Perhaps.
But the GOP cannot CONTINUE to do more damage.
They went off the cliff with Terry Schiavo.
The trust is not there and there are broken bones.
But they can still survive if they will do the smart thing and pass the Nuclear Option. That will stabilize their base and re-establish their bona fides. The DEMOCRATS are not stopping the Republicans from passing the nuclear option. Neither are the hard-core RINOs. There are only three of them. There would have to be five of them. But there aren't.
The REPUBLICANS are standing in the way, quietly but stubbornly, of getting that Judicial slate in there.
They are doing it because the party leadership is not expending whatever political capital it takes in order to pass it.
They are making a calculation: that the pro-lifers won't REALLY leave. "Where else will they have to go?" they are asking themselves.
It's a game of chicken.
Trouble is, the pro-lifers were NEVER playing a political game, at all. Millions of motivated by the obvious - because they have said so all along: the belief that human life comes from God and is sacred, and that concerns for the sacredness of life trump law and process and politics and everything else.
If the Republicans aren't pro-life when they CAN be, folks like me are going to assume that they are not pro-life. I am already there, frankly, but I keep hoping that the GOP Senate will pull a rabbit out of its hat and show that I have not just been a duped rube for all of these years, part of the GOP's "Black Bloc".
But with Frist's backing further away from the Nuclear Option, I think that I am a duped rube, a fool, a trusting moron from the sticks who REALLY BELIEVED the Republicans thought that the sacredness of life was the MOST IMPORTANT thing, like I do.
Folks like me will walk down the road with people of different religions we even distrust - Catholics and Evangelical Baptists, for example, sitting in the same bleachers here - but we never were bluffing or playing a game, or worrying all that much about money or the economy, gun control or anything else. Those things pale by comparison.
I agree there is a disconnect between a very principled base and a "leadership" in Congress and the White House that has trouble understanding real principle.
I also agree that using the "nuclear option" -- a word we should find a substitute for -- would help the GOP with its voters. The problem is that some of the most moderate GOP senators really don't care about GOP voters, partly because their own constituents aren't that conservative, and partly because that's just the way these senators "think." Rounding up 50 Republican senators for this in the face of the Democratic threats and the post-Schiavo propaganda war mounted by the left will be difficult. But there's a chance it might happen. We'd better hope it does.