The Republican Party was born on March 20, 1854, the green shoots of a political spring. Unlike America’s other parties that were often shotgun weddings of convenience, the Republicans burst forth around moral ideas that were so powerful — ending slavery and making America a world industrial power — that the tail of this supernova lasted for more than 166 years and inspired its eventual nickname, the Grand Old Party. That GOP died — morally, if not officially — in the late afternoon gloaming of a gray and bitterly cold winter’s day, Feb. 13, 2021. After 43 Republican senators who’d been given …