Charles Pierce: “If there’s any evidence that John Boehner tried to arrest the prion disease before it took over his caucus, and then his entire political party, it was not evident in his performance as Speaker. The man was positively hysterical in his opposition to the Affordable Care Act.”

“That he bailed out before the maniacs took full control is a tribute to his survival instinct, not his political integrity. He got run over by forces from which he and his party had been profiting, and which got out of the lab because he wasn’t strong enough, or willing enough, to stop it.”

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) in a statement to National Review:

“I absolutely oppose and reject any notion of boycotting Georgia. Georgia welcomes business, investment, jobs, opportunity, and events. In fact, economic growth is driving much of the political progress we have seen here. Georgia welcomes the world’s business.”

“Corporations disgusted like we are with the disgraceful Voter Suppression bill should stop any financial support to Georgia’s Republican Party, which is abusing its power to make it harder for Americans to vote.”

David Frum: “To appease those cultural blocs, Republican politicians must be willing to sacrifice everything, including what used to be the party’s foundational principles. To protect the gun, or to avoid contradicting the delusions of anti-vaccine paranoiacs, property rights must give way, freedom to operate a business must yield.”

“The QAnon-curious Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene expressed the new mentality when she took to Facebook to denounce vaccine passports as ‘corporate communism.’ It sounded crazy. But if you understand that she interprets communism to mean ‘any interference in the right of people like me to do whatever we want, regardless of the rights of others’—then, yeah, the property rights of corporations will indeed look to her like a force of communism.”

Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), who leads the Republican Study Committee, argues in a memo that Republican party’s future demands an “embrace” of “our new coalition,” Axios reports.

Banks says that “both parties are undergoing coalitional transformations” and that Republicans shouldn’t fight the trend of corporate donors pulling back from the GOP.

Writes Banks: “Our electoral success in the 2022 midterm election will be determined by our willingness to embrace our new coalition. House Republicans can broaden our electorate, increase voter turnout, and take back the House by enthusiastically rebranding and reorienting as the Party of the Working Class… There is an embittered and loud minority in the GOP that finds our new coalition distasteful, but President Trump’s gift didn’t come with a receipt.”

Matt Lewis: “What had been (in the days of Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp) an optimistic philosophy has metastasized. We are left with a right wing that is animated by despair, desperation, and an inevitable belief in American decline. We have been hearing this sort of clamoring since 2016, culminating with the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6. But there was always the hope it would dissipate if or when Donald Trump left the White House.”

“But sadly, Trump’s exit has done little to quell the incipient thirst for authoritarianism from many on the right. Indeed, the fever seems to be getting worse.”

Michael Gerson: “It is the sign of a sickness deeper than covid-19 that the defiance of public health guidance has become a political selling point in the Republican Party.”

“In the not-so-distant past, Republican governors competed with their colleagues to author innovative welfare reform or criminal justice proposals. Now bad covid policy is a point of pride and a path to influence.”

Jonathan Chait looks at a new paper from political scientist Jacob Grumbach which finds that “the states that backslid on democratization over the past 16 years were shared a single characteristic: Republicans gained full control of their state government.”

“In other words, states that are rolling back democratic protections are not responding to demographic change nor to any change internal to their state. They are following the agenda of the national Republican Party. That agenda is spreading throughout the states, which are imposing voter restrictions almost everywhere their party has the power to do so. Restricting the franchise has become perhaps the party’s core policy objective.”

“A group that opposes former President Donald Trump is dialing up the pressure on GOP lawmakers who objected to the certification of the 2020 presidential election results,” McClatchy reports.

“The Republican Accountability Project is spending $1 million on a new round of TV and digital ads criticizing six GOP members of Congress the group says ‘encouraged a deadly attack’ on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 as Electoral College votes were being counted.”

“Lin Wood, the defamation and personal injury lawyer who took up former President Trump’s baseless accusations of election fraud, will run to lead the South Carolina Republican Party,” The Hill reports.

“Democrats control Washington, but Republicans have a mighty counterweight that gets little attention: dominance in the states and the courts,” Axios reports.

“That one-two punch gives Republicans domain over a huge swath of America’s governing system, including power over voting laws and the redistricting of House seats, plus the ability to use state courts to their advantage.”

“Just as Biden is taking a maximalist approach to Washington power; Republicans are doing the same state-by-state.”

GOP pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson in an interview with Ezra Klein:

“To the extent that these days, you see discussion about expanding the coalition and bringing in voters who might be more available to the GOP. There is not as much of an appetite these days for winning back, say, college educated suburbanites, I think in part because there is a belief that there may just be too great a divide on some of these sort of values and culture type issues.”

“Meanwhile, I think there is some more appetite you are seeing among Republicans for doing outreach to those in communities of color, who may not have college degrees.”

Paul Krugman: “That same loss of seriousness, I’d suggest, inhibited their ability to effectively oppose Biden’s rescue plan. They couldn’t do the hard thinking required to settle on a plausible line of attack. So while Democrats were pushing through tax credits that will cut child poverty nearly in half and subsidies that will make health insurance more affordable, Republicans were focused on cancel culture and Dr. Seuss.”

“And looking forward, why should we expect the G.O.P. to do any better in opposing Biden’s longer-term initiatives?”

Related for members: Republicans Are Committing Political Malpractice

“The leader of Michigan’s Republican Party referred to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and two other top Democratic elected woman as “witches” and joked about assassination when asked how to remove two GOP congressman who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump,” the AP reports.

Axios: “The post-Trump Republican Party cares most about issues in seven key categories, with most prioritizing economic issues like job creation and limited government, according to a new survey conducted by former President Trump’s chief 2016 and 2020 pollster.”

The top three include:

1. Dollars & Cents GOP: These voters care most about a balanced federal budget, economic growth, taxes, international trade and limited government. Middle-aged men are concentrated here.
2. Core GOP Conservatives: All GOP voters remaining who didn’t fit into the other categories. Considered extremely conservative and the most committed GOPers. Care most about honesty in government.
3. Don’t Tread on Me GOP: Heavily focused on personal and individual freedoms, such as privacy, gun rights and marijuana legalization. Top category for young men.