To grossly misappropriate a popular misquotation of Mark Twain: Reports of the Republican Party’s death, arguably, have been exaggerated. Again.

This time, by Colorado’s 4th Congressional District U.S. Rep. Ken Buck. The conservative former district attorney from Greeley is of course himself a Republican but only grudgingly so, it seems, by the lights of an op-ed he penned this week for the Denver Post.

The piece opens with the pronouncement, “The Republican Party is dead,” and ascribes it to the GOP-controlled Congress’s embrace of “an omnibus spending bill that betrays our values”; its failure to replace Obamacare, and its inaction thus far on immigration reform and tax reform.

Buck’s in-your-face to the GOP establishment even rated a separate news story by the Post the very same day, recapping the op-ed. A two-fer for Buck. If the aim was to spark some earned media for the two-term congressman – who recently has talked of running for Colorado attorney general should current Republican AG Cynthia Coffman run for governor – mission accomplished.

Whatever the agenda, Buck has been burnishing his populist bona fides for some time. His book “Drain the Swamp” came out earlier this year excoriating the D.C. Beltway culture and its corruption. He has bashed corporate cronyism and the influence that a big-business lobby like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has on national politics.

Is he signaling an aching desire to leave Congress, so great is his disillusionment?

In any event, rest assured, Buck’s seeming show stopper is hardly unprecedented. The Grand Old Party has been dead and buried before.

It was just last year – right after it became clear then-presidential candidate Donald Trump would win his party’s nomination – that national news media were sending out death notices. When Trump cinched it with his win in the Indiana GOP primary, the liberal Atlantic proclaimed the turning point, “The Day the Republican Party Died.” The cover of the New York Daily News read, “Republican Party 1854-2016.”

It wasn’t just the left. Some Republicans were similarly dismayed. GOP roving foreign policy point man Max Boot wrote in the Los Angeles Times that the party “has been killed by Donald Trump.”

Ironically, those voices were bemoaning the very dynamic – the Donald and the resulting GOP platform heading into last November’s election – that Buck writes made him “proud to call myself Republican” at the time. Quite a turnabout in just a year.

But go back in time a bit further. There was the GOP’s defeat by Barack Obama in his 2012 re-election, which prompted this typical observation in the blog Thinking Right:

With the performance of this President and the current economic setting there is absolutely no reason that this should not have been a cakewalk for the Republicans.  To state the obvious, it was not.  Does this mean that the Republican party as we know it is dead?  I think so.

No, wait, maybe it actually was earlier still that the Republicans went toes up. So wrote a blogger last year for faithfully leftist Daily Kos:

The GOP really died long ago with the elections of 2006 and 2008 and it has been a walking dead zombie ever since.  It’s political leadership was decimated and replaced with wild-eyed ideologues and media charlatans screaming, “Don’t Tread on Me.”

But why stop there? Consider the man who over a century ago not only reportedly declared, “The Republican Party is dead,” but who then proceeded to do his level best to drive a stake through its heart. He was no less than a former president himself as well as a former Republican: Teddy Roosevelt.

Having decided to seek another turn at the presidency in 1912 after a falling out with incumbent Republican President William Howard Taft – Roosevelt’s protege and anointed successor after Roosevelt left the White House in 1908 – he was denied the GOP nomination in favor of Taft. So, he ran against Taft as the nominee of the Progressive Party.

Roosevelt exacted his revenge against Taft, actually besting the GOP candidate in the general election in what turned out to be a four-way presidential race that included Socialist Eugene V. Debs.

Unfortunately for Roosevelt, he also was shot on the campaign trail by a saloonkeeper in Milwaukee (he survived and even delivered a speech before seeking medical attention). He also wound up handing the presidency to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.