In the Washington Post, Greg Sargent reports on the growing consensus among GOP strategists that the party can win by ignoring minorities and increasing its share of white voters.

The emerging case is that Republicans mainly need to do even better among whites — by doing a better job energizing white supporters and by bringing in more “missing” white voters who might be inclined to vote Republican — thus relieving them of the inconvenient need to alienate their base with anything that might persuade Latinos to give their party a second look.

Which may be one reason why Florida senator Marco Rubio is actually declining in popularity with conservative voters—which is probably why he’s pushing a doomed-to-fail anti-abortion bill in the Senate.

Meanwhile in Wisconsin GOP governor Scott Walker signed a bill forcing women deciding to have abortions to undergo an ultrasound. Apparently immune to the subject of irony and personal freedom, Walker signed the bill over the 4th of July weekend.

And the Times chronicles the destructive behavior of the GOP-controlled government of North Carolina.

Republicans repealed the Racial Justice Act, a 2009 law that was the first in the country to give death-row inmates a chance to prove they were victims of discrimination. They have refused to expand Medicaid and want to cut income taxes for the rich while raising sales taxes on everyone else. The Senate passed a bill that would close most of the state’s abortion clinics.

And, naturally, the Legislature is rushing to impose voter ID requirements and cut back on early voting and Sunday voting, which have been popular among Democratic voters. One particularly transparent move would end a tax deduction for dependents if students vote at college instead of their hometowns, a blatant effort to reduce Democratic voting strength in college towns like Chapel Hill and Durham.

As I’ve said before, all these moves strike me as electoral hara-kiri. But there’s no question they are immensely destructive to the ongoing struggle for social justice and a better, more civil world. This GOP social crusade is the political equivalent of a school shooting. It is the product of a pathology—in this case, a collective dysfunction—which may leave the instigator dead, but will take lots of other casualties before that blessedly happens.