A former top counterintelligence expert at the FBI, now at the center of a political uproar for exchanging private messages that appeared to mock President Donald Trump, changed a key phrase in former FBI Director James Comey’s description of how former secretary of state Hillary Clinton handled classified information, according to US officials familiar with the matter. Electronic records show Peter Strzok, who led the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server as the No. 2 official in the counterintelligence division, changed Comey’s earlier draft language describing Clinton’s actions as “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless,” the source said. The drafting process was a team effort, CNN is told, with a handful of people reviewing the language as edits were made, according to another US official familiar with the matter.

Democrats have had an iron grip on power in California for at least the last decade; without Arnold Schwarzenegger’s celebrity governorship, it would be more like a generation. Democrats have supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature, control all of the statewide offices, and haven’t elected a Republican to the US Senate since Pete Wilson in 1988. The Golden State has turned so blue that last year’s general election to replace Barbara Boxer featured two Democrats and no Republicans at all.

That grip on power might get threatened now, Politico reports, thanks to burgeoning sexual harassment scandals within the party. Will this give Republicans an opening for a comeback in California? (Spoiler: Naaah.)

Scandal-induced resignations will cost California’s Democratic Party its supermajority in the state Legislature at least temporarily next year, and the fallout is spilling into the 2018 elections. It’s scrambling calculations for some of the state’s most powerful politicians in Sacramento, and even House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was caught in the fray when she defended now former-Rep. John Conyers last month as an “icon.”

“We’re in unchartered territory here,” said Garry South, a veteran Democratic strategist who advised former California Gov. Gray Davis. “This whole issue has hit a critical mass in a very short time. I’ve never seen anything like it before — and I don’t know where it ends.”

Where it won’t end is in a bounceback for the GOP, but we’ll get to that in a moment. Just how bad is this scandal, anyway? Bad enough for some progressive activists to claim that the Democrats are hiding rapists and molesters among their leaders:

Among those who have been outspoken in their demands for more action is Christine Pelosi, chairwoman of the California Democratic Party Women’s Caucus and Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, who told lawmakers at the start of an Assembly hearing last month, “We have rapists in this building. We have molesters among us.” …

“It’s kind of a snowball effect, and every week seems to bring a new powerful man who is brought down by these accusations,” said Jessica Levinson, a Los Angeles-based political analyst. “And I don’t feel that we’ve totally cleaned house- and all the accusations are made and everybody else who remains in power has never conducted themselves in an inappropriate way before.”

The political environment in California appears similar to what we’ve seen nationally, only with perhaps even greater intensity. As alleged victims come forward and get a respectful hearing, others feel more comfortable in coming forward, too. It’s taken decades for the lid to come off, so this will continue to intensify as those claims emerge. Since the accountability structures in the California legislature for abuse are similar to that of Congress — which is to say next to nothing — there may be a whole lot of abuses left to uncover. And since Democrats have had Sacramento mainly to themselves for the last few decades, the abusers will overwhelmingly be Democrats.

Democrats have a big problem in California, legally and politically. What they almost certainly don’t have is an electoral problem. For most of these districts, the option for voters dealing with a scandal-plagued Democratic incumbent will be another Democrat, not a Republican. There may be a few politicians in battleground districts where the GOP might find a competitive challenger, but those districts are few and far between in California. The damage might be more noticeable in statewide elections, but it would take a tremendous amount of damage to translate into electoral success.

The results of the 2016 primary for the Senate seat won by Kamala Harris provides us a clear window into the California GOP’s prospects. California uses a so-called “nonpartisan blanket primary” in which all candidates regardless of party affiliation compete. The top vote-getting Republican in that primary was former state party chair George “Duf” Sundheim … who got 7.8% of the vote. Democrat Loretta Sanchez got 18.9% of the vote to come in second. Sanchez raised $3.2 million and Harris raised $9.7 million for their campaigns by the time of the primary; the top five Republicans didn’t even raise $1 million combined.

California isn’t a Democratic bastion by accident or by fluke. It’s deep blue because its voters want it that way. Primarily that’s driven by the greater Los Angeles area and San Francisco-Oakland population centers, but that accounts for 2/3rds of the state’s population, too. The sexual harassment scandal will be embarrassing and potentially could end many Democrats’ political careers, but Republicans won’t get too much benefit out of it. If they want to compete in the Golden State, they need to make inroads in Democratic strongholds and convince them that decades of Democratic failure has to be countered with smaller-government policies and economic approaches that rebuild businesses in their communities. Until that happens, the GOP will remain on the sidelines in California no matter how many scandals plague the Democrats.

Tuesday on MSNBC, Rep. Francis Rooney (R-FL) described the FBI and the Department of Justice as “off the rails” and suggested the possibility of a “purge” at the FBI and the Department of Justice.

JACKSON: Before I let you go, I need to ask you about the president and his tweets. He’s been fairly quiet Christmas day, but the president is tweeting about the FBI. He’s been tweeting about his Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, why is that the right message right now for Donald Trump and Republicans?

ROONEY: Well, there’s two issues here. Yes, the president does have his own unique communication style, which I don’t think any of us have seen the use of Twitter deployed so broadly as a president does. But on the investigation, that investigation is totally off the rails. And I am really concerned —

JACKSON: But he’s not tweeting about the investigation. He is tweeting about the deputy director. He’s tweeting about FBI agents. Congressman, do you think that is appropriate for the president?

ROONEY: I’m very concerned that the DOJ and the FBI, whether you want to call it deep state or what, are kinda off the rails. When you look at what the Strzok guy was texting, you look at that Ohr guy talking to the dossier Clinton op research people, and the McCabe guy’s wife takes $600,000 from Clinton-related sources while running for state senator.

JACKSON: Congressman, you just called the FBI and the DOJ off the rails, something that you’re okay with talking about here? How does that not sort of undermine the work that the agencies are doing?

ROONEY: I think the American people have very high standards for our government agencies and to see people like these—

JACKSON:  Are the agencies not living up to the standards?

ROONEY: Well, those aforementioned examples are really nerve-racking to me and undermine my confidence that the agencies don’t respect the Constitution and will not put the ends before the means.

JACKSON: That’s a pretty broad brush you’re painting with.

ROONEY: Yeah, but we have seen a lot of ends-before-the-means culture, both out of the Obama administration and out of Hillary Clinton, with her $84 million dollars of potentially illegal campaign contributions or the Clinton Foundation, Uuranium One. People need a good, clean government.

JACKSON:  Do you think people don’t have a good, clean government? I have to let you go, but the point I’m trying to get at, the ones looking at the comments you’re making and say Republicans are working to essentially trying to discredit the Department of Justice and thus discredit the Russia investigations. Is that not what you’re doing?

ROONEY: No, I don’t want to discredit them. I would like to see the directors of the agencies purge it. And say, look, we have a lot of great agents, a lot of great lawyers here, those are the people I want the American people to see and know the good work is being done, not these people who are kind of the deep state.

JACKSON:  Language like that, Congressman, purge. Purge the Department of Justice?

ROONEY: Well, I think that Mr. Strzok  could be purged, sure.