The Tail Wagging The Elephant

The Oklahoma Republican Party’s civil war spilled onto the national stage last weekend when a faction voted to publicly censure U.S. Sen. James Lankford for helping negotiate a bipartisan immigration measure.

You read that correctly. They are enraged their party’s senior U.S. senator is playing a consequential role in addressing what they view as a grave matter of national security.

Yes, it’s insane. But that’s where we are after a toxic half-century-plus marriage of rightwing politics and evangelical religion that yielded a cult devoted to a thrice-married, convicted sexual predator facing 91 criminal charges.

Thanks to the presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, the Make America Great Again crowd refuses to take yes for an answer when it comes to immigration reform. The bipartisan Lankford and Co. proposal appears to give Republicans much of what they pined for – making asylum claims harder, increasing the number of deportation flights, and capping the number of migrants to 5,000 a day [even less in certain circumstances].

As Lankford noted on Fox News, “This bill focuses on getting us to zero illegal crossings a day … There's no amnesty. It increases the number of Border Patrol agents, increases asylum officers. It increases detention beds so we can quickly detain and then deport individuals.”

Even so, this wing of the fractured state GOP cannot get on board because its  master, Trump, fears a deal will eliminate the border crisis as a tool he can use to bludgeon incumbent Democratic President Joe Biden.

Sane, reality-based minds might ask a simple question: Does wrecking the bipartisan deal serve the public’s interest? Or Trump’s?

In MAGA eyes, the two interests are one, given that many Trump devotees now regard him as God’s chosen one, leading America out of the … what? Religious wilderness?

This is scary stuff, especially since it reflects a sizeable portion of the leadership of a party that controls supermajorities in both legislative houses, every statewide elected office and every congressional seat.

Lankford undoubtedly knows all this, yet he’s pushed back against the criticism, doing yeoman’s work to help reach a bipartisan immigration fix. It’s far from perfect. But it serves as a reminder of how our democratic republic is supposed to work – pursuing reasonable compromise that makes a difficult situation better.

As a longtime Baptist minister, Lankford would seem to be uniquely positioned to help remove the scales from the eyes of the MAGA cult. But the unholy zealots now view him as a RINO – Republican In Name Only.

And that vitriol undoubtedly captures the attention of jelly-spined elected Republicans from the statehouse to the Potomac. Why? Because they know the MAGA crowd, while actually small, wields outsize influence in GOP primaries, its voters turning out come hell or high water.

That creates a nightmare scenario in which GOP legislators fear that pushing back against the crazy could cost them their seats. So, they duck instead. Profiles in cowardice.

It’s worse than you might think. When an uber-conservative like former party chair A.J. Ferate isn’t far enough right to be invited to the censure meeting, it’s clear the tail is now wagging the elephant.

Even the current state chair, hard-right state Sen. Nathan Dahm, publicly called the meeting illegal and insisted the censure did not reflect an official Oklahoma GOP position.

Here's a reality check: According to polls, the majority of voters want our two major parties to cease the Battle Royale and compromise. Get things done.

The longer the Oklahoma Republican Party is dominated by the fringe, the faster it will risk irrelevance with a public becoming increasingly weary of over-the-top rhetoric that yields few solutions.