The name “Parker Griffith” has come up on the Republican side of virtually every important vote in Congress this year. He voted against not only the health care bill, the climate change bill, the financial reform bill and the budget, but also the stimulus package, only 1 of 11 Democrats to do that. He even announced that he would not vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker in the next Congressional session. Now, the freshman Democrat from Alabama will make official what’s been pretty obvious for a while now, that he’s a Republican and he plans to run for re-election as one.

POLITICO has learned that Rep. Parker Griffith, a freshman Democrat from Alabama, will announce today that he’s switching parties to become a Republican.

According to two senior GOP aides familiar with the decision, the announcement will take place this afternoon in Griffith’s district in northern Alabama [...]

The switch represents a coup for the House Republican leadership, which had been courting Griffith since he publicly criticized the Democratic leadership in the wake of raucous town halls during the summer.

Griffith, who captured the seat in a close 2008 open seat contest, will become the first Republican to hold the historically Democratic, Huntsville-based district. A radiation oncologist who founded a cancer treatment center, Griffith plans to blast the Democratic health care bill as a prime reason for his decision to switch parties—and is expected to cite his medical background as his authority on the subject.

This is nothing more than a failure for the DCCC. They recruited this Republican for a seat in Alabama, and spent over a million dollars getting him elected in 2008. The seat held absolutely no importance to the overall Democratic majority, and Griffith didn’t vote with the majority on any substantive issue from the moment he got to Congress. Now he’s flipping parties, which causes a political stir, but means nothing, because he was voting with his new party anyway.

The D-Trip threw a million dollars down the toilet, money the NRCC could have spent electing Parker Griffith themselves.

About the only positive here is that the Blue Dogs just lost one more member and a little more leverage.

UPDATE: Media Matters compiles Griffith’s “Democratic” legacy. Think how many actual Democrats who almost won in 2008 – Darcy Burner, Bill Hedrick, Bill Durston, Dan Seals and others come to mind – could have used that million dollars spent by the D-Trip to get Parker Griffith elected, so he could vote against the entire Democratic agenda and then switch parties.