Republicans want their new weapon With the 2022 Dobbs decision abolishing womens’s federal right to an abortion, Republicans lost a campaign issue they’d campaigned on reliably for decades. It was like the Pentagon’s identity crisis after the Cold War ended. The Pentagon spent the 1990s not knowing who it should be planning to fight. Republicans have failed again and again since 2022 to block abortion protection amendments in the states, even as fringe right legislators all but lock women with doomed pregnancies into iron maidens as they bleed out. Abortion is on its way to being a third rail in Republican politics. The issue is now a political loser. To replace abortion, the GOP settled on Great Replacement theory, an isotopic variant of the Southern Strategy. Republicans stoke fears of brown-skinned hordes of immigrants pouring across the U.S. southern border to knock white Americans off the top of the social ladder. It’s not about race as much as power and status. Race is just the icing. Speaking with Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Greg Sargent reflects on the irony that in 2013 Republicans felt they could never win another presidential election if they did not fix the immigration system. Then they elected the most anti-immigrant president in history who now demands they not fix it after they spent months in negotiations with Democrats to arrive at the bill they killed this week at Donald “91 Counts” Trump’s bidding. Steve Benen (MaddowBlog): The “Gang of Eight” in the Senate negotiated an immigration…