In a recent article on Colorado Politics, terrific reporter Ernest Luning reviewed the ongoing squabbling in the El Paso County Republican Party. It seems the chaos going on at the national level of the GOP is serving as a model for how the El Paso County Republican Party is going about its business.

Now, I must say right up front I am glad to see anything that renders a GOP organization less effective. As a former chair of the Democratic party here in El Paso County, and as a former congressional candidate from the area, I’m hardly unbiased. Yet I’m also a former political science professor up at the Air Force Academy, and from all of those points of view, what is happening nationally as well as locally is fascinating.

There is an old joke in politics, admittedly told more often by Dems than Republicans, that people in the Republican Party run for office claiming government isn’t working, then once elected, go about proving that to be the case. We need look no further than the national GOP nonsense in the House for evidence that the GOP, frankly, just can’t govern.

There was a time, not that many years ago, wherein the Dems and the GOPers could disagree on policy, but after 6 p.m., would let partisan differences drop and they went to each other’s parties and played golf together, and such.

And though a certain former president has made the situation much worse, this national enmity to those in the opposite party really began, I posit, with the introduction of jet aircraft. Stay with me for a moment, this will make sense. Before jets, members of the U.S. House and Senate were not expected to go home to their districts or states every single weekend. As a result, there was a great deal of socializing in D.C. on the weekends. Speaker of the House Samuel Rayburn, a Democrat who served during the 1940s and 1950s, famously held a poker game on Friday nights, where leaders of both parties got together to gamble and chat, the only rule being no politics.

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It is much harder to vilify your political opponents when you were just trying to beat their full house while drinking beer together the weekend before. But with jets, and the ability of elected folks to get home every weekend, and with constituents now expecting the reps to be home every weekend, that level of cooperation and personal friendships largely died.

I’ve mentioned in earlier columns the level of vitriol we now find in politics reminds me, sadly, of the political landscape of 1850 or so, and that’s not a good thing. But nationally, the inability of the GOP to elect a speaker and, well, to effectively run the only chamber in which they have a majority, is both telling and worrisome, unless your goal – like the handful of House members that got U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy tossed out – is to render government unable to govern. If you want the government to shut down, I guess all these tactics make sense, sort of.

And as per the CoPo article noted above, the local El Paso County GOP seems intent on following the national party’s lead and seeks to apply a purity test to fellow Republicans that have a different view of how to advance the GOP agenda. You may recall from earlier CoPo reports the current county chair, Vickie Tonkins, and her team have been fighting, not so much the Dems, but each other, in terms of who “properly” represents the GOP. After much infighting, Tonkins and her allies seek to expel three party members – two of whom are actually former GOP elected officials – out of the party for the sin of using the word “Republican” when they were not authorized to do so.

It seems a while back, a small a faction of GOPers split off during the last election and dared to call themselves “Peak Republicans.” Please do take a moment to read the article, as it explains the various intrigues and nuances of the squabble, including the assertion by the county party’s vice chair that “The Republican Party is not and has never been a for-profit business.” I’ll just let that one stand here for you to ponder, and perhaps, giggle about.

Purity tests rarely end up working well, and it certainly seems the state GOP will end up brokering a solution. And there is bad blood to overcome, such as the hurt feelings that no doubt followed the state party’s censure of Tonkins for “Flagrantly and intentionally (violating) her duty as county chairman and instead of supporting these seven Republican candidates in the general election, she actively opposed them.” Oh my.

As I said earlier, given my view the overall goals of the GOP in our county, state and nation are ultimately aimed at aiding the rich at the expense of, well, the rest of us, and given that the GOP that used to be anti-Russia now seems to be a cheerleading group for Putin, I’m happy to see them continue to demonstrate their inability to govern, even within their own party.

But from a poli sci point of view, this is quite interesting.

Stay tuned…

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.