GOP rebranding effort hitting a few snags

Republicans know they need to better appeal to voters who aren't white Southern males, lest they end up consigned to permanent minority status. So they had a bunch of pow-pows where they decided that, well, the problem wasn't in their policies, but in how they marketed those policies.

Or something silly like that.

But let's see how their marketing efforts are coming along. Remember, Republicans lost the woman vote 55-44 in 2012. And to make matters worse, women made up 53 percent of all voters, far outperforming their male counterparts. So if you've got a double-digit deficit against the largest single voting group, you should do something about it, right?

Well, protecting abusers and rapists wasn't the answer, but that's what the majority of the GOP caucus tried to do today when voting on the Violence Against Women Act.

As Rep. Lynn Jenkins, a rare Republican woman, said in a statement after the vote:

Democrats wanted a hammer to beat over the heads of Republicans and far too many misguided Republicans provided them with that hammer. This is exactly why hardworking Americans are fed up with Congress.

Actually, Democrats wanted a sensible and once-uncontroversial piece of legislation to pass. It was Republicans who took that hammer and beat themselves in the face with it.

Then there's brown Americans, many of whom continue fighting for the same access to the voting booth enjoyed by their whiter counterparts. Yet just months removed from an election in which non-white voters had to wait hours to vote, fight efforts to purge them from voter rolls, and fight efforts to require overly restrictive voter ID laws specifically designed to disenfranchise them, you had a conservative SUPREME COURT JUSTICE (Scalia) say that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires federal pre-clearance of changes in voting laws in parts of the country with a history of racial disenfranchisement, enables the

perpetuation of racial entitlement.

The old coot doesn't even bother hiding his bigotry. Yet despite howls of protest from the Left, there was only crickets from the Right (and the occasional defense here and there). Given the GOP's inability to win any meaningful level of support from African American, Latinos, and Asians, you'd think they'd begin trying to address those deficiencies. But nope. Not interested.

And so concludes another day in the GOP's ongoing campaign to rebrand itself, which looks no different from the version of the GOP already relegated to the fringe of mainstream American opinion.