At the Caucus Room restaurant in Washington, DC, GOP leaders drew up a plan to intentionally sabotage President Obama at every point possible.
On the guest list for this "invitation only" meeting were Republican Senators like Jim DeMint, Jon Kyl, Tom Coburn, John Ensign and Bob Corker.
Also in attendance were Congressmen Paul Ryan, Pete Sessions, Jeb Hensarling, Pete Hoekstra, Dan Lungren, Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy.
The whole thing was orchestrated by Republican propaganda mastermind Frank Luntz and over the course of four hours, this group of the most powerful conservative lawmakers in the country committed to a plan of action.
They promised each other that they would filibuster and obstruct any and all legislation supported by the new president, Barack Obama.
They would do everything possible, for as long as it took, to make his a "failed presidency."
Congressman Pete Sessions of Texas compared the plan to the tactics of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.
He said, "Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban. And that is that they went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person's entire processes... And we need to understand that insurgency may be required when the other side, the House leadership, does not follow the same commands, which we entered the game with."
The current crisis in the federal judiciary is just another front in this Republican insurgency campaign.
It's the political version of guerrilla warfare.
And the really scary thing is that it's not just about sabotage.
Screwing over President Obama is great as far as Republicans are concerned, but it's really more of a means to an end: the total takeover of the federal judiciary.
Ever since the Powell Memo in 1972, corporatist conservatives have made hijacking our nation's courts one of their top priorities.
They've done a pretty good job at it, too. The far-right Federalist Society, for example, now dominates our court system and our Supreme Court.
But if Republicans can successfully keep their manufactured judicial crisis going until President Obama leaves office in 2017, that'll be the real Republican victory.
That's because if they manage to both hold on to the Senate in 2016 and win the White House, they'll have free reign to fill up our courts with as many hard-right corporate- and billionaire-friendly judges as they want.
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