, because, well, who else would have him? Bobby Jindal made waves in January when he said that the Republicans had to stop being the stupid party.

Now the National Organization for Marriage is going after Branden Peterson, a Minnesota state senator, for cosponsoring a same-sex marriage bill.

“Republicans like Branden Petersen don’t realize that not only is voting to redefine marriage a terrible policy, it is also a career-ending vote for a Republican,” said Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage. “NOM will do everything in our power to defeat any Republican who votes in favor of same-sex marriage.”

This constant drive for ideological purity at any cost will be the death of the Republican Party long before the demographic shifts coming in the next decades. With gay marriage, the writing is on the wall: it's over, it's a done deal. Even Dick Cheney is just waiting for the dead-enders' last gasp.

The reason the Republican Party has a majority in the House of Representatives is that they have gerrymandered several states that Democrats win in presidential elections, such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, and have concentrated all the Democrats in just a few districts, giving them 70, 80 and 90% majorities. Meanwhile, the Republican districts in those states have much smaller majorities, on the order of maybe 55 to 60%.

If the Tea Party succeeds in driving the Republicans further to the right, they're going to alienate suburban Republicans who have grown weary of the bickering over gay marriage, abortion, contraception, immigration reform and universal background checks for gun purchases. The small Republican majorities in those suburban districts could flip at any time. A relatively small exodus of well-to-do Democrats moving from the city to the suburbs, and continued population growth in the Sunbelt could flip even more districts from R to D in solid red states.

If the economy continues to improve and the internecine war between the Tea Party and old-guard Republicans continues, their numbers in the House could collapse as early as 2015 as the gerrymandering backfires.

And I don't like that at all, because when I first started out I was a Republican: the Democrats had a lock on everything in Minnesota, and it wasn't pretty. They had to get beat a bunch of times to straighten them out, and a repetition of that scenario nationwide won't be good for anyone.

The Republican Party needs to get its act together and start acting like a real political party, instead of a fanatical religion or a bunch of rabid British football hooligans.