It started a cross-migration of parties for people. Democrats like Strom Thurmond changed parties from Democrat to Republican in 1964. Sometime between 1964 when she worked on Goldwater's campaign and 1974 when Bill ran for attorney general of Arkansas as a Democrat, Hillary Clinton changed party affiliations. Even Ronald Reagan changed parties in the early '60s.
It appears that true Republicans have lost the party identity to Tea Party RINOs. For example, neither of the Republicans who served on the January 6th Committee is in the House any longer. Adam Kinzinger chose not to run again, and Liz Cheney lost in the primary to an election-denying Trump supporter. It makes me wonder if Mitt Romney, the senator from Utah and former governor of Massachusetts, would change parties despite having earned his birthright as a Republican fairly and squarely.
It doesn't matter how you look at it, Republicans in the Republican party have become irrelevant. Parties evolve, and the Tea Party RINOs have seemingly won the identity of the Republican party.
However, there are divisions within that group, too. For example, there are those who support Trump and those who support Ron DeSantis. There is even a division between those who support Trump and those who support Trump in hopes of getting pardons.
The vote for the speaker of the House has pitted Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz against one another. Greene is bitching about those who won't vote for the guy Trump endorsed, while Gaetz is alleging that the guy who wants the job is truly a Republican in drag as a RINO.
MTG has George Santos on her side. He didn't talk to reporters after his first day on the job. According to his press agent, Tommy Flanagan, he was "too busy talking to the Pentagon and some world leaders to take questions," adding, "Yeah, that's what happened."
On the other side, Gaetz has Lauren Boebert endorsing his claims with an enthusiastic, "Yeah, take that!"
That is just the fracture on the election denying Trump supporting side of the Republican party in the House. There is also the division between these idiots, and those who want to distance themselves from Trump in favor of DeSantis. There is also the division between the Tea Party RINOs in the large group who support either Trump or DeSantis, and the true Republicans who are either abandoning the party or going extinct.
It will be interesting to see what emerges from the ashes of this dumpster fire in the party. If Trump leaves the party to make a run as a third-party candidate, will he take the election denying RINOs with him? Would a new leader emerge from that group as these people die off and go to prison? Would that party survive one cycle of Trump branding any better than the Republican party did?
When the party is unable to unite behind a speaker who promises everything to everybody just so that he can hold the gavel and does not have to move out of the office he prematurely moved into, the party seems doomed. It has not been this fractured since Teddy Roosevelt took away the progressive voters and left behind the business-minded faction that led the country through the Roaring Twenties and into the Great Depression.
Aside from the similarity of the party splitting, DeSantis is about as much like William Howard Taft as Trump is like Teddy Roosevelt.
The party has evolved from the unregulated brainchild of Reagan and Gingrich that rose from Nixon's ashes into dysfunctional in-fighting that is more reminiscent of high school drama while the dumpster fire still burns than of honest political discourse about the future of the party.
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