This was written quite awhile ago and almost a year before the mid term elections. I tend to agree that the GOPe is over; especially since they don't seem to be able to rein in this president, nor fulfill any of their promises. As for a 3rd party, not so sure that TEA will actually become a Party, but certainly the time is right. There certainly are a lot of disgruntled DEMS, and a lot of disgruntled REPS.
Tea Party secedes: The GOP civil war is over, and so is the GOPThe Republicans are two different parties now -- how long will it be before the Tea Party becomes a third party?
..." The Republican Party today is, as Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein put it, “an insurgent outlier in American politics … ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” But, to borrow the title of Mann and Ornstein’s recent book, it’s even worse than it looks. There’s the Tea Party and then there’s a rump of spineless moderates. The GOP, quite simply, has been split in two.
This division has been evident for some time, but the recent squabbling over the government shutdown has put the internal discord in sharp relief. We’ve become accustomed to Speaker Boehner’s flailing attempts to corral his Tea Party faction; and we’ve seen the sad spectacle of this ostensible leader of his party taking his orders almost exclusively from the most harebrained and hard-line members. What’s genuinely new, and far more consequential, is a recent New York Times report finding that even big business — including Wall Street! — is itself unable to force Tea Party members to fall in line...
...In truth, Neugebauer and his ilk likely care more about reelection than their big talk lets on. But that’s where another element of the Tea Party’s party-within-the-party comes into focus: namely, the alternative funding infrastructure that, once again, big business initially did so much to create. Think of all the organizations, overflowing with Koch brothers money, that support the Tea Party. There’s Americans for Prosperity, there’s FreedomWorks, there’s Heritage Action. Even if these organizations lost their funding from Wall Street or the Chamber of Commerce, they could rely on donations from the Tea Party base, the vast mass of conservative voters and activists throughout the country who don’t share a scintilla of big business’s fondness for the status quo....
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/11/tea_party_secedes_the_gop_civil_war_is_over_and_so_is_the_gop/
