Markos Moulitsas

Comprehensive immigration reform has Republicans in an unenviable bind: damned if they don’t, and probably damned if they do. 

It’s been several years since white students represented a majority of Texan public school attendees, but it wasn’t until this past March that Latinos became an outright majority. Today, 50.2 percent of the state’s 4.9 million public school students are Latino. Two-thirds of them are minorities. 

Immigration advocates in the Senate appear confident of getting the 60 votes necessary to pass a comprehensive reform bill for the first time since 1986. 

Having surrendered any chance of winning hostile brown and women voters, Republican hopes to ride a string of supposed scandals back to power aren’t just being hampered by reality, but by voters themselves. 

For decades, the National Rifle Association and its allies in the gun lobby have held sway in electoral politics, using clout and campaign cash to keep a tight rein on candidates. It’s been a one-sided affair, and gun proponents ruled the roost.

Conservatives are masters of manufactured outrage, no doubt about it. But traditionally, their conspiracy theories have at least had some sort of internal logic to them — from Vince Foster’s supposed murder at the hand of the Clintons to Barack Obama’s supposedly forged birth certificate. 

“The GOP today is a tale of two parties,” reads the Republican National Committee’s 2012 autopsy report — a document that is proving to be the gift that keeps on giving to this column. “One of them, the gubernatorial wing, is growing and successful. The other, the federal wing, is increasingly marginalizing itself, and unless changes are made, it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win another presidential election in the near future.”

In 2012, for the first time ever, the percentage of the nation’s African-Americans who voted outpaced the percentage of whites who voted.

As if Republicans don’t have enough structural problems, from their unpopular ideology to shrinking demographic base, their unyielding allegiance to the gun lobby — and its unreasonable opposition to universal background checks — delivers an unexpected Democratic advantage in 2014.

The Republican Party’s efforts to rebrand continue to run up against that biggest of stumbling blocks: the Republican Party’s actual beliefs.