Dana Hess writes for South Dakota Searchlight, an online news organization.

The 21 subjects turned in by lawmakers as potential summer study subjects made for interesting reading.

The Legislature’s Executive Board hit on two subjects to study this summer. One is a study of the accuracy and consistency of property tax assessments. Don’t get too excited; your property taxes aren’t likely to go down as a result of this study.

The other subject they chose is a bit of a twin bill: Studying state government’s ability to wrangle artificial intelligence as well as keeping teenagers away from online pornography.

The other 19 subjects ran a wide gamut from keeping an eye on prison construction costs to reform of the state’s eminent domain laws to planning for the boom in growth at Ellsworth Air Force Base (the board approved the formation of a Select Committee on Legislative Relationships with Ellsworth Air Force Base, to “allow the Legislature to be proactive and better engage with issues that arise year-round”).

Some legislators explained their potential studies in detail. Others, when asked to explain the “scope of study requested,” used just one sentence to make their point. Compared with the longer explanations, it looked like homework done by students who were trying to get by with just the bare minimum of work.

Most of the subjects dealt with policy in one form or another. However, one was more politics than policy. That one-sentence wonder came from Rep. Mary Fitzgerald, a Republican from Spearfish. Her proposed study: “The use of legislative caucuses as a tool for coalition-building.”

Since Fitzgerald used only one sentence to describe her proposed summer study, it’s difficult to read between the line. So at this point you would be excused if you had some questions: Why does a political party caucus need to study coalition-building? If they’re all in the same party, doesn’t that mean that they’re automatically in the same coalition?

The answer in South Dakota is, well, when it comes to Republicans, not really.

Members of the super majority in the Legislature all call themselves Republicans, but some of them like to think of themselves as more Republican than others. Some are your father’s Republicans with a fondness for lower taxes, smaller government and fewer regulations. Others are that and more with a penchant for passing up vaccines, adding more firepower to the Second Amendment and trashing the transgendered.

These two factions of the same party are about to meet head-on in June in 43 Republican primaries, 17 for places on the Senate ballot and 26 primary races in the House.

It doesn’t take too long a memory to recall the Republican primary election season from two years ago. That’s when mailboxes were clogged with cards and flyers claiming that one or more of the candidates on the Republican primary ballot just wasn’t conservative enough to serve the people of South Dakota.

The outfits paying for those mailings were often out-of-state entities. That didn’t keep them from developing a keen interest in who was best suited to serve in our Legislature.

It’s not just primary election season that brings out these uber-Republicans. The state party is still reeling from its convention two years ago when conservative activists almost managed to stick Gov. Kristi Noem with her primary opponent Steven Haugaard as her lieutenant governor. It took a personal plea from Noem to get the conventioneers to give her the candidate she wanted, Larry Rhoden.

At the same convention, ultra conservatives came close to sinking the attorney general candidacy of Marty Jackley with a strong showing by one of the minions from the failed AG tenure of Jason Ravnsborg. In a move that’s still dripping with irony, that convention did manage to cast aside the party’s incumbent secretary of state candidate in favor of an election denier.

During the last two legislative sessions, Republicans have struggled to find a way to wrest power from the party convention and the activists that flock to it. Some in the GOP would rather that the party’s candidates for constitutional offices be on the primary ballot.

Maybe the Republican Party does need a few lessons in coalition building. Or perhaps its members would be better off with a history lesson about the traditional priorities and ideals of the GOP.