As of today, Congress is under Republican control. This year, Republicans control more state legislative chambers than at any point in history. Despite President Obama's insistence that he will lead through executive orders, the next two years will demonstrate what a modern Republican leadership agenda looks like. We already have an inkling of what is to come—on a national level it looks like Republicans are going to get behind education reform, and on a state level you can expect lots of assaults on reproductive rights. As we know from 2007, Republicans don't tend to wear power very well; it goes to their heads, they start to make government small enough to fit into our personal lives, and they eventually explode in a fit of scandals and incidents where they accidentally say what they really mean. You can expect the first trickle of Congressional scandals to start as early as spring of this year, though it'll probably take two years for the really nasty stuff to go public.

But over the winter break Republicans already faced their first scandal, and we can tell a lot about their upcoming strategy from the way they handled it. When it came out that new Republican Majority Whip Steve Scalise gave a speech to a white supremacy group in 2002, the party didn't abandon Scalise. In fact, they closed ranks around him. They accused the media of playing politics, as though white supremacy was just one option in a buffet of political opinions, or an ugly fad haircut you might have tried out in the heat of the moment. The party came together to state that white supremacist affiliations just aren't that bad, that a politician who reportedly described himself as David Duke "without the baggage" is just a folksy local politician who made a little scheduling error.

Let's examine what, exactly, this united front is protecting. Republicans can claim with straight faces that a man who willingly spoke in front of a white supremacist group is not a racist. This continues a conservative trend of diminishing the evils of racism while simultaneously claiming that they're not racist—the same ugly thinking that responded to the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag with an #AllLivesMatter hashtag and charges of "reverse racism." Conservative equivocation has successfully muddled racism into something that's impossible to prove; somehow, in the American media, it's become almost impossible to accuse anyone short of Hitler of being racist.

So what can we learn from the successful defense of Steve Scalise? First, Republicans are getting good at messaging again; they didn't demonstrate any cracks in their veneer during the whole of the Scalise affair, and they held the party line with big, beaming smiles on their faces. Second, this messaging is incredibly damaging to an America that's still reeling from a terrible year that exposed just how deep institutional racism runs in our local law enforcement communities, and Republicans still aren't afraid to exploit those divisions for everything they're worth. Despite hypocritical suggestions by Rand Paul—another white-supremacist-associating Republican—that the party should reach out to minorities, the party seems to be doubling down on straight Christian white American males as the future of this country. We'll see how that works out for them.