“I once shot an elephant in my pajamas,” the old Groucho Marx joke goes, “how he got in my pajamas I’ll never know.”

Speaking of shooting elephants, last week GoDaddy CEO Bob “Dumbo” Parsons posted a video from his African safari vacation showing him stalking and gunning down a perfectly healthy elephant. On the video, Parsons is heard saying, “Of everything that I do this is the most rewarding.” Unlike Groucho, he was not joking.

This caused blowback for Parsons and GoDaddy, the massive domain registrar and web services company he founded, mainly because it’s been decades since hunting animals as huge and non-threatening as elephants was considered “sport.” (You can weigh in here by signing a petition titled “Real Men Don’t Kill Elephants.”)

Instead of killing a real elephant, it’s too bad Parsons can’t act out his Great White Hunter fantasies in a virtual world by grabbing his gun and elephant pajamas and heading to Sacramento, where a figurative old bull elephant called the California GOP is on its last legs and needs to be put out of its misery.

The party, which has been suffering from diminished capacity for decade or more, has gone rogue, like a senile old bull lost in the woods charging at phantoms. It has become a danger to itself and others.

Case in point: Last week, GOP legislative leaders walked away from budget negotiations after three months, killing any chance of future input into resolving California’s budget crisis. This move was so inherently reckless and self-destructive that it is analogous to political suicide.

As a result, political analysts up and down the state and across the partisan divide have put the California Republican Party on death watch.

For anyone who has been following California politics, this turn of events was not unexpected. Still, it was surprising to see this dire headline on the front page, above the fold of last Thursday’s Los Angeles Times: “Budget Talks Fold, and California GOP’s Influence Fades Further.”

Or, as the irreverent political news site CalBuzz put it, “Handed their biggest opportunity in years to achieve some cherished policy goals, Republicans instead snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and came away from budget negotiations with zilch.”

The budget talks with Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, were seen as the Republicans’ final opportunity to remain relevant. The party is but a shell of its former self, however, and what’s left has been commandeered by extremists, particularly on the issue of taxes.

Brown won election last November by double digits, in part by campaigning on a promise to put a key issue of tax policy — whether to extend hikes on an array of fees and taxes that are set to expire on July 1 — on the ballot in June so voters could weigh in.

Brown had several options for getting the proposal onto the ballot but chose to go through the legislature in an effort to get bipartisan support. As bait for the GOP, the governor also put on the table over $12 billion in cuts of the sort Republicans usually like: drastic reductions to funding for programs that benefit children, the poor, sick and handicapped people and the elderly.

To be clear, the governor was not asking Republicans to endorse extending the tax hikes. He just wanted their tacit approval to let taxpayers decide this one issue. And he didn’t need a unanimous vote from the GOP in the Legislature. Far from it. To get the measure on the ballot, Brown needed a two-thirds vote in both houses, which translated to just two Republican votes from the Senate and two from the Assembly.

But retrograde forces in the California GOP came down hard against the ballot initiative. Party apparatchiks — spurred on by outside forces including Washington, D.C.-based anti-tax activist Grover Norquist — stood their ground: Taxpayers must not be allowed to vote on tax policy.

Here’s analysis from the Times:

Several major Republican priorities were within reach as four GOP lawmakers negotiated on Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget plan. When talks broke down, they lost a rare window of opportunity…

After years of sitting on the bench, watching much of the state’s business being conducted with little regard for their input [during the term of GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger], California Republicans in recent months had an opportunity to share the reins of government.

Now, that appears to be gone.

The Democratic governor and legislative leaders offered the GOP a rare chance to shape key policies — and mitigate several that were forged on the other side of the aisle over more than a decade. GOP legislation was suddenly on the front burner. Rolling back government employee pensions, easing regulations on business, limiting the growth of government all seemed within reach.

The price for this potential bounty was four votes, the ones Gov. Jerry Brown needed to place a tax measure before voters. Not an endorsement of more taxes, just a vote to let voters decide the matter.

Today, after the collapse of those negotiations, many in the Capitol are asking whether, in declining to provide those four “ayes,” the Republicans have cemented their fate as a dying minority party in this largely Democratic state.

And:

In a puzzling eleventh-hour shift, they lifted the veil of secrecy on the talks and released the sprawling list of GOP demands that had been brought to the negotiating table. It spilled over seven pages and veered into such topics as when the state should hold its presidential primary. It included the continuation of billions of dollars in corporate subsidies and tax breaks that Brown wants to eliminate to balance the budget.

The public move appeared intended to show that Republicans were being serious and reasonable. But the Brown administration seized on the GOP document to make the opposite case.

In addition, the pressure from anti-tax activists on the GOP not to cut a deal was so intense that only a handful of the Legislature’s 41 Republicans would even engage with the governor.

CalBuzz identified the root of the problem:

Witnessing this sorry spectacle, one mad dog GOP blogger, of course, thumped his chest and did a little touchdown dance: “There is NO public policy trade off that makes it okay to then vote to place taxes onto a special election ballot.”

See? Again: It is the position of the California Republican Party that taxpayers must not be allowed to vote on tax policy.

Calbuzz reviewed the list of demands the GOP put before the governor late in the negotiations:

A leisurely stroll through the 11th hour, 53-point list of demands that [GOP Senate Minority Leader Robert] Dutton presented to Brown when a deal was close, however, makes clear that giving equal weight to Krusty’s [Gov. Brown’s] serious effort to find a compromise acceptable to Republicans on pension reform and the GOP’s unwavering irresponsibility about the state’s finances is a big-time false equivalence.

Moreover, for the CA GOP to complain now that Brown broke off negotiations — after they damn near adopted a resolution to castrate any legislator who even considered negotiating with Brown — is just nuts.

The Republicans’ collapse comes less than two weeks after its biannual convention. In advance of the meeting, the party made itself the object of ridicule, first by threatening to pass a resolution causing for the excommunication — or, as CalBuzz put it above, “castration” — of moderates in the Legislature who voted to allow taxpayers to vote on the extensions. (The resolution was quietly pulled before it reached the floor.)

Next, the party chairman invited Gov. Brown to debate Grover Norquist on the tax extension vote at the GOP convention. But the fact that party had to fly Norquist in to debate Brown had the unintended effect of signaling that the party couldn’t find a Republican in all of California who could go toe to toe with Brown — or perhaps that no California GOP pol wanted to go on record arguing against allowing California taxpayers to vote on tax policy.

The governor declined the offer to debate Norquist, citing urgent business running the largest American state, the seventh largest economy in the world and whatnot, but did offer to send is popular dog, Sutter, to exchange views with Grover.

The California Republican Party was in bad shape before this latest disaster. Here are some statistics that illustrate the party’s parlous condition:

• There are 7.5 million registered Democrats (44 percent) and 5.3 million registered Republicans, (31 percent). This is the lowest GOP percentage in the history of California.
• There are 3.5 registered independent voters (20 percent) — double the percentage from 1994. Polling and voting data show that California independents vote with Democrats most of the time.
• Democrats hold 123 of the 187 partisan seats in California (66 percent).
• Democrats hold 34 of 53 House seats; 52 of 80 Assembly seats and 25 of 40 State Senate seats.
• Democrats won all nine statewide races last November and now hold all 10 state offices (including both U.S. Senate seats). Since 1988, Democrats have won all five presidential races and all eight U.S. Senate races.
• All but one of those Democrats elected last November won by double digits. (Kamala Harris was elected attorney general in a squeaker after Karl Rove money-bombed her opponent.)
• Pres. Obama won California by 24 points (61 percent to 37 percent) or by 3,262,692 votes.

The future does hold meager hope for the California GOP. In a ballot initiative a few cycles back, California voters inexplicably decided to create a new redistricting system in which amateurs picked at random are charged with redrawing boundaries for the state’s electoral districts. This could work for the GOP — or not. When Dems controlled the process after the 2000 Census, they carved out districts that advantaged the GOP. It’s unknowable now whether the amateur committee will be so generous.

The other wild card that could help the state GOP is that, by order of voters in yet another ballot initiative, California is removing partisanship from all future primary elections. Candidates’ party affiliation will appear nowhere on the ballot. Instead, the top two vote-getters, regardless of affiliation, in each primary race will face off in November.

Unfortunately for the California GOP, however, neither of these changes address the party’s real problem: Their positions on fiscal as well as social issues across the board are unpopular, particularly with independent voters.

So what is the prognosis for the California GOP?

“The end result of all this,” Barbara O’Connor, emeritus director of the Institute for the Study of Politics and Media at Cal State Sacramento, said to the Times, referring to the party’s decision to cut and run from the budget talks with Gov. Brown, “is they will become even more irrelevant.”

The party’s positions were unpopular before it opted out of the budget talks, and now the California GOP has made itself irrelevant to the process for at least the next two years.

Paging Dr. Parsons…