Recent polls show majority support for marriage equality, a rapid change from just a few years ago. Unfortunately, the same isn't true of Congress. The same malapportionment that gives Republicans a structural advantage in the House and Senate also overweights the votes of social conservatives, who tend to reside in the nation's more rural areas. Congress will eventually voice its support for same-sex marriage, but it will lag behind the country as a whole.

If at first you don't succeed, the saying goes, try, try again. But if you try again and fail, and then you keep trying until you've tried and failed 36 times, maybe it's time to just give up and find something more productive to do with your time. That's the advice one might give to Senate Republicans today, after an amendment offered by freshman Senator Ted Cruz of Texas to repeal the Affordable Care Act failed. Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat, said that by his count it was the 36^th such unsuccessful attempt; the tally in the House passed 30 last summer, so there it may be even higher by now.

On the tenth anniversary of George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, we may be witnessing a seismic shift in America's politics of national security. After decades of using hawkish positions for partisan advantage, the Republican Party is facing a foreign policy identity crisis. Its brand is still stained by the Iraq War and the Global War on Terror, and the once-fringe views of Ron Paul are becoming mainstream among the public and party activists, as shown by the response to Senator Rand Paul's March 6 filibuster and his success at this past weekend's Conservative Political Action Conference.

Imagine you're a religious right activist, used to being a serious player within the Republican party, the kind of person candidates court and party chieftains huddle with. You've done well at making sure that just about every politician in your party has the right position on your issues. You may not always get everything you want as quickly as you want, but you know that you don't have to waste energy fighting rear-guard actions within the GOP.

But then bad things start to happen. We spend a couple of years talking about nothing but the economy and budgets, ignoring your favorite issues, and some in the party suggest that the real culture war isn't your culture war, it's an economic one. A couple of your favorite candidates get a little too candid with their views on rape, and end up losing at the polls, leading some influential strategists to suggest that the party needs to shift its focus away from your issues. Then one of your party's senators comes out in support of same-sex marriage, and even though it's only one senator, all the pundits agree that he won't be the last, and it's only a matter of time before your party abandons its insistence on "traditional" marriage entirely. Then some party bigwigs come out with a report on how the GOP can win future elections, and it says nothing about you and your issues. There's talk about how libertarian the party should become and how it can appeal to minority groups, young people, and women, but all that makes you feel pretty left out.

As McKay Coppins reports, that's leaving religious right activists more than a little peeved. But he puts his finger on a big reason that some in the party feel free to encourage a move in a leftward direction:

In the post-Reagan era, at least, liberals have always been plagued by a “DMV” problem. Every state has a Department of Motor Vehicles, and the general view is that they’re terrible. No one looks forward to the DMV and for good reason: The lines are long, the forms are complicated, and the service is poor.

When President Obama got Republicans to raise taxes on the top one percent of income earners as part of the January deal that ended the threat of the fiscal cliff, some Democrats gloated that Republicans had been made to go back on the famous Grover Norquist pledge never to raise taxes. It appeared that Obama, fresh from his November victory and taking advantage of Republicans’ divisions, had won big.

Well, think again.