Infighting and Swamp Fever Dominate Virginia GOP

There are those who make the cry that the Republican Party can be changed from within.  It's a claim that I do not subscribe to given the manner in which the Christofascists/Tea Party crowd, white supremacist (who more often than not are one and the same as the Christofascists/Tea Party) and no tax lunatics have been allowed to infiltrate local city and county committees all across Virginia.  Of late, a few seem to finally be realizing that these folks are like a metastasizing cancer and efforts are being made to limit the ability of the extremists and outright crazy elements on local committees and at mass meetings to drive the GOP further into crazy land and/or select committee chairs and party candidates.  A nasty civil war has ensued with those trying to limit insanity being labeled as Nazis or worse.  A column in the Richmond Times Dispatch looks at the ongoing civil war.  Here are some column excerpts:

In increasingly Democratic Henrico, Republicans more often than not speak in one voice — a reminder of the control over the party apparatus by a local boy made good: Eric Cantor, the U.S. House majority leader and could-be speaker. But because of Cantor’s adversaries — his tea party primary opponent and others disdainful of Cantor’s more traditional brand of Republicanism — the latest mass meeting, to some, seemed mass confusion.

In recent weeks, this pattern has been playing out across Virginia as factions struggle for control of a Republican Party reduced to a regional presence by a string of Democratic statewide victories. The current infighting, in which Cantor loyalists figure prominently, is a preliminary to the main event in 2016: the battle for the GOP’s governing body, the central committee. It will be concurrent with the presidential race in purple Virginia.

In suburban Virginia Beach and rural Campbell and Buckingham counties, to name a few, Republicans have engaged in the parliamentary equivalent of hand-to-hand combat.

These battles — over leadership, organization and convention delegates — can be vicious. It’s because the stakes are comparatively low: dominance of local GOP committees, many of which have few members. That’s a reflection of the changing Virginia. Democrats are attracting the young, Asians and Hispanics. The Republican base is dominated by aging whites.

The internal combat is of the Republican Party’s own making. Elective Republicans openly court libertarians, home-schoolers and property rights advocates who have flooded the party since 2010. Their muscle is institutionalized by partisan gerrymandering, which forces Republicans further right, fueling partisan impasse — most recently, in Richmond, over spending and health care.

In Henrico, anti-Establishment Republicans narrowly rejected a Cantor loyalist, county GOP chairman Don Boswell, a former sheriff, to lead the mass meeting. Instead, these activists installed an interloper from Stafford County, about 60 miles north: Russ Moulton, former 1st District Republican chairman.  No friend of Cantor, Moulton has made a name for himself training tea partyers and Paulians in Republican rules and other organizational esoterica.

This way, this crowd is becoming part of the GOP fabric. But it also is a threat to comparatively mainstream Republicans such as Cantor. He favors open-to-all primaries for choosing a nominee because they minimize the right’s influence. Moulton and Co. prefer member-only conventions because they maximize it.

As Cantor’s enemies see it, naming Moulton as temporary chairman short-circuited any effort at slating and spotlighted momentum for Dave Brat, the congressman’s remaining opponent in the June primary. Further, it raises anew a nettlesome question for Cantor: If he can’t bring his party together at home, how can he do it in Washington? But then, who can?

Fred Gruber, a tea party guy from Louisa County, is running. He’s apparently not making friends by — according to Republican blogs — comparing his foes to Nazis. That’s always risky, more so when Cantor, the dominant political figure in the Henrico-anchored 7th District, is the only Jewish Republican in Congress.

This is another instance of the personal nature of Republican Party politics, and how it is magnified by the intimacy of caucuses, conventions and committees, all of which are about preserving the power of the few. Rivalries span generations. Grudges are nursed, not forgotten. Egos must be stroked.

In Virginia Beach, the Republican mass meeting was a rumble. More than 600 people were there in an Establishment drive, dependent on slating, to wrest the party from the upstarts. It may have worked.

In Buckingham, the new Republican leader is a pastor who longtime activists said they’d not heard of until he arrived at the mass meeting at the county agriculture center Wednesday.

As I have said many times, the Republican establishment created a Frankenstein monster when it allowed in the Christofascist, Tea Party and white supremacist focusing only on short term opportunity.   Now, the monster is proving difficult to kill.