New And Improved Ought To Mean Something More Than A New Label On An Old Product

The GOP "Pledge to America" released this morning at first glance looks like it has two main parts -- repeal Obamacare, and NOT to do a bunch of other stuff, most of which amounts to promising not to raise a variety of taxes. I'll look at it more after work, but this is far less impressive than 1994's "Contract with America." It's long, complex without being substantive, unlikely to be actually implemented even if it is meaningfully attempted, and looks like more of the same brand of stuff republicans have been selling for a long time. While there is not much in there that is objectionable, there is also not much that is inspiring or even interesting.

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She Turned Me Into A Newt

So newly-nominated U.S. Senate candidate apparently once "dabbled into witchcraft" back in her early twenties. That sounds like a gigantic yawner of a non-story to me.  There being no religious test for the holding of Federal office and all forms of religion being equally invalid nonsense to me, I fail to see why I should care that someone experimented with a religion not of her upbringing while she was a young adult.

Except it isn't a yawner of a non-story to a lot of people. This seems to have a reasonably large number of people upset.

I mean, come on, it's not like she experimented with Islam or anything like that.  Far, far better that she actually worshiped a divine personification of evil (one prominent conservative blogger calls this "excusable") than it would have been had she learned about a religion with over a billion adherents worldwide. And she's certainly come back to the cult of zombie-worship in a big way since then.

It's not at all clear to me that she actually did literally worship Satan anyway. From the small excerpts of the statements she made on Politically Incorrect that I can identify using the (admittedly minimal) effort I've put in to investigate story, it looks like she engaged in a single act of some kind of non-Christian worship while on a date with a man identified as a "witch." That means that, while in her early twenties, she dated a guy who was a Wiccan.

There are appreciable numbers of Wiccans out there and here's a news flash: they don't worship Satan. They worship -- well, there's no formal structure for Wicca so I don't think anyone can make a broad, categorical statement about who or what Wiccans worship as a group. Some Wiccans worship an entity they call "The Goddess" and others worship an amorphously-defined pantheon of spirits of nature, aiming at ultimately worshiping nature itself. In practice, Wicca involves honoring where your food comes from and the spirit of an animal that you consume, treating others the way you would want to be treated, and seeking an inner peace and harmony with the world around you. There are a lot of complex reasons, some rooted in over a thousand years' worth of history, why Wicca is called "witchcraft" and "Satan-worship," but taking its teachings at face value,* it is no more morally objectionable than pretty much any other religion you could care to name.

Wicca does not come with any of the hangups about sex associated with more traditional religions and for at least people, engaging in a Wiccan ritual is a countercultural and somewhat rebellious act. Some varieties of it use "ritualized" sex as part of an act of worship, so it could be that O'Donnell's date was actually simply trying to seduce her (and who knows, maybe he succeeded or didn't really have to try all that hard, that's between him and her and none of our business, although if so that would make the prudish O'Donnell something of a hypocrite) and all the Wiccan worship stuff was so much window dressing for this otherwise rather ordinary sort of human activity -- people in the twenties go out on dates and sometimes the dates go well and they have sex. It's, um, a lot of fun. O'Donnell was as entitled to have that sort of fun as anyone else.

Now, there's all sorts of reasons to be skeptical about Christine O'Donnell as a candidate for the U.S. Senate. She seems to take a rather casual view towards campaign finance laws and has allegedly used campaign donations to pay personal expenses like her rent. She has publicly voiced a deep identification with the women of the Lord of the Rings fantasy trilogy and the Chronicles of Narnia series (again with the magic and witchcraft!) which is fine as a light-hearted matter but she seems to take the analogy rather more seriously than that.  Her early career involved advocating such an uptight vision of human sexuality that she has had to deny rumors that if elected, she would attempt to criminalize masturbation (I would foresee practical enforcement problems).†

Is the nomination of such a whack-job (no masturbation pun intended) a sign of deep insanity within the Tea Party movement?  I don't really think so.  There is certainly a legitimate debate to be had about whether the Tea Party is now or is inevitably going to be a movement embracing social causes.

I've had the impression from the start that the motive force behind it is a simple fear of government in the hands of Barack Obama, but over time I've been forced to admit that there's more depth to it than dislike of Obama and from the beginning some criticism (although not a whole lot of venom) has been directed at former President Bush for his free-spending ways, too. There seems to be a desire for fiscal responsibility but at the same time a desire for lower taxes (the legend is that the "tea" in "tea party" stands for "Taxed Enough Already"), and those are probably incompatible goals for the foreseeable future.

though, and I wonder if what's really going on is that individual local areas of "tea party" activism are allowing the social and religious issues to creep in while others, like the one characterized by the woman interviewed on NPR who said that as far as she was concerned, the tea party movement was about "Constitutionally Limited Government, Fiscal Responsibility and Free Markets." If I were convinced that was the extent of what was going on with the tea party movement, I could more or less get behind it.

But when we find out that a Tea Party-approved insurgent candidate once, as a very young woman, experimented with a non-Christian religion, and all the energy and air goes out of her campaign with a gigantic WHOOSH!, yeah, that makes me think that religion is one of the motive forces powering the phenomenon. Then I see things like this article, and while I don't pretend that it (or almost anything else I can find) is unbiased, it makes me think that even though on its face this is a movement with objectives I can endorse, people like Christine O'Donnell are not people like me and I've little reason to believe that, were she somehow elected to the Senate despite having had a racy date with a Wiccan nearly twenty years ago, I would be pleased with the way she helped govern our country.

As a final observation, I'll note that the Tea Party's big primary successes this cycle all seem to have come in relatively small states, or in states whose nomination processes have rules that lend themselves well to "inside baseball." The most-touted Tea Party successes in Federal elections have come in Delaware, Nevada, Alaska, and Utah. O'Donnell won her nomination by about 3,500 votes out of under 60,000 cast. She won, and that's significant, but it seems that in larger jurisdictions, the "establishment" Republicans have large enough numbers and enough pull that candidates of all sorts are forced to steer towards the mainstream and abandon their personal ideals for the sake of becoming electable at all.‡

So while I don't think the reports of Christine O'Donnell's flirtation with Wicca in her twenties is particularly revelatory or damning about her, it does reveal something about the state of the Republican party and its relationship with the Tea Party movement. It suggests to me that the party as a whole is probably still unmoved by the Tea Party but in smaller groups, and smaller states, a group of people who haven't really thought things through and have difficulty separating libertarian from socially conservative ideals are calling the shots. In other words, there is little to no adult supervision.


* To demonstrate how ridiculous a religion is, you rarely need to go deeper than face value.
† But seriously, Christine. Diddle the bean already. Do us all a favor.
‡ I'm looking at you, Rand Paul.

Calling For A Truce

Mitch Daniels is the Governor of Indiana. He is a dark-horse possibility for the Republican nomination for President in 2012, although I'm not entirely sure of how much traction that would get. But he has raised his profile significantly by saying that Republicans need to call a "truce" on social issues and focus on anti-terrorism and fiscal responsibility.

He's quite serious about this.  And he should be taken seriously.  Daniels himself is a social conservative -- pro-life, anti-same-sex-marriage, a churchgoer, all the right credentials to be popular with members of the social conservative wing of the GOP, who fancy themselves collectively to be the Republican espirt vivant.  So maybe it takes a guy like Daniels to point out that our government's fiances and our collective security should be prioritized significantly above social issues which, social conservatives are sporadically quick to remind me, are generally left to the states rather than the Federal government.  He may not have the best credibility of fiscal issues, having been George W. Bush's Director of the Office of Management and Budget, but on the other hand that does make him knowledgeable about Federal spending.

I know social issues are a lot of fun for people.  Sometimes they're fun for me, too.  And there's less flexibility to cut the Federal budget as much as some would like.  But that's where our energies, our brainpower, and our political efforts need to be -- as a party, as a nation, and as responsible human beings.

Against Hyperbole

Some of you will no doubt condemn Rick Moran as a squishy RINO for writing these words.  But they need to be written, they need to be read, they need to be understood, they need to be implemented.  The political maneuver of "more conservative than thou" has led to an ideological arms race such that it seems one literally has to subscribe to an alternative version of reality in order to gain support from conservatives these days.  What Republicans need is a platform, not a slogan.

I'll try again because last time, it seemed like not a lot of people were listening.  So I'll try again here.

We should strengthen our dollars instead of devaluing them.  China is about to unpeg the Yuan from the dollar and that means greater uncertainty in the currency market -- an opportunity for strong dollars to buy back that debt, an opportunity to invest in China and further link its economic structure to that of the West, which can only create more peace, more stability, more prosperity for everyone.

We should shed our nativism and offer the people of the world a reasonable path to U.S. citizenship for those who wish to come here, work hard, pay their taxes, and add to our national strength.

We should recognize that national security and civil liberties are not mutually exclusive choices and proudly proclaim that America is both the home of the brave and the land of the free.  We are strong enough, clever enough, and powerful enough to have both strength and freedom.  Deranged clerics hiding in dusty caves in Afghanistan are not powerful enough to take that away from us.

We should restructure our tax codes so that those who consume and use the benefits of our society and our government the most are those who pay the most to support it, rather than those who earn high incomes.  A national sales tax offers the most efficient avenue towards a fair distribution of the tax burden and it deserves careful and serious examination.



As we consider restructuring our government's funding patterns, we should also dedicate ourselves to controlling its spending patterns.  We should undertake paying down our national debt as a mission of similar national importance as the Apollo Project or the Cold War were.  This means restricting entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, and now to the new health insurance entitlement.  It also means cutting into popular tax deductions like home mortgage interest.  It means the military not buying as many of the awesome new weapons as I would like to see it buy.  No one will like getting fewer government goodies right away.  But after a few years, we'll have adapted and our children and grandchildren will thank us for giving them a government not saddled with a century's worth of debt.


That doesn't mean the government should stop spending money altogether.  We should build a space elevator.  This will inspire a generation of young Americans to orient their educations and careers in the sciences and serve as a tremendous utility for us in exploiting space for generations to come.

We should make it easy for utilities to build more nuclear power plants, and establish a half dozen ultra-safe, ultra-deep repositories for the waste scattered around the continental U.S.  At the same time, oil isn't going away as the best portable fuel for vehicles any time soon, so we should invest in research to further economize shale oil petroleum extraction.

We should buy every poppy grown in Afghanistan and use it to make medicine, which we then sell to the rest of the world.  This puts drug dealers around the world out of business, it defunds al-Qaeda, it wins us the hearts and minds of the people of Afghanistan such that we no longer need to pin our hopes for a stable government on corrupt, unreliable puppets like Hamid Karzai.

We should cool our political alliance with the ethically bankrupt Saudi Arabian regime.  Not end it; they are economically and strategically important.  But until the Saudis can develop a society that more genuinely embraces friendship with the West and demonstrates a willingness to enter the twenty-first century in terms of morality, law, and diplomacy, they should be kept at arms' length.  Simultaneously, we should understand and exploit the deep sectarian differences between the Saudis and the Iranians, and let it be known to both of them that anything more than hostile words aimed at Israel will be met with an overwhelmingly unpleasant response.

We should warm our friendship with India and encourage American investment in the Indian economy.  India is the world's largest democracy and the strides it has made into the twenty-first century are awe-inspiring.  India should serve as a flagship example of what happens when a nation enters the family of western-style government and society.

In concert with our treaty partners, we should seriously consider expanding NAFTA to appropriate Caribbean and Central American nations.  Good candidates for inclusion in this NAFTA are the Bahamas, Costa Rica, Colombia, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic.  More trade means more economic growth, more stability, a freer exchange of people and ideas, and therefore more peace and more prosperity for everyone involved.

We should reconsider how judges serve in our Federal judiciary.  We ought not to be slobbering over the possibilities of what will happen now that a nonagenerian Justice of the Supreme Courtis stepping down, nor should a man be forced to wait until he is ninety years old to retire in order to feel confident enough in the political process that he can know he will be replaced by someone he would trust to responsibly step into his shoes.  Turnover within the judiciary should be slow and measured, but constant and predictable.  It should buttress judicial independence, and not force the members of the courts to keep their fingers on the political pulse of the nation when making rulings on the law.

These ought not to be considered radical proposals.  They do not consist of whining about how health care is fascism or agonizing over the difference between a long-form birth certificate and a certificate of live birth.  They are not Hate and they will not placate the shrill ideologues filling the echo chamber of American politics with ever-more unpleasant screeches.  They are solid proposals and some of them are not particularly fun but they are obviously necessary.  These are the sorts of things people ought to like seeing the government do, and I predict that they are the sorts of things the electorate will reward if they are seriously attempted.

Why The Tea Party Movement Is Doomed

Like it or not, the United States of America has a two-party political system.  Eventually, any political movement that gathers any steam, any appreciably number of followers, or any recognized intellectual force, becomes a plum for one or another of the parties to grab.  That party will gain votes if it can show that it can make common cause with the new movement, and fields candidates who say things that are sympathetic to that movement.  That is what is happening with the Tea Party movement now.  When Sarah Palin tells Tea Partiers that the time is coming very soon to pick a "D" or an "R," she's quite right -- and no one has done more than her to court the Tea Party votes to the GOP than any other mainstream politician.  Not that this would have been a difficult sell -- while Tea Partiers certainly had criticism of the free-spending ways of the Bush Administration, the focus of their invective was always aimed at the Obama White House and the Democratic-controlled Congress, and the anger did not coalesce into political action until after the 2008 elections.  Gov. Palin was always pretty popular with the Tea Party crowd anyway, and she never left the GOP.

So that's why the Tea Party movement is doomed -- not that it has failed to articulate something or to meaningfully affect in the political discourse.  Indeed, it is its very success and energy that dooms it to become co-opted and assimilated into the GOP.  The only real question is whether it becomes an identifiable faction within the party the way gun rights advocates, pro-lifers, budget hawks, and religious conservatives are, or rather stands for a set of generalized and somewhat indefinite concepts.  I tend to think the latter.

Election Depression

A few days ago I was philosophically pleased and comfortable with the state of our nation despite its fractious politics.  This morning I'm less pleased.  There are several reasons why.

First, it appears that by about a margin of 53% to 47%, voters in Maine have repealed a same-sex marriage law.  This is a margin similar to California's Proposition 8 a year ago.  Along the way, the backers of the initiative fought tooth and nail to not disclose where the money to pay for their political campaign came from, and once again claimed to be "protecting marriage," "protecting churches," "protecting families," and "protecting children."  Protecting them from what?

It was another campaign based on questionable political tactics and lies, with the goal of enshrining bigotry into law.

Second, the weight of the world was placed on a special election in New York's 23rd Congressional District.  This district, which is very rural, looks on a map a little bit like Canada dropped several gobs of paint on top of New York State, which then oozed down about three-quarters of the way to Albany. It has always been a Republican stronghold; it hasn't sent a Democrat to Congress since before the Civil War.  The Republicans nominated a member of the state legislature and the Democrats found their patsy to stand up for the party, hoping forlornly for something bizarre to happen.  Well, it did; "Tea Party" conservatives found the Republican nominee "too liberal" and ran a political novice against her on the Conservative Party ballot (New York has four political parties, with the Liberal and Conservative parties being used for this purpose often enough to tweak moderates to more extreme positions).  Whether she was "too liberal" because she had voted for tax increases in Albany or because she was pro-choice remains a little bit uncertain in my mind.  But the effect of the split the right-of-center votes was to siphon off enough support from the mainstream GOP candidate that the Democrat appeared to have a plurality.  So then the mainstream Republican withdrew from the race -- and endorsed the Democrat.  Now, it appears that the Democrat has won, although the polls are very close and it's at least mathematically possible that the Conservative could pull it out; I'm not fluent enough in the politics of the area to know whether that's a realistic possibility or not.

In the grand scheme of things, one seat in the House of Representatives switching parties isn't going to matter all that much.  There are two depressing things about this election.  First and foremost, it seems there was thuggery and intimidation at the polls, and the supporters of the insurgent conservative candidate are to blame.  It was depressing when progressives sent out thugs to poll-watch in 2008 and it's depressing to see conservatives do it now.  But while of less immediacy, I find more pernicious in the long run the fact that, even as the Conservative candidate (prematurely?) conceded defeat, the social conservatives have called this race a victory for conservatives over liberal elements in their own party.  They didn't care about winning the election.  They cared about ideological purity within their own party. 


This is not a recipe for political success, as the apparent results in New York demonstrate.  The recipe for success is what happened in Virginia, where the Republican candidate found a way to bridge the gap between the two wings of his party, keep the voters' eyes on the prize -- the promise of good government -- and got a majority of voters behind him.  Or even in New Jersey, where the Republican gubernatorial candidate withstood charges of corruption (and obesity) to promise competent government and defeat the (bald) incumbent.

Deliver good government.  Work change incrementally.  Make room at the table.  Find common causes.  Oh, and duck the bigotry.

I feel like something of a lone wolf howling at the moon on this.  I know I'm not, that other sane Republicans can see an existential threat to our party in this growing schism.  But for the moment, we are being hooted down as "liberals," "traitors," or subject to ad hominem attacks.  Both of the thoughtful and well-written bloggers I linked to in this paragraph have recently been at the receiving end of intramural brawls and efforts to purge them from the "movement."  As for the national party leadership, I've got to conclude that at minimum, the RNC is completely useless in dealing with the schism.  I saw this sort of thing emerging in the California GOP twenty years ago, and just look at the electoral success it's brought us in California ever since.

The trend will continue, with a higher-stakes primary battle in Florida between Governor Charlie Crist, an ally of John McCain, and Tea Partier Marco Rubio for the Republican nomination to the U.S. Senate.  That primary election will probably be the playboard upon which the opening moves of the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination are executed, and right now the likely candidates are looking like Palin, Pawlenty, Huckabee, and Romney; the surprising early leader is Mike Huckabee.  Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, but I would have thought it would have been Palin or Romney.  Other potential candidates have either self-destructed on the "Appalachian Trail" or exorcised themselves from contention.  Of course, 2012 is a long time in the future in political terms so it's easy to read too much into the maneuvers and polling.

My big point here is that as I had sadly feared, the hard-line conservatives motivated by social issues and unthinking reactionarianism, appear to have taken the upper hand in the struggle for the soul of the GOP.  William F. Buckley described his efforts, back when he helped revive conservatism as a vital, intellectually important force in American politics, as standing athwart history yelling "Stop!"  But it's important to read the entire thing, to understand what Buckley wanted conservatives to do once they got history to pause -- and that was to think carefully about what would happen next, to take the time to understand what's important and good about our country and adapt those ideas to the problems of the day.

I won't say that there are no Tea Party Conservatives or social conservatives who would do that.  Plenty are.  And sometimes I'll agree with them and sometimes I'll disagree with them.  But there doesn't seem to be a lot of thought going on at all over in that camp.  There's a lot of emotion, a lot of passion, a lot of something that smells like fanaticism.  If anyone stopped to think about same-sex marriage, they'd see that it is where the future is and opposition to it is based on nothing but bigotry; it's fanaticism that makes people adhere to that bigotry -- which is why I lump the Maine SSM election results in with the intramural knife fight (aside from the fact that it's a good bet that there is considerable overlap between Tea Partiers rejoicing at the NY-23 results and anti-SSM advocates rejoicing at the Maine results).* 

I have not drunk the Kool-Aid and I find the recent behavior of those who have to be repellent.  It's fanaticism that rejoices in causing a Republican candidate for office to withdraw from a race and endorse a Democrat; it's fanaticism that causes conservatives to think that electing a Democrat to Congress is better than electing a moderate Republican.  And while I can deal with a thoughtful conservative who disagrees with me on individual planks in our party's platform, it's fanaticism that repels me.  There's no room for someone like me in a party of fanatics.


* If you're a Tea Partier who is in favor of same-sex marriage, please comment here so that I can at least know that someone like that even exists.

Taking Charge Of The Reboot?

John McCain wants to re-make the GOP.  Well, someone has to do it:

...those familiar with McCain’s thinking say he has expressed serious concern about the direction of the party and is actively seeking out and supporting candidates who can broaden the party’s reach. In McCain’s case, that means backing conservative pragmatists and moderates.

This is almost certain to put him on a collision course with the future Presidential campaign of McCain's former running mate, who very clearly wants to push the party in the opposite direction. A result which I am not the only one thinks would be bad for the party in the long run.

Pragmatism inherently involves leaving ideological perfection behind and instead focusing on both what works and what is possible to accomplish with the political, fiscal, and social tools available. For that reason, of course, McCain's efforts will be seen as tantamount to treason by the social conservatives. But as far as I'm concerned, they are yesterday's news and the future lies in more or less the direction McCain is pointing to.

Declining To Attract Decline To State Voters (UPDATED)

The California Republican Party, acting through its convention of generally self-identified party activists, has decided that it will not permit "decline to state" voters to participate in its primaries. The effect of this will be to put more moderate Republicans at a disadvantage in pursuing office. This is a win for ideological purists and a loss for voters like me, who would prefer to see a Republican candidate be competitive in a marginal district rather than make a campaign pitch that alienates centrist voters.

More After The Jump -->

From The RINO Files

Boycott WorldNetDaily. They are doing much more harm than good.

Damn skippy. High time someone said it. Those guys are nuts. Not only am I uninterested in the bizarre rantings of far-righties, I'm getting sick and tired of having to apologize for them or explain them away.

Republicans can't be the party of reflexive anger, the party of "no," without at least having something substantive to put on the table. I've said it before -- nuclear power plants, balanced budgets, strong dollars, means-testing Social Security, judicial reform that isn't hostile to the concept of an independent judiciary, immigration reform that still allows for immigration to take place, and an explicit disregard of adults having consensual sex is the platform to offer. Instead, we're getting people chanting "show me the birth certificate!" with their hands placed firmly over their eyes, and Glenn "Crybaby" Beck slipping beyond the fold of madness before our very eyes.

Maybe Bruce Bartlett has the right idea. Maybe us moderates should take a time out, let the far-right social cons run things the way they like for a while, and in 2013, move back in to pick up the pieces.

Whip Ads: A Sign Of The Times

A cruise of Real Clear Politics this morning revealed videos six hit advertisements from moveon.org -- aimed at Dianne Feinstein, Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu, Mark Pryor, and Tom Carper. What all of these politicians have in common is a reputation as "moderate" or "centrist" Democrats. What all these advertisements have in common is that they take these Democrats to task for deviating from the "progressive" agenda moveon.org would prefer to see enacted into policy.

In the past, moveon.org has focused most of its vitriol at Republicans. But this seems to be becoming a thing of the past -- these "whip ads" are intended to push the Democrats into a more rigid, left-wing conformity. For better or for worse, though, they also signal the fact that for political progressives, the Republicans have become simply irrelevant:

Which is, frankly, becoming a less and less controversial sort of position for people to take -- even those who feel a natural gravitation away from Democrats.

As further support for my proposition that, until further notice, the GOP is irrelevant, consider this. If there were to be a Republican Presidential primary held right now, it would be Mitt Romney versus Sarah Palin, with Mike Huckabee playing spoiler. The tactical parallels to the Democratic primary in 2008 are obvious. The difference is that all three of these "leaders" are what counts as "old news" and therefore substantially weakened as candidates despite the fact that they would be running against a charismatic incumbent Democrat with the best political fundraising machine ever assembled.

Tow of the four even remotely interesting GOP Presdiential possibility from the GOP have been plucked out of the running already, one by a clever political appointment from that same formidable incumbent, and the other through an act of political self-immolation. I use the phrase "remotely" interesting because from what I can tell, Tim Pawlenty is really dull. The Exorcist is not boring, but does appear to be from the crazy wing of the party rather than the one that might one day become a force to contend with again.

So it makes a lot of sense for people who are trying to affect and control public policy to simply ignore Republicans completely. As things look right now, the chances of the Republicans being relevant to shaping or influencing national policymaking in a meaningful way are slim to none, at least until after the 2016 elections. That's a long way out, and yeah, a lot of things can happen between now and 2012. But sometimes, the road out of the wilderness is exactly as long and difficult as it appears when you go in.

There are two strategies being suggested as the way to get out of the wilderness. One is to narrow the party's focus and pump up the base's numbers -- that is to say, the 2008 platform, only more of it. The other is to broaden and expand the base by reaching out to different groups and presenting different kinds of policies -- that is to say, the "big tent." I'm a big-tenter. But it seems likely that the "pump up the base" strategy is what's going to be tried first.

See What Happens, Republicans!

Moderates respond well to messages of fiscal conservatism, when they are devoid of social authoritarianism. The appropriate response to this revelation is not to explain why moderates should become more conservative.

An Example Of How THE ISSUE Trumps Everything Else When It Comes To The Supreme Court

Rush Limbaugh called Sonia Sotomayor a "reverse racist." But he may support her nomination to the Supreme Court anyway. Why? She's Catholic and has an unclear record on THE ISSUE. That is why my guide to language surrounding Supreme Court nominations refers so heavily to that particular matter. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

By the way, it's not insignificant that she's Catholic. Consider:

Justice	Religion	Voting Pattern on Abortion Rights Cases
John Roberts	Roman Catholic	Restrict Roe/Casey
John Paul Stevens	Protestant	Affirm Roe/Casey
Antonin Scalia	Roman Catholic	Overturn Roe/Casey
Anthony Kennedy	Roman Catholic	Varies
David Souter	Protestant	Affirm Roe/Casey
Clarence Thomas	Roman Catholic	Overturn Roe/Casey
Ruth Bader Ginsburg	Jewish	Affirm Roe/Casey
Stephen Breyer	Jewish	Affirm Roe/Casey
Samuel Alito	Roman Catholic	Restrict on Roe/Casey

What this adds up to is that all non-Catholic Justices would sustain existing abortion law; only Kennedy would keep Planned Parenthood v. Casey (which altered and moderately restricted Roe v. Wade, based on an "undue restriction" and "viability" standard) in place. Note that in the case of Roberts and Alito, I'm reading tea leaves a little bit from their Federalism opinions and votes in Gonzales v. Carhart.

So Kennedy right now is the deciding vote; he's generally voted to affirm Casey, but in Carhart, he sustained the ban on partial-birth abortions, thus restricting abortion rights somewhat. Since Sotomayor is going to replace Souter, and the religion-based voting pattern holds with her, that turns a reliable "affirm" vote into a wobbly vote to at least further restrict abortion rights.

Republicans Behaving Badly

When I see stuff like this, it makes me want to throw my hands up in despair and change my party's registration.

Not just the "Democrat Socialist Party" resolution, although that is at once profoundly silly, unnecessarily offensive, and ultimately misguided and counterproductive. But also the idea that the party, having just chosen a new administrative leader, feels the need to hamstring him. If he's doing such a bad job, why not remove him from his position altogether and get a replacement? There is no shortage of available candidates.

Now, when I see stuff like this, I'm heartened and want to stay. Congressman Toomey is not someone on whom I expect to agree on a lot of social issues. But he seems to be reaching out to moderate Republicans like me to tell me that I too have a place at the table (or in the tent, to use the metaphor). I get the opposite message from a guy like Chris Rubio in Florida. And from Dick Cheney -- by the way, Mr. Cheney, attacking Colin Powell is not a good way to make friends and influence people in the middle part of the political spectrum.

Congressman Toomey is playing it smart -- he isn't compromising his own socially conservatives positions, but he is reaching out to consolidate different kinds of Republicans around his candidacy. If he can pull it off, he'll be doing his part to keep the party's coalition together rather than, say, Senator Jim DeMint's avowed preference for ideological purity at the expense of legislative impotence. (DeMint is wrong; it would be better to have 60 Republicans in the Senate than 30, even if -- particularly if -- that majority were squishy on the issues.) That's what people in this corner of the party can reasonably hope for from people in his corner of the party. It's a shame that more conservatives in the GOP aren't following his example.

Search For A Platform Continues

Andrew Sullivan's conservative credentials are suspect these days. On the other hand, the very fact that his credentials are suspect is a symptom of something wrong with the right side of the political spectrum. Still here's what he has to say for himself:

On most issues, I side with what used to be the center-right, but the GOP is poison to me and many others. Why?

Their abandonment of limited government, their absurd spending under Bush, their contempt for civil liberties, their rigid mindset, their hostility to others, their worship of the executive branch, their contempt for judicial checks, their cluelessness with racial minorities and immigrants, their endorsement of torture as an American value, their homophobia, their know-nothing Christianism, and the sheer vileness of their leaders - from the dumb-as-a-post Steele to the brittle, money-grubbing cynic, Coulter and hollow, partisan neo-fascist Hannity.

Sullivan is maybe a little harsh in his criticism of Michael Steele -- I'd agree that while he has not articulated himself well, he has raised some decent points to consider. I'd describe him as "clumsy" based on what I've seen so far, but not "dumb-as-a-post."

"Know-nothing Christianism?" you cry, "What the hell does that mean?" The answer is, it's that contempt for education and knowledge in favor of faith and religion, it's what kept Congressman Mike Pence from being able to answer some relatively simple questions about science. It's not that Pence is dumb or because he doesn't know the scientifically right answers, but because he's afraid of offending his constituency and therefore doesn't know the right political answer:

But aside from that quibble, Sullivan is spot on. It seems to me that there are enough voices are out there crying for a real platform to emerge. When will someone actually put something on the table?

Should Have Been President

In 1988, I supported Jack Kemp's bid for President. I was moved by his energy and passion and charisma, by the powerful way he argued for individual empowerment, limiting government, privatization, and the powerful force of individual freedoms. Even then I knew that the anti-abortion stance was an inconsistency with the rest of his platform but I also picked up the vibe that Kemp was not particularly interested in prosecuting that plank of his platform; he had to mollify a bloc of voters with it and that was about all.

I was quite disappointed when he fared so poorly in the early GOP primaries, and the contest turned into a duel between George Bush (the Elder) and Bob Dole. I was excited to see him in the administration trying out new ideas in the world of social welfare and reaching out to non-traditional Republican constituencies. He still seemed like a vision of what the Republicans could look like, how they could grow and improve. Even in 1996, I'd hoped he could summon up the political strength to put on a bid for President and his selection as Bob Dole's running mate was about the highest point in that dismal campaign for me.

I have to wonder how things could have been different had he become Ronald Reagan's successor instead of George Bush. His domestic agenda would have been very different than Bush the Elder's, although I think his foreign policy would have been largely the same.

Jack Kemp died last night. His death underlines, at least in my mind, the need for Republicans and conservatives to start thinking about ideas again. Kemp's political moment had long passed, of course, but that was something he had grown to be comfortable with after the predestined failure of the 1996 Presidential campaign. Kemp was content to enjoy his family and his role as an out-of-the-game "ideas man." Ideas were his strong suit; political machinery, not so much. Which is why he was never President -- but should have been.

Not Enough To Say No

Jon Huntsman is a possible candidate for President in 2012? I'd not really thought about it, but I have to admit that he's stepping up to say something in a real leadership capacity today. (People have to start getting his name right, for starters.) Politico calls him the fastest-rising Republican you've never heard of, and that's about right because he seems to have kept a very low profile despite providing what appears to be pretty competent government to his state.

My point today is, he's the guy who's saying, "You can't just say no. You can't just obstruct or obfuscate." Republicans need to actually come up with new ideas of their own. They need to show that, if given power back, they will actually do something that could potentially be beneficial with that power. Otherwise, they'll be reduced to doing what Democrats did for a long time -- waiting for the party in power to screw the pooch so badly that the public will grow disgusted with them and hand things off to anyone else on general principles.

In fact, even that's a halfway unfair characterization of how the Democrats got their mojo back -- they did say they were going to change and then end the war in Iraq. But it only worked because the public had grown so disgusted with the way the war was going that they were looking for anything, any strategy, anyone, who would effect a meaningful change.

This is why the Tea Party movement is not proving particularly useful or effective in terms of effecting political change (as many people, including me, predicted). It's fun to say "no" all the time because it's easy to criticize and it's easy to get party unity and strong discipline on opposing someone. And it's a valid political point to be against something. But when you're just opposed to something, it sort of ends there. (And your message gets co-opted pretty easily.)

The trick is to channel that energy into being in favor of something. That's how real change happens. Huntsman is dead on right about that. That's something that Barack Obama did when he ran for President, and in retrospect it's amazing how effective he was at it. He managed to advocate a whole constellation of policy ideas, at a very high level of generalization, by talking constantly about "hope" and "change." Yes, I know it's not like he only said those words on his campaign but he never really offered much by way of specifics. Really, he did little more than identify a set of problems and indicated that it would be a priority in his White House.

Now is the time when the rubber meets the road. Now is the time for specifics. Obama is still short on actual, substantive policy ideas. You want proof? Take a look at his budget report. I did yesterday and I was astonished. On the surface, it looks great. There's all sorts of policy statements that sound good; it's difficult to disagree with much of what's there. But look closer. It's about 170 pages long. Twelve pages are a "don't blame me for the crappy economy" argument, which blithely ignores that as a Senator, Obama was part of the team that created the budgets the country's been running on for the past two years and he personally did nothing to help. A sin of omission, to be sure.

Then, the next twenty-six pages are a wish list of policy changes that have apparently not been thought through all the way, dressed up as intellectual justifications for optimistic economic projections. After that, you get more policy wish lists, going department by department through the whole Federal government. You don't get to any real numbers until you hit the appendix. Even then, the numbers are presented in a summary fashion, making it very difficult to figure out exactly what these departments are going to do with all this money. You're better off using this third-party produced interactive budget toy to break down where money is going to go.

This creates an opportunity for Republicans. Obama needs actual ideas. Once you get past the wish lists, he's really short on specifics. Repubicans, step up to the plate and plunk your ideas down on the table. Do it now, and argue for them now. Don't "save" them for a rainy day when the Democrats have flubbed things up so badly you get back in power by default.

If you do this, one of two things will happen. First possibility -- Obama and the Democrats will actually adopt the ideas you argue for. If this happens, you get credit as the originator of the idea and as someone who offers "bipartisan" solutions to problems. Second possibility -- Obama and the Democrats will reject your ideas. If this happens, you get credit as having offered a solution to a problem, and you get to lambaste the Democrats as the real obstructionists. Either way, you win politically.

But you have to have actual ideas to offer, first. Here, let me help you -- I've offered ten substantive ideas that are at least defensible from a policy standpoint and not already occupied as Democratic turf. They could make for bright points in a comprehensive Republican policy platform. Some young (that is, in his or her 50's) Republican holding a Governor's seat or a Senator's seat or some other prominent elective office, to fashion that policy platform and combine that with his or her political machinery and charisma. Right now, the closest things to leaders that Republicans have are a talk show host who cheers on defections from the party, a former Congressman who's been out of office for over ten years, and a floor leader in the House whose policy contributions so far consist of complaints of nausea. So the floor's wide open, as far as I can see it.

But it's not enough to look good and criticize the incumbent. You have to have some actual ideas in your head. Ah, but that's always the hard part, isn't it?

The Tighter You Clench Your Fist, The Less Sand You Can Hold

Upon hearing this afternoon of Senator Arlen Specter's decision to switch parties and run for re-election as a Democrat, my very first reaction was, "Well, who can blame him?" The Republican Party has little to offer Specter. The party offered little support for his political efforts and conservatives within the party made it clear that they did not like his refusal to adhere to party discipline.

And what was his incentive to do so? Avoiding a primary challenge? Not getting stabbed in the back by his Republican colleagues in the Senate? Demographics don't favor Republicans in Pennsylvania and aren't going to again, at least not for the foreseeable future. I'm a little surprised that Specter didn't switch affiliations to become an independent, but then again I suppose that in a state the size of Pennsylvania it's extremely difficult to overcome the power of party affiliation.

A guy can only take so much abuse. Simply put, Specter was made to feel unwelcome in the GOP and now, he'll have to find a comfort zone in the other party. The tent just got a little bit smaller, and the Republicans are now politically weaker -- substantially weaker -- because of it. Assuming that Al Franken is certified as Minnesota's newest Senator, Specter will now be the 60th U.S. Senator caucusing with the Democrats, rendering the majority in the Senate (theoretically) filibuster-proof.

Such are the rewards of insisting on ideological purity instead of building broad governing coalitions: moderates bail out and go to the other party. The lesson to the GOP here is in the title to this post.

Republicans For Same-Sex Marriage (A Continuing Series)

One of John McCain's campaign managers is calling on the Republican Party to embrace same-sex marriage. His reasons:

I believe conservatives, more than liberals, insist that rights come with responsibilities. No other exercise of one's liberty comes with greater responsibilities than marriage. ... It cannot be argued that marriage between people of the same sex is un-American or threatens the rights of others. On the contrary, it seems to me that denying two consenting adults of the same sex the right to form a lawful union that is protected and respected by the state denies them two of the most basic natural rights affirmed in the preamble of our Declaration of Independence — liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Right on, Steve Schmidt. Republican should not be afraid of arguing for individual rights and liberties. They should embrace them. It's the right thing to do. And, as Schmidt argues, it's the only long-term plan for political viability on this issue.

Memo To Wingnuts: You're Not Helping

A political movement, with populist roots, that expresses dismay and resentment towards high taxes, high levels of deficit spending, accumulating national debt, and grasping increases of Federal power over the economy is a good thing. It can provide fuel and foundation for significant, principled, and effective political action. And it can be a force for the creation of good policy and making America a better place.

The "tea party" movement is not that movement. Glenn Beck's teary-eyed rants are not that call to action.

It could have been, which is more the pity. But with stuff like this going on at the "tea party" movements, it's going to be very difficult for the movement to regain whatever credibility it started out with. The linked video begins with the scheduled speaker and group leader announcing that 1) Barack Obama's presidency represents the culmination and last step in a fifty-year long effort by the international communist conspiracy to take over the United States, 2) he urges all of the "tea party" attendees to not send their children to college, and 3) he holds himself out as an example of a principled Amercan by not paying any taxes at all. And then at just shy of five minutes into the video, there is this colloquy:

Off-Camera Woman: [Shouts] Burn the books!
[Scattered applause, possibly not for her]
Off-Camera Man: I don’t think you were serious about that, were you?
Woman: I am too.
Man: "Burn the books?"
Woman: The ones in college, those, those brainwashing books.
Man: [laughs nervously] "Brainwashing books?"
Woman: Yes!
Man: Which ones are those?
Woman: Like, the evolution crap, and... [pause] Yeah!

Now, the voices are off camera, and the quality of those voices is noticeably better than the quality of the audio pickup for the speaker leading the discussion. What's more, characterizing conservatives as book-burners plays very closely into left-wing stereotypes about what conservatives really are, and that is for the most part a maliciously untrue characterization.

So my B.S. meter is getting some medium-range readings here, because it's plausible in my mind that the voice-overs are actually dubs put in to subvert the message that the "tea party" organizer is trying to spread. Or that she was there and actually said these things, but was fulfilling the role of agent provocateur.

But on the other hand, sadly, I must admit that there are some genuinely crazy types out there. And this "tea party" thing is accreting Kool-Aid drinkers at an alarming rate. Honorary movement leder Glenn Beck is drawing what appear to be non-sarcastic concerns about his mental health based on his on-camera conduct like pretending to set someone on fire in the studio to make a point. And there are some people out there who think that censorship (although they often call it something else) has a place in our society, people who tend to do things like try to get Harry Potter books pulled out of public libraries because they are offended by the notion of witchcraft.

For those who oppose the social, foreign-policy, and/or economic goals of the President, not controlling this sort of thing is going to prove very, very counterproductive.

Charles Is Right

Torture is in the news again, as the Red Cross joins the ranks of international organizations condemning the United States for using torture to interrogate terrorism prisoners, this time focusing on medical doctors who participated in the process to make sure that the torture didn't kill any of the detainees. I frankly still have a hard time believing that Americans would actually would have done things like this. I desperately want this report to be incorrect.

Now, as many of you Readers know, it's not often that I would recommend listening to the Rush Limbaugh show. It's really only interesting when a caller gets the drop on the host. Like here.

The caller is a disgusted Republican, a McCain voter, who insists on moral grounds that the United States should not torture anyone. He's apparently someone who would buy into the policy I would impose were I the President: "No torture. Ever." The caller also correctly points out out that Rush's "Operation Chaos" intended to prolong the tight Democratic primary race between Hillary Clinton and the eventual winner failed to prevent the Democrats from rallying around Barack Obama in the general election. And most stingingly, he points out that the uniformity of thought and opinion on issues like torture -- it's okay to torture sometimes, and what we're doing isn't torture anyway -- is indicative of some sort of brainwashing.

Frankly, I can see where the caller is coming from. Now, I know that Limbaugh occasionally gets callers who pose as Republicans or conservatives and turn out to be plants (and Limbaugh secretly loves it when they sneak past his screeners because it's good for ratings when they do). But for his criticism, he earns a condemnation from Limbaugh to the effect that someone who says these sorts of things is not a real Republican and that he is an ignorant liability to the nation. If that is true, then count me within those ranks, too. Also count me as mystified when people who claim to take their morality and guidance on public policy issues from the Bible trying to make breathing room for torture in our laws.

What is disappointing, though, is that the caller accuses guys like Limbaugh of being brainwashed and is promptly condemned for exercising independent thought and coming up with a result to a policy issue that differs from Limbaugh. It lends credence to the brainwashing accusation, and it lends credence to the meme that Republicans all adhere to a line of policy dictated from Limbaugh's radio studio. If Republicans are capable of exercising independent thought, then they need to tolerate one another when they come up with different ideas than the ones espoused by Rush Limbaugh. But a constellation of different policy ideas seems to be precisely what a large faction of the GOP wants to discourage.

Which is why that faction of the party is and will continue to be a gigantic albatross around our necks when it comes to be election time.

The proud policy of the United States ought to be, and it ought to be Republicans pushing as hard as they can to implement it, is as follows:

1. No torture.
(a) Ever.
(b) Under any circumstances.
2. Our enemies are not our teachers. We hold ourselves to our own high standards, and we will not lower ourselves to the low moral behavior of others even if "they would do it to us" (See Torture Policy Rule 1(b).)