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For those familiar with online political commentary, the phrase “Dems in disarray” has long been a popular cliché — usually used in a tongue-in-cheek fashion — intended to poke fun at internal divisions within the Democratic Party’s coalition, and pundits’ preoccupation with the occasional fissures.
Nearly six years ago, The New York Times’ David Leonhardt explained, “The joke appears to date from a 2005 “West Wing” episode that included a (fictional) cover of Time magazine with the phrase. It received new life thanks to a March 2006 New Yorker piece by Hendrik Hertzberg, the first two paragraphs of which each began, ironically: ‘The Democrats are in disarray.’ Sure enough, those disarrayed Democrats retook the House of Representatives later that year.”
Years later, there can be little doubt that one of the major American political parties is in disarray, but it’s not the Democratic Party. NBC News reported overnight:
In a striking turn of events, Senate Republicans threatened Monday to block a major bipartisan package of border security measures and asylum restrictions, just one day after their chief negotiator signed off on it. GOP senators left a special closed-door meeting in the evening predicting that their party would not provide enough votes to move forward with the package Wednesday, saying they agreed they need more time to discuss changes to the bill in the form of amendments.
In other words, Republican senators demanded that Democrats agree to a compromise package on border security and foreign aid; Democrats did as the GOP asked; and now Republicans are poised to reject the legislation they asked for.
It’s a bill that’s received the backing of the Senate’s GOP top official, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, as well as several entities aligned with Republican politics, including the U.S. Border Patrol union, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal.
Most GOP senators apparently don’t care. Assessing the package’s legislative prospects, Politico said the bill is teetering “on the brink of collapse,” while a Washington Post analysis added, “That was quick. Barely 24 hours after the release of a much-maligned Senate border deal, it appears to be all but dead.”
If that was the only major development unfolding in Republican politics, it would certainly hint at a healthy dose of disarray. After all, it’s not every day in which the party’s members make a major demand about an issue they claim to care about, then get their way, and then kill the legislation they said they wanted after their own leader endorsed it.
But this most certainly isn’t the only major development unfolding in Republican politics.
While the GOP’s self-imposed drama unfolds in the Senate, elsewhere on Capitol Hill, Republicans are poised to impeach the Homeland Security secretary for reasons they’re struggling to explain, knowing that their Senate counterparts intend to ignore the entire fiasco.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump appears to be throwing his handpicked chair of the Republican National Committee under the bus for reasons he also hasn’t explained.
It’s against this backdrop that the state Republican Parties in Florida, Arizona, and Michigan have recently parted ways with their chairs; the chair and vice chair in Oklahoma don’t appear to be on the same page; and Nevada is holding a presidential primary and caucus on the same week for a series of confusing reasons that have left local voters baffled.
If this isn’t worthy of a “GOP in disarray” headline, what is?