Month: November 2013

Rightly or wrongly, freshman Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) is seen as the man who is responsible for the recent government shutdown. As a result, a small plurality of Republicans now see Cruz as their party’s leader. That is not helping him deal with the simmering resentment he has aroused on Capitol Hill among his colleagues. On Wednesday, Cruz had to offer an olive branch to infuriated members of his caucus by promising not to openly support the Senate Conservatives Fund’s efforts to defeat them in next year’s primaries.

The day before, the SCF had announced that they would spend $330,000 to try to defeat Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. They had already run blistering ads against “dozens of Republican senators for rejecting Cruz’s tactics in the budget showdown that led to a 16-day federal shutdown.”

The Establishment reacted with fury, threatening to never do business again with any firm that does work for the SCF. High-level staff at the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) blasted away with threats and insults.

“We’re not going to do business with people who profit off of attacking Republicans,” said Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for the committee. “Purity for profit is a disease that threatens the Republican Party.”

…And on Friday, one of Mr. McConnell’s closest aides offered a vivid metaphor about the leader’s determination.

“S.C.F. has been wandering around the country destroying the Republican Party like a drunk who tears up every bar they walk into,” said Josh Holmes, Mr. McConnell’s chief of staff, now detailed to the National Republican Senatorial Committee through the election. “The difference this cycle is that they strolled into Mitch McConnell’s bar and he doesn’t throw you out, he locks the door.”

Incumbent Senate Republicans are getting plenty of assistance from inside the Beltway, with columnist Kathleen Parker writing that “It’s time to dump the tea party in the Potomac,” and Jennifer Rubin writing that people like Sen. Cruz “have very little appeal outside the tight-knit web of ideological true-believers” and that “[t]here have to be reality-based voices to push back and to encourage those figures who might actually appeal beyond the base.”

Long Island Republican congressman Peter King is still out there screaming his head off, calling Ted Cruz “a fraud,” “a false prophet,” and arguing that he is leading the party “into the Valley of Death.”

But protest as the Establishment might, the only time the Republican base has shown an increase in their approval of the party was when they were following Ted Cruz’s dead end plan to repeal ObamaCare.

During the shutdown Congressional Republicans had actually received a bump in their approval because their own party base expressed approval of them (52/39) but they’ve dropped back down to 39/53. The drop is probably because even though 66% of Americans overall thought the shutdown was a bad thing to only 25% who thought it was good, 39% of GOP voters believe the shutdown was a good thing for the country.

The base of the party wants non-stop confrontation and they are absolutely heedless of the likely political consequences. The more the Establishment pushes back, the lower their numbers go. And, with a 6% approval rating in the latest Public Policy Polling poll, Congress is already in a competition for popularity with the margin of error.

Rightly or wrongly, freshman Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) is seen as the man who is responsible for the recent government shutdown. As a result, a small plurality of Republicans now see Cruz as their party’s leader. That is not helping him deal with the simmering resentment he has aroused on Capitol Hill among his colleagues. On Wednesday, Cruz had to offer an olive branch to infuriated members of his caucus by promising not to openly support the Senate Conservatives Fund’s efforts to defeat them in next year’s primaries.

The day before, the SCF had announced that they would spend $330,000 to try to defeat Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. They had already run blistering ads against “dozens of Republican senators for rejecting Cruz’s tactics in the budget showdown that led to a 16-day federal shutdown.”

The Establishment reacted with fury, threatening to never do business again with any firm who does work for the SCF. High-level staff at the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) blasted away with threats and insults.

“We’re not going to do business with people who profit off of attacking Republicans,” said Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for the committee. “Purity for profit is a disease that threatens the Republican Party.”

…And on Friday, one of Mr. McConnell’s closest aides offered a vivid metaphor about the leader’s determination.

“S.C.F. has been wandering around the country destroying the Republican Party like a drunk who tears up every bar they walk into,” said Josh Holmes, Mr. McConnell’s chief of staff, now detailed to the National Republican Senatorial Committee through the election. “The difference this cycle is that they strolled into Mitch McConnell’s bar and he doesn’t throw you out, he locks the door.”

Incumbent Senate Republicans are getting plenty of assistance from inside the Beltway, with columnist Kathleen Parker writing that “It’s time to dump the tea party in the Potomac,” and Jennifer Rubin writing that people like Sen. Cruz “have very little appeal outside the tight-knit web of ideological true-believers” and that “[t]here have to be reality-based voices to push back and to encourage those figures who might actually appeal beyond the base.”

Long Island Republican congressman Peter King is still out there screaming his head off, calling Ted Cruz “a fraud, “a false prophet,” and arguing that he is leading the party “into the Valley of Death.”

Rightly or wrongly, freshman Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) is seen as the man who is responsible for the recent government shutdown. As a result, a small plurality of Republicans now see Cruz as their party’s leader. That is not helping him deal with the simmering resentment he has aroused on Capitol Hill among his colleagues. On Wednesday, Cruz had to offer an olive branch to infuriated members of his caucus by promising not to openly support the Senate Conservatives Fund’s efforts to defeat them in next year’s primaries.

The day before, the SCF had announced that they would spend $330,000 to try to defeat Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. They had already run blistering ads against “dozens of Republican senators for rejecting Cruz’s tactics in the budget showdown that led to a 16-day federal shutdown.”

The Establishment reacted with fury, threatening to never do business again with any firm who does work for the SCF. High-level staff at the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) blasted away with threats and insults.

“We’re not going to do business with people who profit off of attacking Republicans,” said Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for the committee. “Purity for profit is a disease that threatens the Republican Party.”

…And on Friday, one of Mr. McConnell’s closest aides offered a vivid metaphor about the leader’s determination.

“S.C.F. has been wandering around the country destroying the Republican Party like a drunk who tears up every bar they walk into,” said Josh Holmes, Mr. McConnell’s chief of staff, now detailed to the National Republican Senatorial Committee through the election. “The difference this cycle is that they strolled into Mitch McConnell’s bar and he doesn’t throw you out, he locks the door.”

Incumbent Senate Republicans are getting plenty of assistance from inside the Beltway, with columnist Kathleen Parker writing that “It’s time to dump the tea party in the Potomac,” and

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the  Grand Canyon. The photo that I will be using is seen directly below. I will be using my usual acrylics on a 12×12 gallery-wrapped canvas.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time, I have continued to work on the painting.

I have tried to follow the pattern of pencil shapes and start to reveal the lit and shadowed areas.  That took some time but was well worth the effort.  I now have a road map of the scene.  Blue/purple appears in areas of shadow, red appears in those of light.  Toward the front a purplish red is shadow.  To the right is the dark shape of the  very close rock.

The current state of the painting is seen directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week.  See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

Ever since California changed their election laws in 2010, I’ve been thinking about how to orchestrate a progressive insurgency from the Golden State. Despite my obsession, my ideas are still somewhat nebulous. Now I’m beginning to think about how the moderate, pro-business right can use some of the same ideas to revive the right’s fortunes in California and take the fight to the Tea Party.

The need is obvious. The Republicans are doing so badly in California with women, Latinos, Asians, and young people, that their party is effectively dead. Business leaders have already concluded that it’s more promising to support moderate Democrats than to spend a dime on Republicans.

The business community, always focused on the bottom line, increasingly sees moderate Democrats as the best investment for campaign dollars. The GOP just hasn’t been producing.

“We’re going to be redoubling our effort to help elect Democrats who understand business,” says Rob Lapsley, president of the Business Roundtable.

That’s what is happening right now in Georgia, where business leaders are lining up to fund Michelle Nunn’s Democratic campaign to win an open Senate seat.

“The vast majority of Americans say they don’t want the government to shut down, they want middle ground,” said John Wieland, founder of John Wieland Homes and Neighborhoods Inc., who together with his wife penned checks totaling $10,400 to Nunn’s Democratic U.S. Senate bid. In the 2010 midterms, the Wielands each gave $4,800 to the Republican Senate candidate.

“Michelle understands that middle ground, and that’s why we wrote the checks,” Wieland said.

It’s a sentiment shared by some business donors from Virginia to Arkansas, and one Democrats want to spread as the parties vie for control of the Senate in the 2014 midterms.

But why give to Democrats if you can find reasonable Republicans instead? If control of the Republican Party is slipping away from business leaders, maybe California is the place to attempt a comeback.

With 53 congressional seats, California lawmakers are collectively 12% of the House of Representatives. It’s incredibly easy to get on the ballot, and their nonpartisan blanket primary system makes it possible to run against a Republican without diminishing the right’s chances of electing a candidate. Likewise, it is possible to run against a Democrat without diminishing the left’s chances of electing a candidate.

Unlike in most states, California holds a primary where candidates are not formally endorsed by the parties. Instead, candidates indicate which party they “prefer.” You can say that you prefer the Republican Party or the Tea Party or the DisneyLand Party. And because no one can win without achieving a majority, and there is a second election between the two top vote getters, you won’t normally hurt your side of the political divide’s chances by bleeding off some of their votes.

To give a brief example of what I mean, in the 2000 presidential election in Florida, Ralph Nader got enough votes that would have otherwise gone to Al Gore to make the election close enough to steal. The result was eight years of catastrophe with George W. Bush as our president. Under California’s primary rules for most elections, there would have been a second election without Nader on the ballot. Al Gore would have won. Moreover, a lot of people would have been freed up to express their support for Nader in the first go around because they wouldn’t have had to worry that it would hurt Gore’s chances.

One result of this system is that it is possible to have the top two primary vote recipients come from the same party. When this happens, the two meet in a general election, and the more moderate candidate has the advantage because the other side of the political divide will be more inclined to vote for them.

What I have mind is basically a two-step process. It works a little differently for business-minded people on the right than it would for progressives on the left. The first step is to come up with a party name that clearly indicates that the candidate is on the right, but also that they are not from the socially-conservative, xenophobic Tea Party wing of the right.

The business community would provide seed money for a couple dozen candidates and run them in the districts where they are either likely to wind up in a general election against a conservative Republican or a fairly far-left Democrat in a somewhat competitive district.

In a race between a conservative Republican and a moderate “Republican,” the Democrats and independents in the district will vote in large numbers for the “Republican.” And in districts that are competitive, a far-left Democrat may not be able to hold enough of the middle to beat a moderate challenger. This would be particularly true if the moderate were pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-immigration reform, and environmentally responsible.

The second step is key. To illustrate it, it will be helpful to give this hypothetical right-wing party a name. Let’s call it the Republican Reform Party. The second step is that all the people who are elected on the Republican Reform Party ticket will agree to go to Congress and vote for one of their own on the first ballot to elect a Speaker of the House.

I need to explain how this would work. The Speaker of the House is elected by the entire body of the House of Representatives, not by the members of any one caucus. And the Speaker must win an absolute majority (218 votes) of the 435 members. Right now, I think there are 233 Republicans and 200 Democrats, with two vacancies. So, if 16 Republican Reform members were elected and refused to vote for a Republican on the first ballot, no one would get a majority. At that point, they could negotiate with the Republicans to get a moderate Speaker with the threat of voting for the Democratic candidate on the second ballot. They would have the power to make or break the Speaker both before they were elected and then every day after they were elected. That is because any member can call for a new election on the officers of the House at any time.

So, the goal would be to get about sixteen Republican Reform members elected. Washington and Louisiana have similar electoral systems and sixteen additional congressional seats to pick from. Added to California’s 53 seats, that makes 69 seats in states with these kind of primaries. Could a Republican Reform Party funded by moderate business leaders find sixteen winnable races in that pool of 69 seats?

I think it’s possible.

For starters, some new polling shows that Tea Party members are currently more satisfied with the Republican Party than non-Tea Party members. And the non-Tea Party Republicans are beginning to really pine for a third party alternative.

The most recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, offers a stark window into widening divisions within the GOP over strategy and what kind of leaders Republicans want going forward…

Asked if they would be more likely to vote for an independent or third-party candidate for Congress if one existed in their district, just 19% of Democrats said they would.

But among all Republicans, that number was 28%. And among wavering Republicans—who constituted nearly a quarter of the poll’s registered voters—the desire to vote for a third-party candidate was a startling 41%.

There is no reason for business leaders to prefer a party that is as socially conservative as the modern GOP. While some in the energy producing industries might like climate change denialism, most business leaders have no use for such silliness. But, more than anything else, business leaders want a viable right-wing party that will protect their interests. They don’t have that anymore. California business leaders have already internalized this, but so far their only solution is to try to buy off Democrats. Some business-minded Republicans are talking about getting involved in Republican primaries, but they won’t get very far with that. In ordinary primaries, the most conservative candidate starts out with a huge advantage.

It’s time to try something else. The Republican Party’s national future can be seen in the California Republican Party’s present. It is doomed. And it’s already worse than useless to the business community. It’s time to launch a real third party effort in California, Washington, and Louisiana.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn tells us that some people don’t want the tyranny of Obamacare, because they like Fords and not Ferraris, etc. True story. Watch the video:

And you know she may be right about some people.

Some people want to be denied health care for a pre-existing condition.

Some people want the right to have no health insurance and depend on fundraisers, church bake sales and the kindness of strangers to pay their medical bills when they get sick.

Some people would rather you or I die, rather than grant us the ability to receive affordable health care at competitive rates.

Some people may want health insurance companies to place lifetime limits on how much they must pay for health care costs.

Some people would rather pay more for crap health care insurance rather than shop for better, cheaper insurance because – freedom.

Some people will believe anything Fox News tells them about the Affordable Care Act.

Some people don’t understand that the only death panels are the ones health insurance companies have in place to deny claims, coverage and life-saving treatments for their policy holders.

Some people think Medicare changed because of Obamacare and have panicked.

Some people believe the ACA is going to increase the deficit when the Congressional Budget Office has already determined that in fact it will cut the deficit and result in health care savings.

Some people still buy snake oil remedies from late night hucksters on TV and send their life savings to faith healers.

Some people are stupid idiotic morons (or morans if you prefer that neologism).

The automobile industry and the health care industry have nothing in common other than they both exist to generate profits. Marsha Blackburn knows this. She knows that health insurers have gouged American consumers for years. So why is she making such ridiculous and farcical arguments about the ACA, and relentlessly attacking Secretary Sebelius like a third grade mean girl?

Well, here’s a hint for you. She received over $607,000 from the Health Care industry, her largest donor group next to the Pharmaceutical/Health Products Industry, which contributed over $379,000 to her campaign chest to ensure that she would “represent” the interests of the health care industries over the interests of everyone else, including her own constituents, who will benefit from the Affordable Care Act.

Marsha Blackburn is either lying about the Affordable Care Act or she is really, really stupid. Something tells me (i.e., the groups financing her political career) that the former is more likely than the latter. She’s expecting some people (and hoping even more people) to fall for her dissembling and obfuscation, and to believe that the ACA is the worst thing since the Edsel (hey, two can play at the automobile analogy game).

Don’t be some of those people. Learn the facts about the ACA. Get yourself the best healthcare available, whether through your employer or through the insurance exchanges. And don’t listen to Republicans like Martha Blackburn who care only for the interests of the health insurance industry, which could care less whether you live or die so long as they can get away with cheating you out of every last dollar they can before you buy the farm.

Ever since California changed their election laws in 2010, I’ve been thinking about how to orchestrate a progressive insurgency from the Golden State. Despite my obsession, my ideas are still somewhat nebulous. Now I’m beginning to think about how the moderate, pro-business right can use some of the same ideas to revive the right’s fortunes in California and take the fight to the Tea Party.

The need is obvious. The Republicans are doing so badly in California with women, Latinos, Asians, and young people, that their party is effectively dead. Business leaders have already concluded that it’s more promising to support moderate Democrats than to spend a dime on Republicans.

The business community, always focused on the bottom line, increasingly sees moderate Democrats as the best investment for campaign dollars. The GOP just hasn’t been producing.

“We’re going to be redoubling our effort to help elect Democrats who understand business,” says Rob Lapsley, president of the Business Roundtable.

That’s what is happening right now in Georgia, where business leaders are lining up to fund Michelle Nunn’s Democratic campaign to win an open Senate seat.

“The vast majority of Americans say they don’t want the government to shut down, they want middle ground,” said John Wieland, founder of John Wieland Homes and Neighborhoods Inc., who together with his wife penned checks totaling $10,400 to Nunn’s Democratic U.S. Senate bid. In the 2010 midterms, the Wielands each gave $4,800 to the Republican Senate candidate.

“Michelle understands that middle ground, and that’s why we wrote the checks,” Wieland said.

It’s a sentiment shared by some business donors from Virginia to Arkansas, and one Democrats want to spread as the parties vie for control of the Senate in the 2014 midterms.

But why give to Democrats if you can find reasonable Republicans instead? If control of the Republican Party is slipping away from business leaders, maybe California is the place to attempt a comeback.

With 53 congressional seats, California lawmakers are collectively 12% of the House of Representatives. It’s incredibly easy to get on the ballot, and their nonpartisan blanket primary system makes it possible to run against a Republican without diminishing the right’s chances of electing a candidate. Likewise, it is possible to run against a Democrat without diminishing the left’s chances of electing a candidate.

Unlike in most states, California holds a primary where candidates are not formally endorsed by the parties. Instead, candidates indicate which party they “prefer.” You can say that you prefer the Republican Party or the Tea Party or the DisneyLand Party. And because no one can win without achieving a majority, and there is a second election between the two top vote getters, you won’t normally hurt your side of political divide’s chances by bleeding off some of their votes.

To give a brief example of what I mean, in the 2000 presidential election in Florida, Ralph Nader got enough votes that would have otherwise gone to Al Gore to make the election close enough to steal. The result was eight years of catastrophe with George W. Bush as our president. Under California’s primary rules for most elections, there would have been a second election without Nader on the ballot. Al Gore would have won. Moreover, a lot of people would have been freed up to express their support for Nader the first go around because they wouldn’t have had to worry that it would hurt Gore’s chances.

One result of this system is that it is possible to have the top two primary vote recipients come from the same party. When this happens, the two meet in a general election, and the more moderate candidate has the advantage because the other side will be more inclined to vote for them.

What I have mind is basically a two-step process. It works a little differently for business-minded people on the right than it would for progressives on the left. The first step is to come up with a party name that clearly indicates that the candidate is on the right, but also that they are not from the socially-conservative, xenophobic Tea Party wing of the right.

The business community would provide seed money for a couple dozen candidates and run them in the districts where they are either likely to wind up in a general election against a conservative Republican or a fairly far-left Democrat in a somewhat competitive district.

In a race between a conservative Republican and a moderate “Republican,” the Democrats and independents in the district will vote in large numbers for the “Republican.” And in districts that are competitive, a far-left Democrat may not be able to hold enough of the middle to beat a moderate challenger. This would be particularly true if the moderate were pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-immigration reform, and environmentally responsible.

The second step is key. To illustrate it, it will be helpful to give this hypothetical right-wing party a name. Let’s call it the Republican Reform Party. The second step is that all the people who are elected on the Republican Reform Party ticket will agree to go to Congress and vote for one of their own on the first ballot to elect a Speaker of the House.

I need to explain how this would work. The Speaker of the House is elected by the entire body of the House of Representatives, not by the members of any one caucus. And the Speaker must win an absolute majority (218 votes) of the 435 members. Right now, I think there are 233 Republicans and 200 Democrats, with two vacancies. So, if 16 Republican Reform members were elected and refused to vote for a Republican on the first ballot, no one would get a majority. At that point, they could negotiate with the Republicans to get a moderate Speaker with the threat of voting for the Democratic candidate on the second ballot. They would have the power to make or break the Speaker both before they were elected and then every day after they were elected. That is because any member can call for a new election on the officers of the House at any time.

So, the goal would be to get about sixteen Republican Reform members elected. Washington and Louisiana have similar electoral systems

Some of Mitt Romney’s and the Republican Party’s most generous donors are lining up to give Michelle Nunn money for her campaign for Saxby Chambliss’s Senate seat. It appears that at least part of corporate America has been convinced by the government shutdown that they don’t need more Republicans in Congress right now, and that is going to create a world of hurt for the party of Big Business.

Obviously, I am uncomfortable with this effort to co-opt the Democratic Party, but I actually see it is a sign of sanity and applaud these men’s recognition that the Party of Lincoln is now the Party of Crazy. They aren’t good for business. They aren’t good for Labor. They aren’t good for hungry kids. They aren’t good for the military. They aren’t good for anything.

The more people realize this, the sooner we can destroy these clowns and the less likely that they will destroy us before we can get the job done. I hope we can get some candidates in other states like South Carolina and Tennessee and Kansas and Wyoming and Idaho, because the tide is turning and we need to be able to take full advantage it. We shouldn’t assume anyone is safe just because they come from a deep red state.

The Republicans broke their party and it is broken in every state.

Sarah Binder asks all the right questions in her piece on the prospect for filibuster reform. Can the Democrats go nuclear on executive branch nominees but not judicial ones? Does the Republicans’ argument that the DC Circuit is just fine with three vacancies change the game so that the Dems no longer care about blowback under a GOP presidency? In other words, while it’s nice to have a veto on lifetime appointments, can the Dems tolerate a precedent that judges can be denied confirmation votes because the Republicans say we don’t need any confirmed judges?

The Dems probably have the votes to kill the filibuster for executive nominees, but until recently they did not have the votes to kill the filibuster for judicial nominees. The ludicrousness of the GOP’s argument on the DC Circuit could change that.

The argument I hear in progressive circles is that it is a mistake to think that the Republicans will respect the filibuster (for anything) the next time they are in change because the Republican Party has fundamentally changed. I think that this is probably true, and that a preemptive move that would smooth the way to filling all the judicial vacancies is therefore warranted.

But I don’t think it would be a healthy reform because without the restraint of needing some Democratic votes in the Senate, the kinds of judges the Republicans would appoint will be very frightening.

I find this whole debate quite depressing and vaguely terrifying, because it just drives home how broken our politics have become. Everywhere I look, our choices are between bad and cataclysmic.

William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor were both elected president on the Whig Party ticket. John Tyler was a Whig, too, but was expelled from the party. And Millard Fillmore was a Whig who became president after President Taylor died in office. Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln were all Whigs. It was a pretty successful political party for a couple of decades, but it fell apart over the question of slavery.

As you might suspect, the party developed northern and southern wings that grew less and less compatible, until the two factions could no longer work together. The northern wing gravitated to the newly-formed Republican Party or, like their former colleagues in the South, joined up with the Know-Nothings.

I don’t see the current divisions within the Republican Party as quite that stark, but the polls are showing some serious signs of strain.

In December, just a month after the GOP experienced a string of election losses, nearly two-thirds of all Republicans held a positive view of their party. Ten months later that share has dropped to less than half.

Among those who are more wavering in their ties to the GOP—a group that is nearly twice the size of the party’s most fervent followers—affection for the party in the latest poll dropped to 35%, with almost an equal number saying they viewed the party in a negative light. (See table at bottom of this post.)

By comparison, nearly three-quarters of all Democrats in the poll said they have a positive view of their party, down just slightly since the end of last year. Even the more wavering among the Democrats are positive toward their party (61%).

The sharp divisions over political style with the GOP also have no corollary among Democrats.

One of the canaries in the coal mine is the way that Mid-Atlantic Republicans like Rep. Peter King, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and New York City mayoral candidate Joe Lhota have denounced southern Republicans for not coming to their aid in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. They felt the same way about the recent government shutdown and threat to default on the nation’s debt. And the same break can be seen in how Republicans view negotiations over the budget.

A similar break can be seen over the question of whether Republicans want their party members in Congress to make compromises to gain a consensus on budgetary matters, or stick to their positions even if this means no budget agreement.

Just under half of all Republicans favored compromise. But among tea-party Republicans, a solid 64% said Republicans in Congress should stick to their positions no matter what. Just a third of non-tea party Republicans took that stauncher position.

When the same question was asked of Democrats, a solid 68% favored compromise, with little variation among liberals and more wavering Democrats.

Only a third of non-Tea Party Republicans think that the Republicans should eschew compromise in the budget negotiations, but that public opinion is not reflected at all in how congressional Republicans are acting.

It might be possible to sustain this kind of division if the budget debate could somehow remain an abstract argument, but the truth is that the sequester cuts that are kicking in for 2014 are real and they have consequences that cannot be ignored. When the “no compromise” position is only supported by half of your party and one third of your non-Tea Partiers, then unity becomes impossible.

Support for a third party is at an historic high in the country right now, but it is particularly strong on the right.

Asked if they would be more likely to vote for an independent or third-party candidate for Congress if one existed in their district, just 19% of Democrats said they would.

But among all Republicans, that number was 28%. And among wavering Republicans—who constituted nearly a quarter of the poll’s registered voters—the desire to vote for a third-party candidate was a startling 41%.

What’s fascinating about these numbers is that it is the more moderate, Establishment Republicans who are more interested in a third party than the renegade anti-Establishment upstarts in the Tea Party. Overall, fifty-six percent of Tea Party Republicans have a favorable view of the GOP, while only forty-one percent of non-Tea Party Republicans approve.

It doesn’t surprise me that the tensions are strongest in the Mid-Atlantic region where the Republican Party’s ties to Wall Street are the strongest, but this split has a cultural component as well. Republicans have been all but wiped out in New England, where they do not have even one serving member in the House of Representatives, and only two senators. Business-minded people in New England would be well-served to ditch the Republican brand entirely and start over from scratch. In the meantime, Gov. Chris Christie is cruising to reelection in large part because he split from the southern wing of the party and embraced federal aid and the president when his state needed disaster relief. That is increasingly going to be the only way a Republican in these parts can be popular. And that is going to start showing up in Congress in a big way as the budget debate drags on.

Unlike the Whigs, I don’t see the Republican Party simply disappearing, but I think some other vehicle will become preferable for people on the right who are running outside of the South.