BUT ... BUT ... BUT I THOUGHT THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WAS DEAD!

If the GOP has one foot and four toes in the grave, apparently no one told K Street:

Democrats control the White House and the Senate, but you wouldn’t know it by looking down K Street.

Republicans hold more than 30 of the 50 highest-profile, in-house lobbying jobs in town, a POLITICO analysis found. That doesn't even include lobbying shops and law firms, which have long been Republican-dominated.

That means the biggest special influence players in Washington are relying more and spending big on a party that's more on the outs than in, to make their case in the halls of Congress and to the White House....

The trend has been on full display in many of the most recent big hires....

The article, from Politico, offers several theories -- that firms thought Romney would win (though the trend continued after November), that fewer Democrats want to go into lobbying, that businesses are just more pro-Republican.

The fact is, the folks who employ lots of lobbyists don't think they're at risk of losing clout as a result of hiring and retaining top people from this supposedly struggling, aimless, moribund party.

Now, maybe our system is so wired for the rich and powerful that it doesn't matter who gets hired for these jobs, because the rich and powerful will always win.

Or maybe it's less important to lobby Democrats with Democrats because Democratic politicians and staffers don't think Republicans are the Antichrist, whereas Republican pols and staffers don't concede the same point about Democrats.

But it looks to me as if these firms know that reports of the death of the GOP -- the party that, after all, still controls the House and, effectively, the Senate -- are greatly exaggerated.