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" The folks at Josh&amp;#039;s place got Nancy Pelosi to sit down and talk about the tantrum thrown by the members of the House Republican caucus that may have doomed comprehensive immigration reform for the foreseeable future. The Minority Leader seems to despair of the GOP rebranding as much as I do. &amp;quot;The bills that have come out of committee have come out strictly party-line,&amp;quot; Pelosi said. &amp;quot;There has been no attempt at bipartisanship on the part of Republicans who run the show. So those bills are totally unacceptable. Would one or the other one of them as part of a comprehensive immigration reform be acceptable in order to move the package forward? Well that remains to be seen. ... I don&amp;#039;t have an objection to piecemeal as long as there&amp;#039;s an understanding that it has to be comprehensive in terms of what goes forward to the conference. So anyway the Speaker thinks he can get a bill passed, that&amp;#039;s okay with me. But don&amp;#039;t think that we&amp;#039;re going to give votes to all this bad stuff and call that a bill.&amp;quot;  In addition, Ms. Pelosi decided to explain to Speaker Of The House John Boehner how counting works. &amp;quot;[T]hat&amp;#039;s just their usual unprofessional way - their usual amateur hour, blame it on somebody else, because they can&amp;#039;t legislate,&amp;quot; Pelosi said. &amp;quot;But if things reach that point anyhow, she has a polite suggestion. &amp;quot;The Constitution says a majority. It doesn&amp;#039;t say the Hastert rule, or sometimes the Hastert rule, or when I feel like it the Hastert rule. It says the majority. And there are ways to achieve the majority that I hope they will pursue.&amp;quot;  In other words, John, if you can&amp;#039;t wrangle your grand flock of loons, don&amp;#039;t look for my help.  It&amp;#039;s time again, I think, to contemplate the modern Republican talent for looking opportunity in the face and spitting in its eye. A lot of thought has been put into why the Republicans act on this issue in a way so oblivious to the obvious political advantage -- or, conversely, why they seem to be actively planning to body-surf the demographic rock-slide that&amp;#039;s coming their way over the next several decades. This assumes a rationality that the party abandoned long ago. I would argue that it took leave of Mother Earth during the endless pursuit of Bill Clinton&amp;#039;s penis in the 1990s. Remember that the Republicans impeached him anyway after taking something of a hiding in the 1998 midterms, which were, if they were nothing else, a referendum on eight years of faux-scandals and Kenneth Starr&amp;#039;s relentless pursuit of anything he could hang around the president&amp;#039;s neck. The country told them to stop. Their Democratic colleagues told them to stop. They went ahead anyway. Then came the extended meddling in the death of Terri Schiavo. In this, the overwhelming consensus in the country was that the Republicans under Tom DeLay were acting with towering indecency. Again, well-meaning Democrats in the Congress went to their Republican friends and told them that, not only was this an act of public inhumanity, it was a profound political loser in that almost every family in America faces a choice similar to that confronting Michael Schiavo at one point or another, and that no American family wanted a crook like Tom Fking DeLay sticking his greasy fingers into their business. (Barney Frank once told me that he talked to at least five members of the Republican caucus on this issue. He showed them the polling data. He couldn&amp;#039;t get them to budge.)They went ahead anyway. The event came to its sad resolution. There was some evidence that it hurt the Republicans in the 2006 midterms. They moved on. The apparent unwillingness of Republican politicians to look at obvious political realities is a function of the fact that the Republican party has no party leadership any more. There is no &amp;quot;Republican establishment&amp;quot; worthy of the name. The Republican party -- and the conservative movement that is its only source of political vitality -- is made up now of several different centers of power: the conservative media, including Fox News and the universe of talk-radio; the conservative ideas infrastructure centered around various think-tanks and intellectual chop-shops like Heritage,and, most important, the network of plutocratic sugar-daddies operating on their own agendas, and more than willing to assert that agenda even if it seems to be to the political disadvantage of the party as a whole. Last, and finishing very far up the track, is the Republican party itself. Can anyone make a serious argument that a Republican congressman is better off as a Republican politician listening to Reince Priebus than to Rush Limbaugh, or Jim DeMint, or David Koch? If said politician has the latter three behind him, when John Boehner comes to him and asks him to vote for a immigration reform bill, said politician can tell Boehner to go whistle up a tree. To fail at government is to succeed as a Republican politician. If you want to seek the source of the dementia that is overwhelming the Republican party to the point where nothing gets done by the American government, look for it there. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a23459/how-republicans-fail-upwards/>