They may need to rethink this.

They may need to rethink this.

This is just getting sad, at this point. One of Eric Cantor's more pressing missions this year has been to try to convince wider America that the Republican Party is not, in fact, made up of crackpots and monsters. The paths available to do this are limited, but in general continue to be "pass horrible bills with nice-sounding titles", things like perhaps a pro-fracking bill called the Everybody Loves Bunnies Act of 2013 or a new bill to institute Adorable Puppy Recognition Month that in the finer print requires all future Meals on Wheels programs to contain at least 15 percent adorable puppy by volume.

Or, in this specific case, a bill to end public financing of presidential campaigns and party conventions called the "Kids First Research Act."

The intent of the dead-in-the-Senate-anyway bill was to, well, end what public financing of presidential campaigns and party conventions currently exists, which is probably only a good idea if you think the parties don't grub for enough corporate money yet and really ought to work harder at it. The hook on it was supposed to be that Republicans would then claim they were going to then use that money to fund medical research for sick children, a cause which is even easier to get behind than honoring adorable puppies. The Republican ploy, however, has now run into a seemingly unexpected problem: Their own damn movement says they don't want to fund medical research for sick children, they'd rather end the public financing of presidential campaigns and tell the sick children to get bent:



Conservatives would rather see the funding eliminated outright. In a May blog post on the Heritage Foundation website, Hans von Spakovsky and Emily Goff of the conservative think tank wrote that, “While ending this public election financing program is a good idea, turning around and authorizing funding for another program wipes out that progress and sets up a whole new constituency for government spending.” It’s unclear whether Heritage Action and other conservative advocacy groups would go so far as to make the measure a key vote, but the opposition from the groups is likely to draw at least some House conservatives into the “no” column.

You really cannot make this stuff up. An obviously cynical-from-the-get-go conservative attempt to make it look like they care about sick kids is being derailed by conservatives demanding they not care about the sick kids—sorry, the "new constituency" of sick kids. So now Cantor may have to either pull the bill entirely or somehow get some Democrats to sign onto it. If a trojan horse called the Kids First Research Act does down explicitly because the "true" conservatives work themselves into a public outrage over the helping sick kids part, though, now that is probably not going to do much for the whole "we are not crackpots and monsters" campaign.