The crumbling Republican Party: What's next after loyalty committees?

By Diane Silver

Karl Rove's dream of turning the United States into a GOP monopoly has become a nightmare for his once seemingly all-powerful party. Signs of weakness are everywhere. Today's case in point has popped up in Kansas, which was once the reddest of red states, where the GOP has just created a loyalty committee.

I'm not kidding, although any sane person would think this was a joke.

At a mid-year convention this weekend, the state party changed it's constitution, no less, to create the committee. The body will strip GOP officials of their party titles if they help a Democrat get elected. New Republican Party Chairman Kris Kobach sought the change and will chair the committee.

Kobach is best known as a failed Congressional candidate of far, far right, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant views.

I have to agree with Andy Wollen, chairman of the Kansas Traditional Republican Majority, an organization of moderate Republicans.

“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” Wollen said. “It’s just the latest demonstration that these people just flat don’t understand people.”

It's also the latest demonstration of why the Republican Party is in trouble. If you have to keep people in line by clubbing them, you've already lost.

What Kobach and gang can't seem to realize is that people are running from the Republican Party because of the radical right's ideas and their love of bullying. I suspect the new loyalty committee will do nothing than drive more people from the state GOP.

Kobach and gang are the best thing that have ever happened to Democrats.

Here's more on the loyalty committee and on the state GOP's attempt to oust it's own representative to the Republican National Committee. Apparently, he isn't radical enough.