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Excerpted from Rep. Scott Tipton’s newsletter to constituents yesterday:

House Republicans remain insistent on budget cuts before looking to increase taxes, while Obama is calling for an extension of the current tax structure for all but the nation’s highest earners, households with more than $250,000 in income and individuals with more than $200,000. Those taxpayers would see their marginal income tax rates increase from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, as well as see increased rates on capital gains and inheritance taxes. U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton, R-Colo., wants to know where and how additional revenue from higher taxation would be spent, and how it would reduce spending, his office said…

It seems obvious to us that asking how “additional revenue” will “reduce spending” is kind of oxymoronic, but it at least re-emphasizes the point that Tipton is against spending.

Sort of, based on the very next point in his newsletter:

U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton, R-Colo., asked federal agricultural officials Monday to ease restrictive insurance guidelines on farmers in the San Luis Valley given the lingering drought. Tipton expressed his concern in a letter to USDA’s Risk Management Agency, stating that agency guidelines would limit farmers in the Multiple Peril Crop Insurance Program from filing claims because of less water being available.

We did some checking on this: for fiscal year 2004, for which we found a report, the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation collected $928 million in premiums, subsidized (meaning taxpayers covered) $2 billion in premiums, and incurred $3.2 billion in losses. The program’s total budget in FY 2004 was $3.4 billion. Here’s a little more historical detail from the Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics:

Government outlays for the federal crop insurance program exceeded $9.2 billion between 1980 and 1990. Over this period, indemnity outlays totaled over $7.1 billion while premiums collected from producers were only $3.8 billion. This corresponds to net losses (excluding administrative costs) that exceed $3.3 billion and implies that, on average, farmers received $1.88 in indemnities for each $1 of premiums paid (i.e., a loss ratio of 1.88).

It’s not like we’re going to deny relief to San Luis Valley farmers, but isn’t somebody going to ask how easing payouts from already generous farm subsidy “insurance” will “cut spending?” This is a lot like Tipton’s praise for the new solar power plant in Alamosa funded by the same loan guarantee program that funded Solyndra, a company Tipton routinely vilifies.

And why doesn’t Tipton feel as strongly about your grandmother’s health care, again? It would be one thing if Tipton was consistent about “cutting spending,” something only a few members of the “Tea Party” class of 2010 can say they have been. Tipton’s problem is not wrongheaded principle, but a sense that there’s no principle at work at all.

The Hill, noted for the record last week:

Nearly half of Republican voters say that ACORN – the community organizing group that closed in 2010 – aided in stealing the 2012 election for President Obama, according to a new poll released Tuesday.

The survey, conducted by Democratic polling firm Public Policy Polling, found that 49 percent of GOP voters believe that the president did not legitimately win reelection because ACORN interfered with the vote. A full 50 percent of Republicans said Democrats engaged in some sort of voter fraud.

More from Public Policy Polling’s election aftermath polling memo:

Some GOP voters are so unhappy with the outcome that they no longer care to be a part of the United States. 25% of Republicans say they would like their state to secede from the union compared to 56% who want to stay and 19% who aren’t sure.

One reason that such a high percentage of Republicans are holding what could be seen as extreme views is that their numbers are declining. Our final poll before the election, which hit the final outcome almost on the head, found 39% of voters identifying themselves as Democrats and 37% as Republicans. Since the election we’ve seen a 5 point increase in Democratic identification to 44%, and a 5 point decrease in Republican identification to 32%. [Pols emphasis]

“Swastika Guy,” circa February 2009.

Almost from the moment President Barack Obama took office, the opposition to his agenda took on an extreme, overheated sense of urgency on the right. Political rhetoric on the right evoked a sense of desperation trending toward outright rebellion–generally based on false, and often hysterical, predictions of what Obama’s agenda would mean for the country.

This irrational radicalization of the grassroots right wing reached its peak during the passage of health care reform legislation and the 2010 election cycle. The fact is, “Obamacare” as finally passed by Congress and signed into law is a far cry from true left-wing aspirations for health care reform, and has more in common with conservative proposals for reforming health care from the Heritage Foundation (or Mitt Romney) than anything one can legitimately call “socialized medicine.” This resulted in a situation where liberal base Democrats were nonplussed by Obama for “giving away too much,” while the right wing painted Obama as a “communist” unfettered by objective facts about his very much centrist actual policies.

Today, their failure is evident everywhere. The intense four-year campaign to irrationally vilify Obama is bankrupt. Only a declining number of hardcores (see poll) are not aware of this.

But those hardcores aren’t going away. Indeed, they think they define “true conservatism.”

We’re not saying this one poll is gospel, but a drop in Republican self-identification, if it’s corroborated and if it continues, could portend an historic re-alignment–real upheaval in the party, or perhaps even a new party to represent the half of America with ideologically conservative predispositions. Among many Democrats at least, there’s a sense that the GOP is permanently marginalizing itself, hastening an irrelevance for political conservatism that many even on the left would say doesn’t fairly represent the views of our ideologically divided nation.

If that’s what must happen, the question is, how many elections will it take? The answer is almost certainly more than the one we just finished. It’s not going to be pretty. The traditional Republican core of wealthy business interests has always required a coalition with other popular movements to survive, but they chose poorly in subsidizing the “Tea Party”–the latest iteration of the John Birch radical right they used to be much better about keeping at arm’s length.

Like we said last week, Republican elites who would like nothing more than to euthanize the “Tea Party” now that it is no longer useful can’t do so–because as this poll indicates, the irrational grassroots they whipped into a froth in 2010 have a life of their own. This is their base now.

And if it is pushing the GOP out of the American mainstream, nobody is stopping it yet.

Our friend Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post with his latest “Worst Week in Washington.”

The Gadsden flag is flying at half-staff this past week.

The tea party – that plucky insurgent movement that, as recently as two years ago, began trying to reshape the Republican Party and politics more generally – finds itself flailing as 2012 draws to a close, buffeted by infighting, defeats and a broad struggle to find a second act…

The movement needs to decide whether it can survive as an outside force or whether it can become more aligned with the GOP without sacrificing the principles on which it was founded.

As evidence of the “Tea Party’s” dilemma, Cillizza cites the resignation of Sen. Jim DeMint to run the Heritage Foundation, the reported decline of FreedomWorks under allegations of mismanagement, and the loss of committee assignments by certain freshmen members of Congress aligned with the movement. The establishment GOP is, fair to say, over them.

But weren’t they always? Top-down declarations of the “Tea Party’s” demise leave out something important–the fact that the “Tea Party” was never a top-down movement.

Now, it’s true that the “Tea Party” shares, in large part, its origin with the very same Republican strategists in Washington who are now declaring them out of style. Organizations like FreedomWorks provided critical back-end support for budding “Tea Party” and so-called “9.12” groups ahead of their zenith of influence in the 2010 elections. But the fact is, those strategists didn’t create the “Tea Party”–and now that it exists, they can’t kill it, at least not without severely harming their own future prospects. The biggest reason for this is that the “Tea Party” is the Republican base, but with a new self-identification that is not under control of the Party.

Because they have no central structure, you can’t say in a blanket way that “The Tea Party” has problems. You might be able to say that grassroots conservatism has problems, but that’s not the same thing–and the reality of that is far more threatening to the Republican Party as a viable political entity. It was necessary to create the “Tea Party” to provide a home for right-wing base voters who railed against perceived failings in both parties, but would surely vote Republican.

Today, the tail may no longer wag the dog, but the GOP establishment still needs their base.

So no, we can’t really agree that the “Tea Party” had the worst week. It may turn out to be the politicians who thought they could ever “control” an irrational and headless movement.

A New York Times story today is making supporters of the recently-passed Amendment 64, the initiative legalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana in Colorado, freshly nervous:

Senior White House and Justice Department officials are considering plans for legal action against Colorado and Washington that could undermine voter-approved initiatives to legalize the recreational use of marijuana in those states, according to several people familiar with the deliberations.

Even as marijuana legalization supporters are celebrating their victories in the two states, the Obama administration has been holding high-level meetings since the election to debate the response of federal law enforcement agencies to the decriminalization efforts.

Marijuana use in both states continues to be illegal under the federal Controlled Substances Act. One option is to sue the states on the grounds that any effort to regulate marijuana is pre-empted by federal law. Should the Justice Department prevail, it would raise the possibility of striking down the entire initiatives on the theory that voters would not have approved legalizing the drug without tight regulations and licensing similar to controls on hard alcohol…

This story doesn’t say that the Obama administration has made a decision to sue to stop Amendment 64–it seems to be more about weighing options, and heavy lobbying from law enforcement interests no doubt happy to encourage the prospect of a crackdown. On the other hand, as this story explains well, Obama faces political problems from such a crackdown, since legalization is most popular among liberal base Democrats.

Despite the consternation this story is stoking among legalization supporters, we would advise patience–this article describes meetings that one should fully expect are taking place, since understanding the range of options is the Justice Department’s job. It doesn’t necessarily mean the will of Colorado and Washington voters is about to be thwarted from above, or that the provisions regarding personal possession versus commercial regulation won’t be dealt with separately. Amendment 64 was written to be “severable,” making it harder (at least in theory) to invalidate the entire amendment if one section is struck down.

CBS News’ Brian Montopoli writes this morning:

Boehner and the rest of the House Republican leadership laid out their offer in a letter to the president earlier this week. It said Republicans would cut a total of $1.2 trillion in spending, but it does not actually say what would be cut. The letter broadly says that the cuts would follow those put forth in what was called “the Bowles plan,” a reference to Democrat Erskine Bowles, who quickly put out a statement saying that the letter does not represent his beliefs. (Republicans were referencing testimony that Bowles gave to the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction last year. That testimony represented Bowles’ understanding of the midpoint between the two sides at the time; he noted Monday that “circumstances have changed since then.”)

Let’s give House Republicans the benefit of the doubt and assume they are calling for the cuts articulated last year by Bowles. His testimony called for roughly $600 billion in Medicare savings, in part from raising the Medicare eligibility age, $300 billion in other discretionary spending cuts, and $300 billion in cuts to other mandatory spending programs.

Despite GOP claims that they represent a middle ground, there is simply no reason Democrats would agree to these cuts. Here’s why: If the nation goes off the fiscal cliff, it faces $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts split between domestic spending and military spending. Republicans are effectively proposing to keep the cuts but focus them entirely areas that Democrats want to protect: Domestic spending and other entitlements. Meanwhile, under the GOP plan, there would be no cuts to defense programs — the area Republicans want to protect. Why on earth would Democrats agree to a deal in which all the cuts are made to their priorities when they could simply do nothing and let the pain be shared by both sides?

Now to be fair, Montopoli doesn’t completely single out Republicans for blame in the present impasse over a budget deal to prevent sweeping automatic budget cuts and tax hikes set to take effect at the end of the year. According to this analysis, President Barack Obama’s aggressive stand in favor of resetting the present 35% top federal income tax rate to the Clinton-era 39.5%–again, only on income over $250,000–is “far from what Republicans could swallow.”

But it’s at least a specific proposal; more than John Boehner can deliver.

When it comes to new revenue – aka, additional money coming into the government – Boehner has set a target of $800 billion. This is not insignificant: The offer has already prompted howls from some on the right who oppose any new revenue. But it is also less than substantive, since Boehner declines to say how he would make the cuts — he merely says they should come through “pro-growth tax reform that closes special-interest loopholes and deductions while lowering rates.” Does that mean getting rid of the mortgage interest deduction? Capping charitable deductions? The letter doesn’t say. [Pols emphasis]

With polling decisively indicating once again that intransigent Republicans will take the blame in the event of a failure to reach an agreement, what we have here is the equivalent of Paul Ryan’s infamous “budget with no numbers”–a proposal that really isn’t even a proposal, yet is nevertheless being insistently represented as a good-faith attempt at reaching an agreement.

Bottom line: both sides may be taking a hard line with a few weeks left to negotiate, but there’s a difference between doing so with specifics, and wasting everyone’s time. The polls say the public gets the difference, just as polls show that voters favor Obama’s proposal for raising taxes on high income earners while minimizing cuts to Medicare and Social Security.

With all this in mind, back to Boehner’s call to “get serious.”

A lot has been written today about the Tea Party and the problems it continues to cause the wing of the Republican Party that may actually be interested in governing. First, from “The Fix“:

Almost four years removed from its initial stirrings, the tea party movement finds itself riven by internal discord, without some of its most prominent leaders and faced with a party establishment that seems ready to abandon it – or at least buck its wishes – in the face of the 2012 election results.

“The Tea party has the opportunity to remain a leading force in American politics, but to do so, it must mature, take the next step and prove it can be part of a coalition that can actually govern,” said Jesse Benton, a longtime adviser to retiring Rep. Ron Paul and now campaign  manager for Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell’s 2014 re-election race. “After two cycles, it’s not enough to just be the angry people waving Gadsden Flags and yelling about Washington.”…

…One senior Republican party strategist, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the future of the tea party movement, expressed concern that while the tea party was at a “low point” today, the coming legislative fights in Congress could lead to a renaissance in the movement.

“What I worry about is that the fiscal cliff/debt ceiling negotiations become like TARP, which is what started this,” said the GOP strategist. “We get a deal that is good for the country but our base goes crazy and it gets them all ginned up again.”

As we’ve written before in this space, moderate Republican leaders understand all too well that the Tea Party is crippling their chances of winning back control from Democrats on both the national and state level. Republican leaders are doing what they can to weaken the influence of Tea Party-backed elected officials, but we don’t see a happy ending here. As the Associated Press reports:

House Speaker John Boehner’s decision to take plum committee assignments away from four conservative Republican lawmakers after they bucked party leaders on key votes isn’t going over well with advocacy groups that viewed them as role models.

Reps. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas and Justin Amash of Michigan will lose their seats on the House Budget Committee chaired by Rep. Paul Ryan next year. And Reps. Walter Jones of North Carolina and David Schweikert of Arizona are losing their seats on the House Financial Services Committee.

The move is underscoring a divide in the Republican Party between tea party-supported conservatives and the House GOP leadership.

“This is a clear attempt on the part of Republican leadership to punish those in Washington who vote the way they promised their constituents they would – on principle – instead of mindlessly rubber-stamping trillion dollar deficits and the bankrupting of America,” said Matt Kibbe, president of the tea party group FreedomWorks.

When you add this news to the fracturing of Speaker Boehner’s caucus and the seemingly rudderless GOP Senate leadership, you’ve got a nice recipe for a crap casserole. We’ve said it before: The Tea Party is absolutely killing the Republican Party. They had a nice honeymoon in the 2010 midterm elections, but it’s been all downhill ever since.

And the GOP has no idea how to stop it.

Our friend Craig Hughes of RBI Strategies Tweeted not long after the election:

Well, as The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber reports today, Hughes was more right than anybody knew–that is, about what Republicans, around the country but particularly here in Colorado, believed would be the outcome going into an election they were about to lose.

It’s no secret that the Romney campaign believed it was headed for victory on Election Day. A handful of outlets have reported that Team Romney’s internal polling showed North Carolina, Florida, and Virginia moving safely into his column and that it put him ahead in a few other swing states. When combined with Ohio, where the internal polling had him close, Romney was on track to secure all the electoral votes he needed to win the White House. The confidence in these numbers was such that Romney even passed on writing a concession speech, at least before the crotchety assignment-desk known as “reality” finally weighed in.

Less well-known, however, are the details of the polls that led Romney to believe he was so close to the presidency. Which other swing states did Romney believe he was leading in, and by how much? What did they tell him about where to spend his final hours of campaigning? Why was his team so sanguine about its own polling, even though it often parted company with the publicly available data? In an exclusive to The New Republic, a Romney aide has provided the campaign’s final internal polling numbers for six key states…

The numbers include internal polls conducted on Saturday, November 3, and Sunday, November 4, for Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Iowa, Colorado, and New Hampshire. According to Newhouse, the campaign polled daily, then combined the results into two-day averages.

In the polling data provided to TNR by Mitt Romney’s chief internal pollster Neil Newhouse, Romney has a 2.5 point lead on President Barack Obama in Colorado over the weekend before Election Day. As you know, the President won Colorado by almost 5.5 points. The range of explanations offered by Newhouse in this story vary from Latino voters (which while significant, don’t fully cover the spread), over-reliance on self-identified “highly likely voters,” and the perils of polling on a Sunday. Each one of these, the story goes, unintentionally helped contribute to the false sense of optimism projected by the GOP going into Election Day.

This story again answers the question of whether the Romney campaign was convinced it was going to win, or whether there was a more complicated process of spin for the base that the higher levels of the campaign knew wasn’t true. Right to the very top, this was a campaign that did believe victory was imminent, and was genuinely surprised when it failed to materialize.

What this story doesn’t seem to adequately capture, beyond the raw numbers of how wrong they were, is the depth of the bubble–with the exception of Gallup and a few clearly GOP-skewed pollsters, Obama’s win in Colorado was accurately forecast in several pre-election polls.

It’s also worth noting, as Hughes did, that longtime local GOP operative Rich Beeson was Romney’s political director. Beeson’s willing participation in the groupthink and flawed assumptions that led the Romney campaign to believe Colorado was in their column shows the extent of the break with a reality they should have seen coming at them like a Mack truck.

Answer: a perhaps unprecedented extent.