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The Republican Party’s slide away from those values preceded Donald Trump, providing the conditions for his rise. In recent years, the GOP has thrown away its guiding values and embraced its darkest instincts. It has blown up long-standing norms in the Senate, creating divisions that outstrip anything I have seen before; done nothing about rank corruption in the White House and the Cabinet; accepted the politicization of the Justice Department and lies from the attorney general; avoided any meaningful oversight of misconduct; and failed to curb attacks on the independence of inspectors general.

The GOP now distinguishes itself by inaction. It has stood and watched as this administration separated children from their parents at the border, mistreated asylum seekers, botched its response to a hurricane in Puerto Rico, attacked science, and opened new avenues for toxic materials in our air and water. It said and did nothing about Russian interference in the 2016 elections, and is actively blocking efforts to combat a recurrence in 2020

It has refused to pass a new Voting Rights Act after the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder eviscerated the legislation, which, reflecting the GOP of the past, had passed the House unanimously. It has refused to deal in any fashion with urgent problems such as climate change, immigration, global competition, hunger, and poverty. It confirmed nominees who lied to the Senate, who inflated résumés, and who failed to meet minimum qualifications for the job. It confirmed judges who were unanimously rated unqualified by the American Bar Association.

I agree with Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein that the current nihilist extremism of the current Republican Party is “the central problem in American life.”

And yet I find the chances of getting reform from within close to impossible, given how far they’ve now gone over the edge. And this is a tragedy not just for America, but for the GOP itself.

Here, for example, was a man whose family life would make him a cult hero if he were a Republican, but who has been demonized as an alien threat to America from the get-go. Here’s a Democrat who adopted Heritage Foundation ideas for healthcare exchanges. Here’s a Democrat who has actually cut Medicare. His stimulus was one-third tax cuts. Domestic energy production has soared under Obama, even as record numbers of illegal immigrants have been deported. There were and are so many ways in which the GOP could have used Obama for their own advantage – both strategically and culturally. But they refused to, opting instead for visceral, dumb, self-defeating short-term tactical political advantage. All tactics and emotion; no strategy and reason.

Congress may flip -- but dysfunction is here to stay

The Republican majority in the Senate -- and maybe even the House -- could be gone after this year's election.

With Donald Trump trailing in the polls, Hillary Clinton is increasingly turning her attention to down-ballot races -- particularly for the Senate, where Democrats are hoping to pick up at least the four seats they'd need to claim the majority if Clinton wins the White House.

Cruz: ‘Pitchforks and Torches’ If GOP Doesn’t ‘Deliver’ on Promises

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said Republican voters would take up “pitchforks and torches” if the party’s leaders don’t deliver on the promises that propelled Donald Trump to the White House and gave the GOP full control of Congress.

“And I think quite rightly. I think people are so fed up with Washington. This election was a mandate with change, and the most catastrophic thing Republicans could do is go back to business as usual.”

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan finds himself in the middle of yet another Republican civil war as the battle over LGBT rights has come to Congress, threatening to divide an already fractured GOP.

Democrats won an opening salvo late Wednesday night, when the House approved on a vote of 223 to 195, a measure by Rep. Sean Maloney (D-N.Y.) to deny payment to federal contractors who discriminate against LGBT employees.

Maloney’s victory does not mean that House conservatives — angry over what they view as overreaching by President Obama — will not continue to wage the fight.

Welcome to the GOP civil war

“The party will not fracture but will likely splinter,” says former Minnesota Rep. Vin Weber, a senior party strategist. “The question is: How big will the piece that splinters off actually be?”

He tried to make that pivot this week, releasing his health care plan and defending Planned Parenthood, but was forced to battle a growing insurrection in his own ranks – led by the party’s 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, who labeled him “a fraud” and “a phony” who represented “a brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.”

The five-point Democratic advantage in this combined measure of party affiliation was the same in 2017 as in 2016, but higher than the three-point Democratic leads in 2014 and 2015. Since 1991, the average has been a five-point Democratic edge.

With this in mind, Trump’s poll numbers look much more daunting for him and the GOP. He continues to get about 80 percent of the GOP vote (27 percent of the electorate). But that amounts to a meager 21.6 percent of the electorate as a whole.

The presence of so many independent voters does not mean these are necessarily moderates. Most every poll shows the once-great center shrinking and more polarization at the extremes. If Democrats want to capitalize on the GOP woes and the general unpopularity of the president, they might want to consider running on his failure to carry through on populist economic reforms, his attacks on the health-care system, his self-deal and conflicts of interest and the Republicans utter failure to act as a restraint on the unhinged chief executive.

A crucial Senate vote on a bill to create an independent inquiry to investigate the deadly January 6 Capitol Hill riot has been delayed due to Republican objections to unrelated legislation, following an emotional and tumultuous week where the bill to create a 9/11-style commission seems on track to fail in the coming hours.

The likely filibuster from GOP senators underlines Republicans' desires to move on from the deadly insurrection at their workplace which left five people dead and more than 140 police officers injured. Their opposition also highlights the hold former President Donald Trump still holds on most of his party.

Supporters of the January 6 commission -- including the mother of a Capitol Police officer who died the day after the riot -- pleaded with GOP senators throughout the week in order to convince at least 10 Republicans to back the plan. So far, only three -- Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine -- have indicated they plan to join Democrats and support the bill.

Rep. Liz Cheney survived to fight another battle but on a raucous and defining day, the appeasement of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene by House Republicans sent their party lurching further down the road to extremism.

The moral crisis in the GOP after Donald Trump's exit from Washington was epitomized by a showdown that saw Cheney, a lifelong ideological conservative, forced to fight off a challenge to her leadership post after she voted to impeach a President who sparked a violent coup attempt.

Greene, a belligerent conspiracy theorist who thinks the GOP's problem is that it lost the presidential election too gracefully

A longtime acquaintance of the Missouri senator explained to me Hawley’s actions this way: “Hawley never wants to talk down to his voters. He wants to speak for them, and at the moment, they are saying the election was stolen.”“He surely knows this isn’t true,” this acquaintance continued, “and that the legal arguments don’t hold water. And yet clearly the incentives he confronts—as someone who wants to speak for those voters, and as someone with ambitions beyond the Senate—lead him to conclude he should pretend the lie is true. This is obviously a very bad sign about the direction of the GOP in the coming years.”  

Those who have hoped that Republicans like Senator Hawley would begin to break free from Trump once he lost the election have not understood the nature of the change that has come over the party’s base.

Trump was the product of deep, disturbing currents on the American right; he was not the creator of them. Those currents have existed for many decades; we saw them manifested in the popularity of figures such as Sarah Palin, Patrick J. Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, Oliver North

A group of more than 100 former Republican officials have discussed the possibility of forming a conservative party due to their unhappiness with the direction of the GOP under former President Donald Trump and the likelihood he'll be acquitted at the end of his second impeachment trial, according to Republicans who participated in the conversation.

"Clearly, there are a number of Republicans like myself and other Republican leaders, who want a clean break from President Trump, and we are kind of rallying around some core founding principles like truth and honesty, and democracy, and rule of law," the former Pennsylvania congressman, who is a CNN contributor, told CNN's Chris Cuomo Thursday.

The call came nearly a month after the January 6 insurrection on the US Capitol, when Trump supporters attempted to stop the certification of the 2020 election, believing the false claim promoted by Trump that it was stolen from him. One week later, the US House voted to impeach Trump for "incitement of insurrection," with 10 Republicans joining with Democrats.

A little more than three months ago, as Democrats cast their ballots in the Nevada caucuses, Republicans felt confident about their chances in 2020. The coronavirus seemed a distant, far-off threat. Democrats appeared poised to nominate a self-described socialist for president. The stock market was near a record high. The economy was roaring. President Donald Trump looked well-positioned to win a second term, and perhaps pull enough incumbent Republicans along with him to hold the party's majority in the Senate.

Seven GOP operatives not directly associated with the President's reelection campaign told CNN that Trump's response to the pandemic and the subsequent economic fallout have significantly damaged his bid for a second term

Several say that public polls showing Trump trailing presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden mirror what they are finding in their own private polls, and that the trend is bleeding into key Senate races. The GOP already had a difficult task of defending 23 Senate seats in 2020.

Men gave Perdue a 10-point lead over Ossoff and Loeffler a 9-point lead over Warnock. Women gave Ossoff an 11-point lead over Perdue, as well as a 19-point advantage for Warnock.

. If either Republican wins, the GOP will retain control of the Senate.

There is a crisis of identity. Donald Trump now leads a coalition including the Republican establishment — and people who despise the Republican establishment. The insurgent president-elect — lacking relevant experience, adequate personnel and actual policy proposals — cannot exercise power without the help of those he ridiculed.

Trump has chosen to incorporate this conflict into the structure of the West Wing.

This is less a team of rivals than an ideological cage fight.

The GOP Delegate Race After Tonight

But the real race to watch is Pennsylvania, where an additional 54 unbound delegates are up for grabs. These delegates are elected directly on the ballot, but the ballot does not say which presidential candidates they support

Some percentage of Trump voters will take the time to figure out which delegates publicly back Trump. But there's really no way to know right now whether Trump ends up with half the unbound delegates or close to all of them.

Trump’s GOP rivals and the Super PACs hoping to stop him have previously attacked Trump for other similar revelations, declaring him a hypocrite and a phony who is conning working class voters by pretending to be on their side. But such attacks don’t appear to work. Why not

in a perverse way, revelations like these actually bolster his message, rather than undercutting it. Trump’s argument is that he has a unique grasp, via direct experience and participation, of all the ways in which our political and economic system is rigged to make it easier for people such as himself to fleece working Americans. This understanding of how the game really works positions him well to fix it. He has been in on the elites’ scam for decades, and now, having made a killing off of it, he’s here to put an end to it.

Trump has made this argument explicitly, again and again and again, in multiple different ways. At the most recent GOP debate, Trump effectively declared that he understood better than any other candidate that politicians are bought and paid for — because he has bought and paid for politicians himself!

Surveys of Latinos conducted by the Gallup Organization, NBC News and CNN all show that the party’s brand has been hurt by the language of the 2016 contest. Data from ImpreMedia and Latino Decisions that spans the three years after Mitt Romney’s loss detail the magnitude and depth of the reaction to the 2016 campaign.

In 2012, only 18 percent of Latino voters thought Mr. Romney was “hostile” toward Hispanic voters. By November 2015, the number who thought that had jumped to 45 percent. The largest shift was among those 18 to 35. More than three times as many young Latino respondents think the party is hostile toward them compared with 2012 results (a move to 65 percent from 18 percent in 2012).

After Mr. Romney’s 2012 defeat, the party convened a task force to examine its recent presidential losses. The result was a report on the party’s growth and opportunities among the electorate. In the Growth and Opportunity Project, the task force wrote: “It is imperative that the RNC changes how it engages with Hispanic communities to welcome in new members of our party. If Hispanic Americans hear that the G.O.P. doesn’t want them in the United States, they won’t pay attention to our next sentence.”

Even though few Republicans could ever vote Democratic, and certainly not for Clinton, it wouldn’t be the end of the world as we know it. But voting for Trump, whom other civilized nations find abhorrent, might be.

Any hope that Trump might not really mean what he says is either delusional or a gamble too far. Which would voters prefer: The man who promises a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” or one who’ll say anything to get elected? The lunatic or the liar?

It has finally dawned on Republicans that their die is cast and Trump is about to destroy the party he relatively recently rejoined. Like a bunch of Ebenezer Scrooges, GOP leaders have begun emerging from their sleep, blinking at the horror of past misdeeds, trying to prevent a future that their actions foretold.

“The big thing that I think defines the struggle for the party is that a bunch of people want to define it by what we’re against, and a bunch want to define it around what we’re for,” observed GOP strategist Kevin Madden. “Right now, it’s about 70-30, with the ‘against’ crowd winning.

GOP strategists and leaders argue that you have to look beyond the bomb throwers and reality-TV-type characters to find the folks who’ll take Republicans forward.

ask around, and party players are happy to hold forth on their favorite comers. Some are seen as having White House potential, while others are regarded as better suited for long-term congressional or state leadership

Donald Trump's push to route his supporters' money through his own political apparatus, rather than traditional Republican campaign committees, has ignited fears among GOP donors and operatives that the former president could hamstring the party's efforts to win House and Senate majorities in next year's midterm elections.

Letters in recent days from Trump's lawyers to the Republican National Committee and the party's House and Senate campaign arms have warned against using Trump's name to raise money.

"No more money for RINOS," Trump said in a Monday evening statement. "They do nothing but hurt the Republican Party and our great voting base--they will never lead us to Greatness. Send your donation to Save America PAC at DonaldJTrump.com. We will bring it all back stronger than ever before!"