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Left Turn: Is the GOP conservative? (National Review Editors, July 23, 2003)

The news this summer has been rather bleak for conservatives. The Supreme Court first decided to write "diversity" into the
Constitution. A few days later, it issued a ruling on sodomy laws that called into question its willingness to tolerate any state laws based on traditional understandings of sexual morality. In neither case was there much pretense that the Court was merely following the law. At this point it takes real blindness to deny that the Court rules us and, on emotionally charged policy issues, rules us in accord with liberal sensibilities. And while the Court issued its edicts and the rest of the world adjusted, a huge prescription-drug bill made its way through Congress. That bill will add at least $400 billion to federal spending over the next ten years, and it comes on top of already gargantuan spending increases over the last five years. The fact that a pro-growth tax cut is going into effect this summer hardly compensates for these developments--especially since expanding entitlements threaten to exert upward pressure on tax rates in the future.

Republicans have been complicit in each of these debacles. Both the affirmative-action and sodomy decisions were written by Reagan appointees. President Bush actually cheered the affirmative-action decision for recognizing the value of "diversity." Bush has requested spending increases, and not just for defense and homeland security. He has failed to veto spending increases that went beyond his requests. But let it not be said that the president has led his party astray. Many congressional Republicans have strayed even more enthusiastically. Bush originally wanted to condition prescription-drug benefits on seniors' joining reformed, less expensive health plans. When the idea was raised, House Speaker Denny Hastert called it "inhumane." Congressional appropriators--the people who write the spending bills--have been known to boast that they would beat the president if ever he dared to veto one of their products.

We have never been under any illusions about the extent of Bush's conservatism. He did not run in 2000 as a small-government conservative, or as someone who relished ideological combat on such issues as racial preferences and immigration. We supported him nonetheless in the hope that he would strengthen our defense posture, appoint originalist judges, liberalize trade, reduce tax rates, reform entitlements, take modest steps toward school choice. Progress on these fronts would be worth backsliding elsewhere. We have been largely impressed with Bush's record on national security, on judicial appointments (although the big test of a Supreme Court vacancy will apparently not occur during this term), and on taxes. On the other issues he has so far been unable to deliver.

There rages in the heart of every ideologue a desire to be pure even at the expense of being disempowered. The editors here are engaged in the classic mistake of making the perfect the enemy of the good and have compounded it by divoring themselves from political reality.

Besides restoring civility and decency to the White House, President Bush has pushed ahead with missile defense, appointed conservative judges, been the most aggressive president on free trade since Ronald Reagan, cut taxes three or (soon) four times, and passed an education bill that creates a voucher program. The failure to reform Social Security is a disappointment, but entirely a function of Democrats retaining sufficient numbers to filibuster. He's gotten around that filibuster threat where the Faith-Based Initiative is concerned by using executive orders to rewrite the rules of the bureaucracy to begin the process of handing over the provision of social services from government to the private sphere. Meanwhile, he's done about as much as a President can to limit the federal role in abortion and ethically dubious bio-engineering, and passed a partial-birth abortion law. He's launched a sweeping attack on the unionization of federal employees. Throughout, he's restored the language and purposes of Judeo-Christianity and Judeo-Christian morality to our political dialogue. He has been the most profoundly conservative President since Calvin Coolidge.

The prescription drug plan is a mistake in public policy terms, but it's good politics, Bush, GOP benefit from Medicare bill passage (David S. Broder, June 28, 2003, The Washington Post):

The Medicare prescription drug issue -- a staple of Democratic campaigns -- has not gone away, despite passage by the
Republican-controlled House and Senate early Friday of major bills promising help to seniors in obtaining their medicines.

But analysts in both parties agreed that President Bush has strengthened his hand on the issue and put his party in a better position to compete for votes from the 40 million politically powerful senior citizens who benefit from Medicare.

Medicare, enacted in 1965 as part of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society program, and Social Security, created in the New Deal, have been the twin pillars of countless Democratic campaigns -- the bottom-line issues for the most attentive and energized segment of the electorate, the elderly.
Success for the Republicans in swiping that issue -- or even sharing it -- has a political potential scary to many Democrats.

Donna Brazille, the manager of Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign, said, "No question, the Republicans will cut into the traditional Democratic advantage on this issue. Right now, the seniors don't know the details of this bill, and they may not like it when they do. But in the short term, at least, it adds to the notion that he (Bush) can get things done."

Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who has studied health care issues for more than a decade, said that if the substantially different House and Senate bills can be reconciled and sent to the president for his signature -- no certainty -- "it has the potential to be as transformational for our party as the 1996 welfare bill was for Bill Clinton and the Democrats."

In both cases, he said, the party in power benefited politically by "having people see it do something they never thought it would do."

None of the other things that the editors want are possible unless the GOP is in power, but they are outraged that it is doing something that could transfer it even more power. Is there anything less sensible than an ivory-towered conservatism?

MORE:
Why The High Court Still Tilts To The Left (Stuart Taylor, National Journal)

Why have so many Republican appointees turned out to be more liberal than the presidents who picked them? One reason is the difficulty of getting known conservatives through the Senate. President Reagan chose Kennedy, then a fairly moderate appellate judge, only after the Senate had rejected the far more conservative Robert H. Bork by 58-42. The first President Bush chose Souter, the so-called stealth nominee, because his ideological leanings were such a mystery that there was little for Democrats to attack.

Stevens and O'Connor, on the other hand, both appear to have "evolved," to borrow the approving term of liberal law professors and journalists for the migration of the late Justice Harry A. Blackmun from right to left on the ideological spectrum. Seen as a solid conservative for a couple of years after his 1970 appointment by President Nixon, Blackmun had become the Court's most liberal member by the time of his retirement in 1994. (The late Justices William J. Brennan Jr. and Thurgood Marshall, who were even more liberal, had retired in 1990 and 1991, respectively.) [...]

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? To bitterly disappointed conservatives, it is an engine for undermining democratic governance by writing liberal political views into the Constitution. To The New York Times, it reflects "the best instincts of the American people." To me -- as one who joins liberals in despising discrimination against gays, and conservatives in despising discrimination against whites and Asians -- it's better to have justices taking their cues from the Establishment than from, say, the Rev. Jerry Falwell or the Rev. Al Sharpton.

But it would be nice if they were a bit less confident that they know better than anyone else how to run the country. "It would be most irksome," as Judge Learned Hand wrote in 1958, "to be ruled by a bevy of Platonic Guardians, even if I knew how to choose them, which I assuredly do not."

-Among Democrats, The Energy Seems To Be on the Left (David Von Drehle, July 10, 2003, Washington Post)

Ten years after Bill Clinton proclaimed a centrist "New Democrat" revolution, the left is once again a driving force in the party.

They do not call themselves "liberals" anymore; the preferred term today is "progressives." But in other ways, they are much the same slice of the electorate that dominated the Democratic Party from 1972 to the late 1980s: antiwar, pro-environment, suspicious of corporations and supportive of federal social services.

In recent weeks, the progressive left has: lifted a one-time dark-horse presidential candidate, former Vermont governor Howard Dean, into
near-front-runner status; dominated the first serious Internet "primary"; and convened the largest gathering of liberal activists in decades.

The liberal MoveOn.org is the fastest-growing political action committee in the Democratic Party. Left-leaning labor leaders, such as Andrew L.
Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, are taking a more assertive part in mapping the all-important union role in party
operations.

In a sense, it was all foreshadowed by the shake-up of the House leadership after the Democrats' dismal showing at the polls last November. Liberal Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) easily defeated several more conservative Democrats to become the new minority leader.

"There is a coming together of forces to try to resurrect the Democratic Party in the progressive realm," said political strategist Eric Hauser, who helped to organize the recent Take Back America conference of left-leaning activists. "What the Democratic Party stands for hasn't really been looked at for a while. The issues that people care about seem pretty clearly to be solid progressive issues."

In a party that seemed almost comatose after November's poor showing at the polls, any energy at all might be welcome by Democrats, no matter where it comes from. And the progressives themselves certainly do not feel as though they are weighing in from the margin. "We are the base," said veteran organizer Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America's Future.

In essense, the editors are demanding that the GOP do the same thing, commit politicide by satisfying every whim of the base. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 10, 2003 11:36 AM