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Confessions
of a Repentant Republican, Part 2
Why Are 7 Prominent Republican Conservatives
Supporting Democratic Victory in 2006?
“Let's face it
.... When one out of three of your own party wants you to lose
control of Congress, it's time to take a long look......”
- former U. S. Rep. Joe
Scarborough, (R-Florida, 1st District, 1995-2001)
Why are Republican conservatives calling
for an end to One Party GOP Rule?
Why are many now discussing the virtues
of divided government?
On what basis do they believe
One
Party Rule has dishonored
conservative values?
The 7 prominent Republican
conservatives who
contributed to the Washington Monthly
remarkable feature article, "Time for Us to Go: Conservatives on Why
the GOP Should Lose in 2006," did not dwell on contrived wedge
issues promoted by Republican marketing consultants.
They focused, instead, on the neglected limited government ideals on
which the conservative movement was founded:
- individual freedom,
- fiscal responsibility,
- constitutional restraints on unchecked executive power,
- prudent and principled foreign policy.
Why do these conservatives
believe today's Republican Party has betrayed these values?
How has it come about that
today's authoritarian, big government GOP has maintained the language of traditional conservatism even
while mutating into a governing party whose policies produce the
opposite?
Principled conservatives now widely
recognize that the authoritarian, fear mongering, Big Brother, big
government ideology peddled by GOP politicians and
pseudo-populist radio demagogues is anything but conservative.
How has today's GOP come to embrace such an ideology?
To a large measure, GOP success has relied on, not only the nominal
retention, but the conspicuous veneration of the slogans and symbols of
the traditional small-government conservatism the Republican Party has,
in reality, abandoned.
The approach of GOP strategists to cultural
conservatives has been similarly disingenuous: Despite complaints from
conservative Christians that the GOP cynically resurrects highly
visible and symbolic wedge issues on a 2 year cycle rhythmically
synchronized with the campaign cycle, the GOP has, by choosing
symbolism over substance on cultural issues, avoided offending
corporate elites who do not share the religious and social convictions
of the GOP's foot soldiers from the religious right.
But in contrast to their duplicitous treatment of both small government
conservatives and of conservative Christians, the GOP has been
consistently faithful to one group: For corporate lobbyists, today's GOP
has been ever-willing to compromise both fiscal and free enterprise
principles.
Conservative Bruce
Bartlett documents
how the Medicare
Prescription Drug Benefit, which he describes as perhaps "the worst
piece of legislation ever enacted", disproportionately benefits drug
companies and corporations relieved of contractual obligations, rather
than seniors. Remarkably, GOP stipulations specifically prohibited the Secretary of
HHS from negotiating lower drug prices.
While profligately increasing the cost to taxpayers, GOP Congressmen
have, at the behest of drug companies, repeatedly fought against
re-importation of Canadian drugs - free market solution that would
lower prescription drug prices not only for seniors , but for all
Americans, without burden to taxpayers, a concept supported by candidate
George W. Bush.
Principled conservatives are not fooled
by such substitution of Republican corporate welfare for genuine
competitive enterprise.
Veteran conservative activist Richard Viguerie, author of "Conservatives Betrayed: How George W.
Bush & Other Big Government Conservatives Hijacked the Conservative
Cause" bluntly states,
"For
years, congressional Republicans have sold themselves to conservatives
as the continuation of the Reagan revolution. We were told that they
would take on the Washington special interests -- that they would, in
essence, tear down K Street and sow the earth with salt to make sure
nothing ever grew there again.
"But over time, most of them turned into
the sort of unprincipled power brokers they had ousted in 1994. They
lost interest in furthering conservative ideas, and they turned their
attention to getting their share of the pork. Conservatives did not
spend decades going door to door, staffing phone banks and compiling
lists of like-minded voters so Republican congressmen could have
highways named after them and so there could be an affirmative-action
program for Republican lobbyists."
Principled conservatives recognize that
the economic strength of American free enterprise comes from an
environment conducive to entrepreneurial innovation and a thriving
middle class, not in GOP favoritism of stagnant and corrupt
corporate and financial elites at the expense of the middle class.
But today's GOP now poses to America a threat more
fundamental than economic misadventures.
Principled conservatives recognize that authoritarian, big government
"conservatism", even when irreverently wrapped in our flag and
mimicking the language of faith, is alien to America and subversive to
our values.
For generations, America has stood as a
beacon of liberty, and our constitution a monument to the Rule of Law.
But we now witness a governing
Republican Party which
has adopted a theory of presidential power - the "unitary executive"
theory - that
nullifies Congressional, judicial and constitutional checks on
presidential power.
Almost beyond belief, Republicans historically committed to due process
and to constitutional restraints on federal and presidential power, now:
But unlike today's pseudo-conservative
GOP, true conservatives believe that America is not too weak to defend
herself while
maintaining American ideals.
Unlike today's fear mongering
GOP, principled conservatives believe Americans will surmount fear, and
will not allow terrorists to define and change America.
Unlike the radio
"conservatives" who would polarize America and demonize all but their
most sheepish followers as "Democrats, liberals, or
RINO's", principled conservatives now recognize that the core
values which the authoritarian GOP has abandoned (individual liberty, fiscal
responsibility, the rule of law, prudent foreign policy)
are more important than partisan victory.
Fortunately,
these values, though essential to true conservatives, are not
exclusive to conservatives.
Our nation's founders
did not even consider such values to be "conservative" at all, but
characterized such a philosophy centered on liberty as, of all things,
"liberal".
But whatever name is applied to these quintessentially American values,
it is clear that today's authoritarian GOP has forsaken them.
To the consternation of these Big Government Republicans, the ideals of
individual liberty protected by the rule of law, and prudent fiscal and
foreign policy, are once again serving as a uniting force --- an
area where common ground is being found by thoughtful conservatives,
moderates, and liberals of good will.
Today's Republican politicians have not only repudiated
conservative principles of constitutional restraints on federal and
executive power, but now support policies diametrically opposed to
historical Republican positions.
Such GOP reversals on
issues of fundamental constitutional principles abound. On each of
these issues, the current GOP position is disconnected from the
convictions of virtually all Republicans on such issues as recently as
1 decade ago:
And in each case, if true
conservatives who honor the rule of law are to find Congressional
allies in their fight against unrestrained presidential power, it is no
longer true that those allies will be on the Republican side of the
aisle.
When
the Orwellian named PATRIOT Act was enacted in 2001,
Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey both supported the act AND
fought hard to insert a sunset clause, so that the provisions of the
act would truly, in fact, be temporary.
Armey's conservatism was inseparable from his commitment to civil
liberties. In his farewell
address before he retired as Majority Leader in 2003, Armey passionately warned
of those who would promise security in exchange for liberty.
But by the time the
great majority of the provisions of the PATRIOT Act were extended - permanently and without sunset - in
2006, conservative
civil libertarians such as Dick
Armey and Bob
Barr had become all but extinct within the GOP.
Similarly, honest fiscal conservatives such as the Sen. Peter
Fitzgerald (who dared to oppose
the pet pork-barrel projects of fellow
GOP politicians) have been driven by the Republican leadership into
early retirement, even as the GOP establishment has coddled criminals.
Establishment
GOP politicians who have abandoned their fundamental
ideals are now aghast that principled conservative Republicans are
seeking allies among Democrats.
But the principles that are most dear to principled conservatives
- individual liberty protected by thhe rule of law - transcend
partisanship.
While principled
liberals and conservatives have substantial differences regarding the
interpretation and implementation of these principles, the tragic
reality is that a power-drunk big government GOP establishment now
threatens the very constitutional restraints that protect our
liberties, our democracy, and our free and open
society.
William Niskanen's work clearly demonstrates that fiscal policy is
consistently more restrained under divided government
than under one party domination.
But it is the actual behavior of Republicans under this era of One
Party Rule that has clearly demonstrated the tangible threat to the
Rule of Law, to individual liberty, and to our constitutional system.
Unlike today's win-at-all-costs GOP, many true conservatives believe
that only a Democratic congressional victory will restore the balanced,
divided, and representative government through which America has long
maintained our values.
And only a Democratic victory will allow the reflection within the
Republican Party necessary for a reorientation to American democratic
values.
Republicans now firmly in control of party machinery, addicted to
power, and committed to a toxic authoritarian ideology they falsely
call "conservative" will not be dislodged without a Democratic victory.
Today's GOP has lost its way.
Like me,
other conflicted conservatives may benefit from reading "Time for Us to Go: Conservatives on Why
the GOP Should Lose in 2006," in the Washington Monthly.
. .
. .
. .
William
Frey, M.D.
has practiced medicine for 27 years. He is a founding member of Republicans for Humility,
which advocates the return to the unifying American values of humble
foreign policy, constitutional government, and respect for individual
liberties, and stands in opposition to the recent dominance within the
Republican Party of policies favoring unilateral military expansion,
empire, and the accompanying erosion of civil liberties. He has
authored Is
George W. Bush a Conservative?, A Time for
Moral Outrage, The Tragedy of
a Complicit Media, Confessions
of a Repentant Republican and
other essays.
The following essays are from "Time For Us To Go - Conservatives on why
the GOP Should Lose in 2006":
Go to original
Published by The
Washington Monthly,
October, 2006
Time For Us To Go --
Conservatives on Why
the GOP Should Lose in 2006
With Republicans controlling Congress and the White House,
conservatives these days ought to be happy, but most aren’t. They see
expanding government, runaway spending, Middle East entanglements, and
government corruption, and they wonder why, exactly, the country should
be grateful for Republican dominance. Some accuse Bush and the
Republicans today of not being true conservatives. Others see a grab
bag of stated policies and wonder how they cohere. Everyone thinks something’s
got to change.
Now seven prominent conservatives dare to speak the unspeakable: They
hope the Republicans lose in 2006. Well, let’s be diplomatic and say
they’d prefer divided government—soon. (Perhaps that formulation will
fool Dennis Hastert.) Of course, all of them wish for the long-term
health of conservatism, and most are loyal to the GOP. What they also
believe, however, is that even if a Speaker Pelosi looms in the wings,
sometimes the best remedy for a party gone astray is to give it a
session in the time-out chair.
Let's quit while we're behind
By Christopher Buckley
Bring on Pelosi
By Bruce Bartlett
And we thought Clinton had no self-control
By Joe Scarborough
Give divided government a chance
By William A. Niskanen
Restrain this White House
By Bruce Fein
Idéologie has taken over
By Jeffrey Hart
The show must not go on
By Richard A. Viguerie
By Christopher Buckley
...........Who knew, in 2000,
that “compassionate conservatism” meant bigger government, unrestricted
government spending, government intrusion in personal matters,
government ineptitude, and cronyism in disaster relief?
..........A more accurate
term for Mr. Bush’s political philosophy might be incontinent
conservatism.
On Capitol Hill, a Republican
Senate and House are now distinguished by—or perhaps even synonymous
with—earmarks, the K Street Project, Randy Cunningham (bandit, 12
o’clock high!), Sen. Ted Stevens’s $250-million Bridge to Nowhere, Jack
Abramoff (Who? Never heard of him), and a Senate Majority Leader who
declared, after conducting his own medical evaluation via videotape,
that he knew every bit as much about the medical condition of Terri
Schiavo as her own doctors and husband. Who knew that conservatism
means barging into someone’s hospital room like Dr. Frankenstein with
defibrillator paddles? In what chapter of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom or Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind is that principle enunciated?
The Republican Party I grew
up into—Dwight D. Eisenhower, William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater,
Richard Nixon (sigh), Ronald Reagan—stood for certain things. It did
not always live up to its ideals. Au contraire, as we Republicans said in the
pre-Dominique de Villepin era—often, it fell flat on its face. A
self-proclaimed “conservative,” Nixon kept the Great Society
entitlement beast fat and happy and brought in wage and price controls.
Reagan funked Social Security reform in 1983 and raised (lesser) taxes
three times. He vowed to balance the budget, and drove the deficit to
historic highs by failing to rein in government spending. Someone
called it “Voodoo economics.” You could Google it. There were
foreign misadventures, terrible ones: Vietnam (the ’69-’75 chapters),
Beirut, Iran-Contra, the Saddam Hussein tilt. But there were
compensating triumphs: Eisenhower’s refusal to bail out France in
Indochina in 1954, Nixon’s China opening, the Cold War victory.
Despite the failures, one had
the sense that the party at least knew in its heart of hearts that
these were failures, either of principle or
execution. Today one has no sense, aside from a slight lowering of the
swagger-mometer, that the president or the Republican Congress is in
the least bit chastened by their debacles.
George Tenet’s WMD
“slam-dunk,” Vice President Cheney’s “we will be greeted as
liberators,” Don Rumsfeld’s avidity to promulgate a minimalist military
doctrine, together with the tidy theories of a group who call
themselves “neo-conservative” (not one of whom, to my knowledge, has
ever worn a military uniform), have thus far: de-stabilized the Middle
East; alienated the world community from the United States; empowered
North Korea, Iran, and Syria; unleashed sectarian carnage in Iraq among
tribes who have been cutting each others’ throats for over a thousand
years; cost the lives of 2,600 Americans, and the limbs, eyes, organs,
spinal cords of another 15,000—with no end in sight. But not to worry:
Democracy is on the march in the Middle East. Just ask Hamas. And the
neocons—bright people, all—are now clamoring, “On to Tehran!”
What have they done to my
party? Where does one go to get it back? .............
Read
complete article.
By Bruce Bartlett
As a conservative who’s
interested in the long-term health of both my country and the
Republican Party, I have a suggestion for the GOP in 2006: lose.
Handing over at least one house of Congress to the other side of the
aisle for the next two years would probably be good for
everyone.........
Having one-party control of
both houses of Congress and the White House may allow national action
to be taken more quickly, but it’s contrary to the spirit of our system
of government. The Founding Fathers explicitly rejected a parliamentary
arrangement, in which the executive and legislative branches are united
under the same party. Not only did they separate the legislative and
executive functions; they further divided the legislative function into
two bodies with different numbers, different terms of service, and
different election methods. (Remember that prior to the 17th Amendment,
senators were elected by state legislatures.) In short, divided
government was baked in the cake by the Founding Fathers, who wanted
lawmaking to be slow and difficult, not quick and easy. They reasoned,
wisely, that laws able to overcome their institutional obstacle course
were more likely to be clearly considered, broadly supported, and
equipped to stand the test of time.
Ronald Reagan had to contend
with a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives for all eight years
of his presidency. This was no barrier to genuinely popular
legislation, such as the 1981 tax cut. The White House simply had to
work harder and make better arguments for its program. And Democratic
control of the House helped make the 1986 Tax Reform Act one of the few
major tax bills in history to which both Republicans and Democrats
still point with pride. Similarly, Bill Clinton faced divided
government for six of his eight years, and those years gave us the 1996
welfare-reform bill, which continues to have broad support.
These laws endured because
they had legitimacy. It’s unlikely that either party would
single-handedly have produced anything as good. Indeed, one-party
government encourages the majority to pass legislation using votes only
from its own side and usually leads it to bargain first with those on
its own extremes (those least willing to compromise on anything)
instead of moderates across the aisle. This almost guarantees that
controversial lawmaking will be the norm.
Divided government has other
advantages, too. For one, it restrains government spending. The budget
surpluses of the late 1990s resulted mainly from Bill Clinton’s
unwillingness to support the Republican Congress’s priorities and its
unwillingness to support his. For another, it improves our foreign
policy. We had divided government during 36 of 55 years between 1947
and 2001, which meant that both parties had to take responsibility for
the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq (the first one). America is much
more effective in the international arena when it has a high degree of
bipartisanship in its foreign policy.........
Finally, on a purely partisan
level, I believe that loss of one or both houses will strengthen the
Republican Party going into 2008. It will force a debate on issues that
have been swept under the rug, such out-of-control government spending
and the coziness between Republicans and K Street, home of Washington’s
lobbying community. Afterwards, the party will emerge stronger, with
better arguments for keeping control of the White House. Also,
Democrats may well be placed under so much pressure from their
left-wing fringe that they’ll be forced into politically
self-destructive acts such as trying to impeach President Bush. Every
Republican I know thinks Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are the best
things they have going for them. Giving these inept leaders higher
profiles would be a gift to conservatives everywhere.
.
. .
. .
Bruce Bartlett is the author of Impostor: How George W. Bush
Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, recently published
by Doubleday
Read
complete article.
By Joe Scarborough
When The Washington Monthly
reached me at my office recently, a voice on the other side of the line
meekly asked if I would ever consider writing an article supporting the
radical proposition that Republicans should get their brains beaten in
this fall.
“Count me in!” was my chipper
response. I also seem to remember muttering something about preferring
an assortment of Bourbon Street hookers running the Southern Baptist
Convention to having this lot of Republicans controlling America’s
checkbook for the next two years.
Maybe that’s because
right-wing, knuckle-dragging Republicans like myself took over Congress
in 1994 promising to balance the budget and limit Washington’s power.
We were a nasty breed and had no problem blaming Bill and Hillary
Clinton for everything from the exploding federal deficit to male
pattern baldness. I suspected then, as I do now, that Hillary Clinton
herself had something to do with “Love, American Style” and “Joanie
Loves Chachi.” And why not blame her? Back then, Newt Gingrich felt
comfortable blaming the drowning of two little children on Democratic
values. Hell. It was 1994. It just seemed like the thing to do.
The terminally rumpled Dick
Armey (R-Whiskey Gulch) even went so far as to suggest that the
Clintons might be Marxists, drawing an angry personal rebuke from Bubba
himself. But 12 years later, it is Armey’s fellow Republicans who
should be sobered by the short and ugly history of Republican Supremacy.
Under Bill Clinton’s
presidency, discretionary spending grew at a modest rate of 3.4
percent. Not too bad for a Marxist, even considering that his worst
instincts were tempered by a Republican Congress. (Well, his worst
fiscal instincts.)
But compare Clinton’s 3.4
percent growth rate to the spending orgy that has dominated Washington
since Bush moved into town. With Republicans in charge of both sides of
Pennsylvania Avenue, spending growth has averaged 10.4 percent per
year. And the GOP’s reckless record goes well beyond runaway defense
costs. The federal education bureaucracy has exploded by 101 percent
since Republicans started running Congress. Spending in the Justice
Department over the same period has shot up 131 percent, the Commerce
Department 82 percent, the Department of Health and Human Services 81
percent, the State Department 80 percent, the Department of
Transportation 65 percent, and the Department of Housing and Urban
Development 59 percent. Incredibly, the four bureaucracies once
targeted for elimination by the GOP Congress—Commerce, Energy,
Education, and Housing and Urban Development—have enjoyed spending
increases of an average of 85 percent.
It’s enough to make economic
conservatives long for the day when Marxists were running the White
House.
This must all be shocking to
my Republican friends who still believe our country would be a better
place if our party controlled every branch of government as well as
every news network, movie studio, and mid-American pulpit. But evidence
suggests that divided government may be what Washington needs the
most...........
During the 1990s,
conservative Republicans and the Clinton White House somehow managed to
balance the budget while winning two wars, reforming welfare, and
conducting an awesome impeachment trial focused on oral sex and a
stained Gap dress.
The fact that both parties
hated each another was healthy for our republic’s bottom line. A
Democratic president who hates a Republican appropriations chairman is
less likely to sign off on funding for the Midland Maggot Festival
being held in the chairman’s home district. Soon, budget negotiations
become nasty, brutish, and short and devolve into the legislative
equivalent of Detroit, where only the strong survive.
But in Bush’s Washington, the
capital is a much clubbier place where everyone in the White House
knows someone on the Hill who worked with the Old Man, summered in
Maine, or pledged DKE at Yale. The result? Chummy relationships, no
vetoes, and record-breaking debts.
As a political junkie who
wept bitter tears the night Jimmy Carter got elected and shouted with
uncontrolled joy when Ronald Reagan whipped his sorry ass four years
later, I find myself ambivalent for the first time over a national
election. After six years of Republican recklessness at home and
abroad, I seriously doubt Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid or the
aforementioned Bourbon Street hookers could spend this country any
deeper into debt than my Republican Party. With any luck, Democrats
will launch destructive investigations, a new era of bad feelings will
break out, and George W. Bush will stop using his veto pen to fill in
Rangers’ box scores and instead start using it like a conservative
president should.
.
. . . .
Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s
“Scarborough Country” and member of the House of Representatives from
1995 to 2001, is the author of Rome Wasn’t Burnt in a Day
(HarperCollins).
Read
complete article.
By William A. Niskanen
For those of you with a
partisan bent, I have some bad news. Our federal government may work
better (well, less badly) when at least one house of Congress is
controlled by the opposing party. Divided government is, curiously,
less divisive. It’s also cheaper. The basic reason for this is simple:
When one party proposes drastic or foolish measures, the other party
can obstruct them. The United States prospers most when excesses are
curbed, and, if the numbers from the past 50 years are any indication,
divided government is what curbs them.
Let’s look at some
statistics. From the dawn of the Cold War until today, we’ve had only
two periods of what could be called fiscal restraint: The last six
years of the Eisenhower administration, and the last six years of the
Clinton administration, both intervals in which the opposition
controlled Congress. Under Clinton, the average annual increase in
spending was at about 1 percent, while, under Ike, it was negative. By
contrast, our unified governments have gone on fiscal benders. Harry
Truman, with the help of a Democratic Congress, sent the money flying,
with spending increases of as high as 10 percent a year. Lyndon Johnson
was almost as profligate. And today, unfortunately, George W. Bush,
with a GOP majority, is the heir to their legacies. To put this in
plain numbers, government spending has increased an average of only
1.73 percent annually during periods of divided government. This number
more than triples, to 5.26 percent, for periods of unified government.
That’s a hefty premium to pay for a bit of unity.
Equally striking is
that these spending increases have generally found the same recipient:
the Pentagon. It’s not that unified governments love to purchase
bombers, but, rather, that they tend to draw us into war. This may
sound improbable at first, but consider this: In 200 years of U.S.
history, every one of our conflicts involving more than a week of
ground combat has been initiated by a unified government. Each of the
four major American wars during the 20th century, for example—World War
I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War—was initiated by a
Democratic president with the support of a Democratic Congress. The
current war in Iraq, initiated by a Republican president and backed by
a Republican Congress, is consistent with this pattern. It also stands
as the only use of military force involving more than a week of ground
combat that has been initiated by a Republican president in over a
century. Divided government appears to be an important constraint on
American participation in war. Needless to say, this reduces outlays in
both blood and treasure.
There’s one more advantage to
tension between our governmental branches: Major reform is more likely
to last. Since passing any measure in divided government requires
bipartisan support, a shift in majorities is less likely to bring on
serious changes or adulterations. The Reagan tax laws of 1981 and 1986,
for example, were both approved by a House of Representatives
controlled by Democrats and have largely survived. The welfare reform
of 1996 was approved by Clinton and a Republican Congress and also
endures. By contrast, any efforts during the past several years to
reform the federal tax code, Medicare, or Social Security have
faltered, and any changes forced through by the GOP would almost
certainly be undone as soon as Democrats returned to power. Reforms of
real magnitude will almost certainly depend on preventing immoderation
and securing bipartisan support, and little of that seems likely in a
GOP-only government.
American voters, in their
unarticulated collective wisdom, seem to grasp the benefits of divided
government, and that’s how they’ve voted for most of the past 50 years.
To be sure, divided government is not the stuff of which political
legends are made, but, in real life, most of us would take good
legislation over good legends. As a life-long Republican and occasional
federal official, I must acknowledge a hard truth: I don’t much care
how a divided government is next realized. And, in 2006, there’s only
one way that’s going to happen.
. .
. . .
William A. Niskanen is chairman of
the Cato Institute and was a former member and acting chairman of
President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers.
Read complete article.
By Bruce Fein
Suppose Democrats capture
control of one or both chambers of Congress in November. A conservative
would instinctively cringe. On the domestic front, Democrats still
don’t get Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which teaches the superiority
of free markets to government-regulated markets euphemistically styled
“industrialization policy” or otherwise. Smith lacerated the economic
philosophy of modern Democrats: “The statesman who should attempt to
direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their
capitals would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention,
but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no
single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would
nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and
presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.” With Democrats
controlling Congress, we could expect command-and-control laws
requiring windmills on every farm, photovoltaic cells in every home,
and hydrogen fuel in every car.
In foreign affairs, Democrats
are stalled in the horse latitudes. They have no philosophical starting
point. They sport no strategy for confronting the nuclear ambitions of
Iran or North Korea, the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the
growing friction between Japan on the one hand and China and South
Korea on the other. Beating swords into plowshares and making war no
more is not a strategy but utopian faith.
So conservatives should weep
if Democrats prevail in the House or Senate.
But perhaps not.
The most
conservative principle of the Founding Fathers was distrust of
unchecked power. Centuries
of experience substantiated that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Men are not angels. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition to
avert abuses or tyranny. The Constitution embraced a separation of
powers to keep the legislative, executive, and judicial branches in
equilibrium. As Edward Gibbon wrote in The History of the Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire: “The principles of a free constitution are
irrevocably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the
executive.”
But a Republican Congress has
done nothing to thwart President George W. Bush’s alarming usurpations
of legislative prerogatives. Instead, it has largely functioned as an
echo chamber of the White House.
President Bush has flouted
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) for five years
by directing the National Security Agency to target American citizens
on American soil for electronic surveillance on his say-so alone. The
president has defended his warrantless domestic spying with an imperial
theory of inherent constitutional power that would empower him to open
mail, break in and enter homes, or torture detainees, even in violation
of federal criminal statutes. He has concealed details of the spying
program indispensable to rational congressional oversight—for example,
the number of Americans targeted, the earmarks employed to select the
targets, or the intelligence yield of the spying. He has never
explained to Congress why FISA could not have been amended to
accommodate any unforeseen evasive tactics by al Qaeda in lieu of
simply disregarding the law. Indeed, Congress has amended FISA six
times since 9/11 at the request of the White House, and the Senate
Intelligence Committee was informed by Bush’s Justice Department on
July 31, 2002, that FISA was working impeccably. The president has also
refused to disclose what legal advice he received to justify the NSA’s
warrantless domestic spying at its inception. And Attorney General
Alberto Gonzalez has confessed that President Bush is operating other
intelligence collection programs that are unknown to Congress and the
public and that will never be revealed, absent leaks to the media.
Republicans in Congress have
bowed to the president’s scorn for the rule of law and craving for
secret government. They have voted against Democratic Sen. Russell
Feingold’s resolution to rebuke Bush for violating federal statutes and
crippling checks and balances. They have resisted brandishing either
the power of the purse or the contempt power (with which it can compel
testimony) to end the president’s violation of FISA and to force full
disclosure of his secret foreign-intelligence programs. Indeed, the
Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter,
is sponsoring a bill that in substance endorses President Bush’s FISA
illegalities and authorizes an electronic-surveillance program warrant
that would enable the NSA to spy on Americans indiscriminately without
the particularized suspicion of wrongdoing required by the Fourth
Amendment.
Republicans in the House and
Senate have been equally invertebrate in the face of presidential
signing statements that usurp the power to legislate. In approximately
800 cases, President Bush has both signed a bill and declared his
intent to disregard provisions he believes are unconstitutional, the
equivalent of a line-item veto. For instance, he signed the Detainee
Treatment Act of 2005 prohibiting torture while issuing a signing
statement declaring his intent to ignore the law in order to gather
military or foreign intelligence.
The Presentment Clause of
Article I, Section 7 gives the president but two options when presented
with a bill passed by Congress: sign or veto the bill in its entirety.
That was the holding of the Supreme Court when it found a line-item
veto statute unconstitutional in 1998’s Clinton v. City of New York.
The president is obligated to veto a bill that he believes to be
unconstitutional; Congress may override that judgment by two-thirds
majorities. In the 217-year history of the United States under the
present Constitution, Congress has overridden only 28 constitutionally
based vetoes, and on only one occasion did the override engender a
constitutional battle between the president and Congress. Presidential
signing statements further usurp the legislative power by resulting in
the enforcement of laws that Congress has not passed. Members vote on
all the provisions of a law collectively in the expectation that all
will be executed if the president approves.
Signing statements also flout
the president’s obligation in Article II of the Constitution to execute
the laws faithfully. The Founding Fathers were acutely aware of the
example of King James II, whose practice of suspending or dispensing
with laws he believed encroached on royal prerogatives eventually
occasioned his overthrow in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. With such
precedents in mind, the framers of the United States Constitution
directed the president to execute the laws without fail. The Republican
Congress, however, has acted as a disinterested spectator while
President Bush has stolen its legislative authority in plain view and
exercised the tyrannical power of making, executing, and conclusively
interpreting the law and the Constitution.
The most frightening claim
made by Bush with congressional acquiescence is reminiscent of the
lettres de cachet of prerevolutionary France. (Such letters, with which
the king could order the arrest and imprisonment of subjects without
trial, helped trigger the storming of the Bastille.) In the aftermath
of 9/11, Mr. Bush maintained that he could pluck any American citizen
out of his home or off of the sidewalk and detain him indefinitely on
the president’s finding that he was an illegal combatant. No court
could second-guess the president. Bush soon employed such monarchial
power to detain a few citizens and to frighten would-be dissenters, and
Republicans in Congress either cheered or fiddled like Nero while the
Constitution burned. The Supreme Court ultimately entered the breach
and repudiated the president in 2004’s Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. Republicans
similarly yawned as President Bush ordained military tribunals to try
accused war criminals based on secret evidence and unreliable hearsay
in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva
Convention. The Supreme Court again was forced to countervail the
congressional dereliction by holding the tribunals illegal in 2006’s
Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.
Republicans have shied from
challenging Bush by placing party loyalty above institutional loyalty,
contrary to the expectations of the Founding Fathers. They do so in the
fear that embarrassing or discrediting a Republican president might
reverberate to their political disadvantage in a reverse coat-tail
effect.
Democrats, for their part,
likewise place party above the Constitution, but their party loyalty at
least creates an incentive to frustrate Bush’s super-imperial
presidency. This could help to restore checks and balances. For the
foreseeable future, divided government is the best bet for preserving
both the letter and spirit of the Constitution. If Democrats capture
the House or Senate in November 2006, the danger created by Bush with a
Republican-controlled Congress would be mitigated or eliminated.
But that only applies to the
next two years. If Hillary Clinton wins the White House in 2008,
conservatives should be equally zealous for Republicans to recapture
Congress.
. .
. . .
Bruce Fein is a constitutional and
international lawyer with Bruce Fein & Associates and The Lichfield
Group. He served as associate deputy attorney general under President
Ronald Reagan and was a member of the ABA Task Force on presidential
signing statements.
Read complete article.
By Jeffrey Hart
With 9/11, George W. Bush was
reborn (again). Until then, his presidency had been undistinguished and
his poll numbers low. He had also made one particularly ominous
decision. In August 2001, using an executive order, Bush blocked
federal support for stem-cell research. In substance that was bad
enough—like many people I oppose disease and early death—but equally
disturbing was the mindset. Bush summed it up in 2004, when he
described stem-cell research as a project “to destroy life to save
life.”
Wait a minute. Here Bush was
using the same word, “life,” to describe not only a minute clump of
cells known as a blastocyst but also an actual human being. In this
flagrant disconnect between words and actuality were the early
indications of a profoundly ideological mindset.
Edmund Burke was the original
enemy of ideology. In the slogans of the French philosophes, Burke saw
something new and alarming in politics, and he struggled for language
to describe it, writing of “abstract theory” and “metaphysical dogma.”
Burke was seeking a way to describe a belief system impervious to fact
or experience, and he brought to bear a permanently valid analysis of
human behavior and the role of social institutions. William F. Buckley
once summed up Burke’s outlook when he called conservatism the
“politics of reality.”
But that was then. Today, the
standard-bearer of “conservatism” in the United States is George W.
Bush, a man who has taken the positions of an unshakable ideologue: on
supply-side economics, on privatization, on Social Security, on the
Terri Schiavo case, and, most disastrously, on Iraq. Never before has a
United States president consistently adhered to beliefs so disconnected
from actuality.
Bush’s party has followed him
on this course. It has approved Bush’s prescription-drug plan, an
incomprehensible and ruinously expensive piece of legislation. It has
steadfastly backed the war in Iraq, even though the notion of
nation-building was once anathema to the GOP. And it has helped run up
federal indebtedness to unprecedented heights, leaving China to finance
the debt.
Perhaps most damaging to the
ideal of conservatism has been the influence of religious ideology.
During the fight over whether to remove the feeding tube of Terri
Schiavo, a Florida woman who had been in a vegetal state for 15 years,
politicians began to say strange and feverish things. “She talks and
she laughs, and she expresses happiness and discomfort,” Majority whip
Tom DeLay said of a woman for whom cognition of any kind was
impossible. (Oxygen deprivation had liquefied her cerebral cortex.)
Senate Majority leader Bill Frist examined Schiavo on videotape and
deemed her “clearly responsive.” As Schiavo’s case fought its way
through the courts, Republicans savaged judges for consistently
sanctioning the removal of Schiavo’s feeding tube. “The time will come
for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior,”
threatened DeLay.
That members of the judiciary
were being chastised for responding to the law as written rather than
looking, presumably, to some sort of divine guidance was hardly
surprising. In 2002, Bush himself had said, “We need common-sense
judges who understand that our rights were derived from God.” In this
chilling use of the word “God,” the president made his views on the
rule of law all too clear. The conservative writer Andrew Sullivan has
aptly coined the term “Christianism” to refer to this merger of
religiosity and politics.
As Bush’s ideology leads from
one disaster to another, one might ask: How far can it go? It has
already brought us to Baghdad, an adventure so hopeless that Buckley
recently mused, “If you had a European prime minister who experienced
what we’ve experienced, it would be expected that he would retire or
resign.” The more we learn about what happened behind the scenes in the
months leading up to the war in Iraq, the more apparent it becomes that
evidence was twisted to fit preconceived notions. Those who produced
evidence undermining the case for war were ignored or even punished. It
was zealotry at its most calamitous.
On the subject of
democratizing Iraq and the Middle East, Bush has voiced some of the
most extraordinarily ideological statements ever made by a sitting
president. “Human cultures can be vastly different,” Bush told an
audience at the American Enterprise Institute in February 2003,
shortly before the invasion of Iraq. “Yet the human heart desires the
same good things, everywhere on earth…For these fundamental reasons,
freedom and democracy will always and everywhere have greater appeal
than the slogans of hatred and the tactics of terror.”
Happy thoughts,
breathtakingly false. If this amounts to a worldview, it’s certainly
not that of Burke. Indeed, Bush would probably be more at home among
the revolutionary French, provided his taxes remained low, than among
Burke’s Rockingham Whigs. (Burke would of course deny Bush admission to
the Whigs in the first place, as Bush would be seen as an ideological
comrade of the philosophes —if a singularly unreflective one.) It’s no
surprise that longtime conservatives such as Francis Fukuyama, George
F. Will, and William F. Buckley have all distanced themselves from
Bush’s brand of adventurism.
The United States has seen
political swings and produced its share of extremists, but its
political character, whether liberals or conservatives have been in
charge, has always remained fundamentally Burkean. The Constitution
itself is a Burkean document, one that slows down decisions to allow
for “deliberate sense” and checks and balances. President Bush has
nearly upended that tradition, abandoning traditional realism in favor
of a warped and incoherent brand of idealism. (No wonder Bush supporter
Fred Barnes has praised him as a radical.) At this dangerous point in
history, we must depend on the decisions of an astonishingly feckless
chief executive: an empty vessel filled with equal parts Rove and
Rousseau.
Successful government by
either Democrats or Republicans has always been, above all, realistic.
FDR, Eisenhower, and Reagan were all reelected by landslides and rank
as great presidents who responded to the world as it is, not the world
as they would have it. But ideological government deserves rejection,
whatever its party affiliation. This November, the Republicans stand to
face a tsunami of rejection. They’ve earned it.
Meanwhile, as we wait out our
time with this president, we can look forward to the latest in a stream
of rhetoric that increasingly makes Woodrow Wilson look like
Machiavelli. “One, I believe there’s an Almighty,” Bush declared this
April, “and secondly I believe one of the great gifts of the Almighty
is the desire in everybody’s soul, regardless of what you look like or
where you live to be free. I believe liberty is universal.”
Well, it is certainly taking
a long time for the plans of the Almighty to show results in the actual
world. As I write this, sectarian violence in Iraq is escalating. I’d
call my skepticism “conservative,” but Bushism has poisoned the very
word.
. .
. . .
Jeffrey Hart, professor of English
emeritus at Dartmouth College and senior editor at National Review, was
a speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. He is the author,
most recently, of The Making of the American Conservative Mind:
National Review and Its Times.
Read complete article.
By Richard A. Viguerie
With their record over the
past few years, the Big Government Republicans in Washington do not
merit the support of conservatives. They have busted the federal budget
for generations to come with the prescription-drug benefit and the
creation and expansion of other programs. They have brought forth a
limitless flow of pork for the sole, immoral purpose of holding onto
office. They have expanded government regulation into every aspect of
our lives and refused to deal seriously with mounting domestic problems
such as illegal immigration. They have spent more time seeking the
favors of K Street lobbyists than listening to the conservatives who
brought them to power. And they have sunk us into the very sort of
nation-building war that candidate George W. Bush promised to avoid,
while ignoring rising threats such as communist China and the oil-rich
“new Castro,” Hugo Chavez.
Conservatives are as angry as
I have seen them in my nearly five decades in politics. Right now, I
would guess that 40 percent of conservatives are ambivalent about the
November election or want the Republicans to lose. But a Republican
loss of one or both houses of Congress would turn power over to the
likes of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Dare we risk such an outcome?
The answer is, we must take
that chance. If Big Government Republicans behave so irresponsibly and
betray the people who elected them, while we blindly, slavishly
continue backing them, we establish that there is no price to pay for
violating conservative principles. If we give in, we are forgetting the
lesson that mothers teach their daughters: Why buy a cow when the milk
is free?
And it may take a Republican
defeat to bring about a complete change in the GOP leadership in
Washington. Without such a change, real conservatives will never come
to power. We are like the Jews who wandered the desert for 40 years
until their old, corrupt leaders passed away; we will never reach the
Promised Land with these guys in charge.
Yes, on the morning after the
2006 election, if liberal Democrats have won big, it will sting. Many
in the media and in the GOP establishment will lay the blame on us for
the Republican defeat. The party line will be that Republicans would
have done better if they had been less conservative.
But the last 42 years have
taught conservatives a simple lesson: If defeat comes because you stand
firm for what you believe, and if you learn lessons that will help you
win in the future, a defeat can hold the seeds of a hundred victories.
In 1964, conservatives
created a national campaign for a somewhat reluctant Barry Goldwater,
pushed his nomination through the Republican Convention—and suffered a
disastrous defeat at the polls. Defeat came at the end of a campaign in
which the media, at every opportunity, seconded liberals’ charges that
conservatives were bigots, neo-Nazis, and reckless crazies who, given
political power, might destroy the world in a nuclear holocaust.
We were as thoroughly
defeated as anyone can be in American politics. Remember that,
following a 49-state defeat for the Democratic presidential candidate
in 1972, Democrats still controlled both houses of Congress, and that,
following another 49-state landslide defeat in 1984, they still
controlled the House of Representatives. In 1965, conservatives had
nothing—not even control of the Republican Party, whose establishment
assigned us the full blame for the loss.
But we had planted the seeds.
Logistically, an estimated
four million men and women had taken an active part in the Goldwater
campaign. This was unprecedented in modern American politics. LBJ had
only half as many workers, even though the Democratic voter pool was 50
percent larger.
In fundraising, the
difference was even greater. The Goldwater campaign was the first
popularly financed campaign in modern American history. The 1960
campaign, with between 40,000 and 50,000 individual contributors to
Nixon and some 22,000 to Kennedy, was typical of the approach from
previous years. Estimates of the number of contributors to Goldwater in
1964, combining federal, state, and local campaign groups, range from
650,000 to over a million. As you’d surmise from such an explosion in
the number of contributors, individual and smaller contributors became
hugely important. Only 28 percent of the Goldwater federal campaign
contributions were for $500 or more, compared to 69 percent of the
Democratic contributions.
We were learning how to
mobilize grassroots Americans for door-to-door campaigning as well as
raising money.
Meanwhile, we were learning
how to get around the establishment media. We created our own channels
of communication, using publications like National Review and Human
Events, Goldwater’s book The Conscience of a Conservative, and
underground bestsellers like Phyllis Schlafly’s A Choice, Not an Echo,
John Stormer’s None Dare Call It Treason, and J. Evetts Haley’s A Texan
Looks at Lyndon. Those books sold millions of copies without the
benefit of a major publisher or reviews in major publications.
A New York Times article of
the day expressed amazement that anyone would pay attention to these
books distributed by mail-order straight from the authors’ kitchens.
What the Times failed to appreciate was the beginning of a
communications revolution, of new and alternative media that allowed
conservatives to fly under the radar of the so-called mainstream media.
That revolution led to billions of political direct-mail messages from
my company alone, and eventually to conservatives’ use of talk radio,
cable news, and the Internet.
Another beneficial effect of
the 1964 defeat was that it cleared a lot of dead wood out of the
Republican Party. That made it easier for us to increase our influence
on the GOP, utilizing new technology, more effective techniques, and
fresh ideas. The Watergate scandal in 1974 eliminated more of the
Republican officeholders who had stood in the way of creating a more
broad-based party.
Defeat stings, but
conservatives should keep this in mind: Without the disastrous
congressional election of 1974, which dramatically weakened the party
establishment, Ronald Reagan would never have been able to mount a
nearly-successful challenge, two years later, to an incumbent president
of his own party.
Defeat stings, but if Ford
had beaten Jimmy Carter, it is highly unlikely that we would have
elected some 35 conservatives to the House as part of the “Newt
Gingrich class,” or that we would have beaten five powerful liberal
Democratic senators with conservatives in 1980.
Without a President Carter,
it is unlikely that Reagan would have been elected in 1980, or ever.
The conservatives-can’t-win stigma, which largely disappeared with
Reagan’s 1980 and 1984 landslides, would have continued indefinitely.
Without Reagan’s policies, we would probably not have experienced the
technological revolution of the past 20 years. But it’s possible that
none of that would have mattered, because without Reagan’s policies,
the Soviet Union and the Soviet Empire probably would have remained in
place, even as internal pressures pushed the USSR toward war using its
full arsenal of nuclear and biological weapons.
Defeat stings, but the
election of Bill Clinton in 1992 led directly to the Republican
takeover two years later. (Some conservatives foresaw this. One of my
associates, at an election night party in 1992, celebrated Clinton’s
victory by chanting, as a prediction for 1994, “Speaker Gingrich!
Speaker Gingrich!”) Had the hapless President George H.W. Bush been
reelected, it is a near certainty that the Democrats would have
retained control of Congress in 1994. In fact, they would probably have
gained congressional seats in 1994, then picked up the White House as
well in 1996. Someone like Al Gore might have been in the White House
on 9/11.
Sometimes a loss for the
Republican Party is a gain for conservatives. Often, a little taste of
liberal Democrats in power is enough to remind the voters what they
don’t like about liberal Democrats and to focus the minds of
Republicans on the principles that really matter. That’s why the
conservative movement has grown fastest during those periods when
things seemed darkest, such as during the Carter administration and the
first two years of the Clinton White House.
Conservatives are, by nature,
insurgents, and it’s hard to maintain an insurgency when your friends,
or people you thought were your friends, are in power. A Republican
loss this year could lead to a rebirth of the conservative movement, as
a Third Force independent of any political party.
If Democrats win in November,
it will seem like a dark time. But the darkest time comes before the
dawn.
Richard A. Viguerie, president of
ConservativeHQ.com: The Conservative Headquarters, is author of the new
book, Conservatives Betrayed: How George W. Bush and Other Big
Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause. His email is
rav@conservativesbetrayed.com .
Read complete
article.
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