Josh Marshall makes a key point about how the Sotomayor nomination serves as the sledgehammer that pounds on the wedge already driven between wings of the Republican Party:

Sen. John Cornyn’s swipe at Gingrich and Limbaugh yesterday on the Sotomayor candidacy shows what’s emerging as a critical effect of the confirmation battle. We know that a key dilemma for the GOP in the early Obama era is that they are increasingly divided between people who want to get the party back into the business of winning elections and ultras who want to go totally off the deep end with often extreme rhetoric and quests for ideological purity. What’s more, these ‘pragmatists, for lack of a better word, are cowed by the ultras because in a shrunken GOP the ultras make up a much larger percentage of the party.

The truth though is that taxes and fiscal policy, while key issues for conservatives, simply aren’t visceral and divisive in anywhere near the way race and gender are. So while this schism has been there for months, the Sotomayor battle — still only three days old — has thrown gasoline on the fire and intensified the rift dramatically.

So Sotomayor was a brilliant pick for political reasons. Not only does it increase inter-party GOP tensions, but it brings to the surface some of the ugliest emotions imaginable - and as noted previously, this is the electoral equivalent of slitting your own wrists.

The Census bureau tells us that by 2010 Hispanics are expected to be 15.5 percent of the entire population of the United States; by 2050, that figure will rise to 24.4 percent - nearly one in four Americans will be of Hispanic descent.

The Ultras are in the process of alienating each and every one of them.

One would have thought they might have considered this. But as Marshall noted yesterday - it really is as if they just can’t help themselves.