The comeback strategy Republicans adopted after back-to-back election wipeouts in the 2006 midterms and Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 drew heavily on two relentless tactics:

First, GOP leaders promised to reward their core supporters with unrealistic bounties once they returned to power;

Second, they attempted to extort those concessions from unwilling Democrats using procedurally extreme legislative maneuvers.

These two tactics seesawed over the course of the Obama era. When the second failed to yield significant victories, Republicans returned to the first one. They won back the House in 2010 on the strength of a wildly ambitious agenda, after which they took the debt limit hostage and made good on very little of it. When they failed to reclaim the Senate in 2012, they shut down the government in a bid to defund Obamacare. When it failed, predictably, they said real progress would have to wait until they were given unified control of government, and were rewarded with the Senate in 2014 and finally, last year, the presidency.

It is perhaps because these tactics didn’t lastingly backfire that Republicans have decided not to revise them, even as their ultimate purpose has been achieved. To put this another way, after years of failing to extract concessions from Democrats by threatening to harm the country, Republicans are now repurposing those same threats to extort themselves.