Republican Congressman Ken Buck has declared that the GOP “is dead” in a Denver Post guest commentary, saying the U.S. has been distracted with “frivolities” and that Congress has been unable to accomplish anything substantive since President Donald Trump took office.

Read Ken Buck’s commentary The Republican Party is dead

“The Republican Party is dead,” Buck wrote in the opinion piece Monday. “… Republicans carried a strong vision and values into unified government six months ago. We championed principles like limited government, job creation, border security and budget balancing. We promised to repeal Obamacare, enact tax reform and roll back burdensome federal regulations. But what have we done?”

The Windsor lawmaker is a member of the House Freedom Caucus, which has been a vocal proponent of pushing the GOP further to the right. But Buck’s pointed criticism of the Republican Party comes at a time of frustration for conservatives who are upset about the U.S. Senate’s inability to repeal and replace Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

Some top Republican lawmakers have also raised alarm about the turmoil in Trump’s White House over the past several weeks, particularly his spat with Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

“I think there’s a great deal of frustration in the party,” said Dick Wadhams, former chairman of the Colorado Republican Party. “The brutal truth is that Republicans across the nation campaigned on repealing and replacing Obamacare. It would be hard to find a Republican candidate in the last seven years that didn’t talk about that issue and use those very words.”

But Wadhams disagrees with the premise that the GOP is dead, explaining that he thinks Obamacare will still be repealed this year and is optimistic about tax reform. “I think it’s way premature to write off the party,” he said.

Buck, speaking on CNN last week, said he thinks Trump and Sessions need to work out their differences in private and voiced support for the attorney general. The congressman also raised concerns about the now-ousted White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci’s handling of that tension.

“It’s not good strategy in a place like Washington, D.C., when you’re under a microscope to have a communications director making statements that are going to be parsed in different ways,” Buck said on the news network.

In his commentary, which comes after a July 22 rebuke of his GOP colleagues at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver, Buck also said the spending bill passed by Congress earlier this year betrayed Republican values and that tax reform plans have yet to come to fruition.

“Immigration reform is talked about more on Fox News than it is on the House floor,” Buck wrote.

Buck is up for re-election next year in his GOP-dominant 4th Congressional District, but the former Weld County prosecutor has also said he is weighing whether to run for Colorado attorney general, should current officeholder Cynthia Coffman jump into the state’s crowded governor’s race.

“What can we do?” Buck asked in his commentary. “More than anything else, we need a vision, someone who has a message and a plan to unify this country. Instead, we’ve assembled a ‘b-team’ of messengers who distract the nation with frivolities.”