GOP Goes All-In

I still can’t tell for sure if this is happening because of some grand design or is just a series of events that add up to something bigger, but it looks to me as if the Republicans have bet the farm…and their future…on being the extremist, take-no-prisoners, we-never-compromise-no-matter-what-the-result political party in the United States.

Consider the following, all of which happened just in the past week:

1.  Rather than support the candidate designated by the local Republican committee, and even though she who was given $1 million in financial backing by the Republican National Committee, GOP leaders from Karl Rove to Dick Cheney to Sarah Palin supported the Conservative Party candidate in a special election in New York because they considered the GOP candidate to be too moderate.  Not only did this force the Republican nominee out of the race a week before the election, but it handed what had been a very safe GOP seat to the Democrats.  As a result, House Democrats got an extra vote on health care that allowed them to let one of their more conservative members vote against the bill and, therefore, enhanced his or her reelection prospects next year.

(Anyone know what happened to Ronald Reagan’s eleventh commandment of not speaking ill about any Republican?)

2.  The House Republican leadership didn’t just endorse Michelle Bachmann’s tea bagger demonstrations on Capital Hill, it embraced them.  These demonstrations then got a great deal of television time and in the process made the whole party look like a conglomeration of the most extreme elements in American politics today.  One GOP House leader — House Republican Minority Whip Eric Cantor — felt the need to criticize the tea bagger posters that used pictures from a Nazi concentration camp and images of the president as Hitler, although his language was tepid.

3.  As Dana Milbank reported in yesterday’s Washington Post and as you can see from the clip below, the behavior of the GOP representatives during the House debate on the health care reform bill was as bad as the behavior of the tea baggers.  They weren’t just boisterous; they were rude and totally disrespectful in a way that would have had them demanding sanctions if the Democrats had done it to them.  They made few substantive arguments against the health care bill during the lengthy debate and instead decided to disrupt the proceedings as much as possible.

There will be several things to watch in the coming days:

1.  Is Rep. Cantor forced to apologize for his criticism of the tea baggers and, several days earlier, of Rush Limbaugh?  Do House Republicans threaten his minority whip position if he doesn’t?

2.  Is it possible that party identification polls show identification with the GOP falling below the abysmal 22 percent some have shown recently?

3.  Does what happened in the New York special election force moderate GOP candidates not to run for election or reelection?

4.  Do any moderate GOP House members (Joseph Cao from Louisiana, who voted for the Democrat leadership sponsored health care bill is the most obvious choice) decide to switch political parties?

5.  Do Democratic leaders realize that Republicans have gone all-in and decide to stop looking for compromises that will never come?

6.  In particular, do Senate Democratic leaders decide that there’s no reason not to use reconciliation procedures with health care because the GOP is going to be highly critical and disruptive no matter what they do?  Why not just use reconciliation and only need 51 votes instead of needing 60 to stop what now appears to be an aboslutely certain GOP filibuster?  That will allow 9 Democrats to vote against the bill if they feel the need to do so.