Republicans have no morality or ethics whatsoever. The entire Party is in service to the billionaire oligarchy that funds them. Their job is to do a denial of service attack to prevent legislation from passing that would close the loopholes that the billionaires exploit. They do this by trying to control the conversation in the legislature using divisive and offensive bills and stances. The USA has a tenth of the laws and protections in other advanced economies.

Anyone with half a brain can see that nothing Republicans do is for the benefit of the public or average person. So if they can't attract the attention of intelligent humans they must develop their power base from the imbeciles. The best source of imbeciles is within religion. Religion's underlying power mechanism is isolationist social networking and institutionalized rejection of an evidence based ethos. These religious teachings are learned at a very young age when humans are the most gullible, they then exist in little social isolated networks that reject outside influences as some equal but opposing system. Even many intelligent people that realize how religion is a myth still can't break away from it because if they do, they will lose their entire social network and support system. Collectively, this is how you institutionalize stupidity on a large scale. This is how the Republican party exists, it is a party of the billionaire oligarchy, that uses the institutionalized stupidity of collective imaginary friends and magic to operate. There are some well intentioned convenient idiots thrown into the mix, but those are no excuse.