Republicans and libertarians share many similarities. For instance, members of both groups are generally equipped with bladders.

Of course, the same is true of jellyfish.

That reference to jellyfish and certain members of the GOP isn’t as random as it might seem. Jellyfish are brainless, drift with the tide and kill their prey with long tentacles that contain venomous stingers. I’m not saying that describes every member of the Republican caucus in the current Legislature, but since gaining the majority in last November’s election, the party’s lounge at the State House has been sealed off, filled with water and its snack-bar menu now includes live smelt, eels and guppies.

I mention this not to be unkind to the party of Chester A. Arthur, Warren G. Harding and Richard M. Nixon (although, that’s certainly a side benefit), but to point out the divergence between the libertarian doctrines Republican candidates espoused in the 2010 campaign – smaller government, a more efficient bureaucracy, less intrusion in private life, more freedom, more personal responsibility – and the actual way they’re trying to govern.

Which is about as libertarian as the People’s Republic of China. Or, for that matter, Portland.

Here are just a few of the changes they want:

Restrictions on abortion.

Restrictions on birth control.

Restrictions on snow on cars.

Restrictions on wolf hybrids.

A requirement that vehicles have their headlights on.

More school consolidation.

More restrictions on getting a divorce.

For every piece of libertarian dogma – right to work, right to bear arms, right not to wear a seat belt, right to cut down trees along the shoreline, right of manufacturers to put weird chemicals like BPA in babies’ sippy cups – the GOP is trying to restrict some other right, whether it’s allowing game wardens to stop ATV riders without cause, preventing 18-year-olds from buying cigarettes or requiring a driver’s ed class before obtaining a license.

In short, when it comes to regulating and restricting the way Mainers live their lives, Republicans differ from Democrats in content, but not in style.

As for any GOP resemblance to libertarians, that seems to have been swept away like jellyfish on a storm tide.

Nowhere is that sea change more apparent than in the legislative agenda of alleged conservative-libertarian state Rep. Richard Cebra of Naples. While Cebra has maintained some connection with the more extreme fringes of the less-government-more-anarchy crowd with his bill to allow states to nullify federal laws (because, he told the Lewiston Sun Journal, “the federal government is spreading its tentacles into our state’s rights”), most of his initiatives have nothing whatsoever to do with expanding anybody’s freedoms.

Cebra wants to prevent the state’s constitutional officers from endorsing legislative candidates, something that they’re currently permitted to do because of that glaring legal loophole contained in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, with its ill-advised guarantee of free speech.

He’d require people running for public office to prove they’re United States citizens, lest alien shape-shifters from the planet Boogeria slip past our defenses and end up sitting in the Legislature (“Greetings, fellow jellyfish”) or other high government positions (“Greetings, fellow Kenyans”).

And he insists that everyone who wants to vote come up with proper photo identification before being given a ballot. This is supposed to prevent voter fraud, as when an unscrupulous person attempts to cast ballots in two different municipalities (according to the secretary of state, this infraction occurs roughly as often as space aliens attempting to run for the Maine Legislature). He doesn’t seem concerned that this requirement will enable teenagers – with fake IDs obtained on the Internet so they could buy beer – to take part in elections, while denying that right to anyone whose only identification with a picture happens to be a U.S. passport (which doesn’t meet Cebra’s exacting standards because it doesn’t contain the holder’s home address).

In their euphoria over assuming power in Augusta for the first time since Chester A. Arthur was president, Republicans like Cebra seem to have forgotten the principles they stood for when they were in the opposition, those of restraint of governmental authority and limited interference in the lives of law-abiding citizens and teenagers with fake IDs.

“I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least,'” wrote Henry David Thoreau, adding, “Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe, – ‘That government is best which governs not at all.'”

The GOP should keep that bit of minimalism in mind, lest libertarian voters vent their spleens – not to mention their bladders – by washing away the Republican majority and replacing it with a different breed of jellyfish.

You can e-mail me at aldiamon@herniahill.net. But you don’t have to. It’s not like there’s a law or anything.