CHASTENED? ABASHED? NAHHH -- REPUBLICANS JUST KEEP ACTING REPUBLICAN

I keep hearing that Republicans know they've screwed up. I keep hearing that they're licking their wounds and trying to retool their message.

So why am I seeing so many Republicans responding to the election loss of 2012 by being more Republican than they were then? Why do I see Paul Ryan responding to the rejection of a draconian budget that balanced in 28 years by issuing an even more draconian budget that balances in ten years? And why do I see Congressman (and quite possibly future Senator) Paul Broun of Georgia trying to make Ryan look like the good cop to his own bad cop with a New York Times op-ed that says the Ryan budget doesn't cut enough?

THE latest budget proposal by Representative Paul D. Ryan, called "The Path to Prosperity," is anything but. It fails to seriously address runaway government spending, the most pressing problem facing our nation. I cannot vote for something that would trick the American people into thinking that Congress is fixing Washington's spending problem, when in actuality we'd just be allowing it to continue without end.

... We have to dig deeper and make profound cuts now....

We ought to get rid of certain federal departments and agencies, stopping only to shift the role of governing back to the states, where it belongs. The Departments of Education and Energy, for example, are two bloated bureaucracies that we don't need....

Constitutionally speaking, the federal government should not have a role in K-12 public education anyway....

... we should also phase out the federal highway financing system....

... We must repeal Obamacare....

To cap all this off -- literally -- I have proposed a balanced-budget [constitutional] amendment....

Republicans still believe in their own ability to move the Overton window very, very far to the right. And why shouldn't they? Broun and his fellow balanced budget believers have persuaded Politico's Jake Sherman that this issue is a political winner:

... the message of bringing the federal government's books into balance ... was quietly tested in 18 competitive House races in a late-February poll by the National Republican Congressional Committee. It was a winning argument across a broad swath of politically moderate -- and nearly split -- districts.

... Republicans will incessantly pound home the theme of balancing the budget, GOP leaders say. When talking about the Democrats' plan, Republicans criticize it for attempting to raise taxes and the fact that it doesn't balance the budget.

...It's not only the broad idea of balancing the budget that's a winner, but how Republicans want to do it also polls well. Seventy percent of voters in districts Republicans are targeting, and 67 percent of swing district voters support balancing the budget by reforming entitlements and cutting spending.

"Reforming entitlements and cutting spending" -- yeah, that's really specific.

Many, many paragraphs into Sherman's story, he acknowledges that he may be falling for a bit of spin:

Polls like this are always taken with a grain of salt. It's a Republican poll, so the questions are worded to yield results the GOP is seeking. Just 1,200 voters were surveyed. Plus, it's easy to support balancing the budget, but the proposition becomes far less popular when voters hear what’s involved with shrinking the nation's budget deficit.

But that's after he's made clear that he's pretty much sold on the notion that this is going to be a powerful Republican message going forward.

And it might be -- after all, Democrats have never made the slightest effort to try to explain, in plain language, why mandatory balanced budgets aren't good for the country. Dems never explain that we've had a lot of good years since World War II despite (mostly highly manageable) deficits and debt in most of those years. Dems never point out that Ronald Reagan never came close to balancing a budget. Dems never point out that plenty of successful companies have lots of debt on their books. Dems never point out that if you have a mortgage or car payments, you have debt, and you may be managing it just fine. Dems never point out that, historically, no government debt means no New Deal, no interstate highway program, no GI Bill, no Medicare.

I'd add "no U.S. war against Hitler," but Paul Broun's balanced budget proposal allows deficit spending in the case of war -- but only a congressionally declared war. We haven't had one of those since World War II. (We'll start having them now if a balanced budget amendment ever makes its way into the Constitution -- don't you think liberal war skeptics will be more inclined to sign on to wars if doing so can save social programs from being gutted?)

This is what Republicans do: they keep coming and coming with worse and worse ideas, and inevitably they do drag the debate to the right. I think it's only a matter of time before the priests of centrist High Broderism are agreeing that a balanced budget amendment is just what America needs. I fully expect Democrats, in desperation, to concoct some "lite" version of the balanced budget amendment, possibly with a capital budget that would allow at least some deficit spending -- a version that will then become the radical left idea as far as our opinion-molders are concerned.