Liberal columnist E.J Dionne is concerned about recent efforts by conservative leaders to rebrand the Republican Party.

He applauds House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., for “asking what government could do for the middle class,” but he worries that “[i]n some states where Republicans control all the levers of power, they are rushing ahead with astonishingly right-wing programs to eviscerate government while shifting the tax burden toward the middle class and the poor and away from the wealthy. In trying to build the Koch brothers’ dystopias, they are turning states in laboratories of reaction.”