While I’ve been saying that the GOP is broken and hopelessly dysfunctional, Rachel Maddow has come up with a new name for part of that dysfunction: Republicans are “post-policy.” To some extent, that’s because they’ll simply oppose whatever Barack Obama proposes, but there’s also an even more interesting aspect of it that they simply have given up on and lost the capacity for developing policy ideas.

And, no, it’s not just because they are conservatives and conservatives are inherently less likely to have policy ideas. A look at the evidence will demonstrate this.

Here’s the story: Over the last couple of decades, majority parties in the House of Representatives have taken to reserving the very first bill numbers for their party’s agenda. Normally, bills are just numbered in order, when they are introduced: H.R. 637 is usually the bill introduced just after H.R. 636 and just before H.R. 638. But that’s just custom, and at some point a new custom evolved to save H.R. 1 through H.R. 5, and then through H.R. 10, for important party agenda bills.

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The law make crimes such as voyeurism, stalking, acid attacks and the trafficking of women punishable under criminal law. But many women's groups have rejected the measure, arguing that it only selectively accepted the recommendations of the Justice JK Verma commission. The commission, named after its chair and former Supreme Court judge JS Verma, sought to make marital rape a criminal offense, and for members of India's police and armed forces to be tried in criminal courts for for sex crimes, rather than being prosecuted in army courts.

The new laws reject both recommendations.

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