Yes, they do it all the time. But for right now, it feels mighty good to win one. :)

You know, as a conservative, I found this bill completely freaky, and I suspect a lot of my ideological bretheren did, too.

So I'm wondering... just how big is this supposed "base" our party keeps pandering to, anyway?

Big enough to get pandered to on a regular basis. We're ready to include rational conservatives in the big tent of the Democratic Party, GB, whenever you've had enough.

I think that most Republicans I know would find this bill completely freaky. Most Republicans I know, however, are laboring under the illusion that their party still stands for smaller government and greater personal liberty, and they are blinded to the realities of their own party. The people to whom such bills are designed to pander don't care how big the government is as long as the government isn't nosing around in their own lives, and I would wager even kind of get a kick out of a government that will gladly nose around in the lives of those neighbors with the skin or the sexual preference that they never liked anyway, and those people are a sad lot more common than more-enlightened voters on either end of the spectrum would like to believe.

In other words, that "base" is larger than you'd like to think it is: not a majority of the country, but any means, but the voters-by-the-busload far-right fringe are enough to swing a close election. In today's climate, that's plenty big enough.

What I think no one has grasped in the official commentariat, or at least no one has been willing to say, is that both parties have done a great job of alienating and disillusioning their actual bases by taking them for granted. We all go to the polls and hold our nose while we vote for our party of choice with a quiet sigh of resignation to the fact that at least we're not voting {insert other party here}. They don't have to make promises to cut government and get out of our lives, or to strengthen labor organizations and restrain corporate interests, because no one for whom those are genuine concerns will believe them anyway. All they have to do to get most Republican or Democratic voters' votes is exist.

All that leaves them are the fringes of either side who are actively engaged as opposed to asleep in their boots. The Democrats actively eschew trying to engage the left fringe, but the Republicans are perfectly happy to gamble - and quite successfully - that the far right fringe can be bought off with token gestures (which, as Ms. Evans points out, can also make handy ammo against the Democrats in iffy districts) they don't even have to get out of committee to use to motivate that small but substantive block of votes and that it will cost them almost nothing in terms of the votes of Republican voters. They've turned a combination of apathy and empty gestures into a win-win situation. They win by introducing the bill and thus guaranteeing the snake-handling clowns will show up on election day and they win by never having to actually do the things they say they will. In fact, failure in such efforts only fuels the fire of that fringe and lets the more rational majority of their end of the spectrum breathe a collective sigh of relief. How much easier does it get?

They must surely sit around and ask themselves why on Earth it took them a couple of hundred years to work this one out.

I think they've figured out that the reason Evangelicals are Evangelicals is because they are gullible, so they gull and gull some more.