The US Senate debate on ending filibusters for judicial nominees - the "Nuclear Option" - has highlighted a major philosophical and temperamental rift within the Republican Party. On one side, we have the young firebrand conservatives who have risen to power mainly since the 1980s. People like Virginia's Junior Senator, George Allen, for example. These folks care more about ideology than party, more about party and ideology than national interest. And most of all, they care about themselves -- specifically, their future political careers. They apparently do not care who, or what, they damage in the process of advancing themselves and their extreme right-wing agenda. Other examples of this type of Republican include Oliver North, Grover Norquist, Tom DeLay, John Thune, Tom Coburn, Jim DeMint, and apparently Bill Frist.On the other side, we have the older, moderate, pragmatic, traditional Republicans like Virginia's Senior Senator, John Warner. These are the type of Republicans who appealed to me back in the 1970s when, believe it or not, I was a Connecticut Teenage Republican (yeah, I know, sounds like a cheesy horror movie or something). People like Nelson Rockefeller, Gerald Ford, Howard Baker, James Baker, John Anderson, Mark Hatfield, Jacob Javits, Charles Percy, Lowell Weicker, Tom Kean, Christine Todd Whitman, Paul O'Neill, Colin Powell, even George HW Bush of his "Voodoo Economics," Planned Parenthood-supporting days. And, of course there was Dwight Eisenhower, who actually referred to people who would "attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs" as "neglible" in number and "stupid."
Today, unfortunately, the "stupid" Republicans that President Eisenhower talked about are not "negligible" anymore, while only a few of his type of Republican, aka "moderates," are left in the US Senate: Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, both of Maine; John McCain of Arizona; Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania; Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island; possibly Lindsey Graham of South Carolina; sometimes Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and George Voinovich of Ohio.
Since the 1970s, unfortunately, the Grand Old Party has fallen from a reasonable, moderate, budget balancing, international treaty supporting, compromise making, tradition (and US constitution) respecting group to a bunch of anti-tax absolutists and religious extremists (the so-called "Christian Taliban"). These people are, to be blunt about it, fanatics, a word defined by the FreeDictionary.com as "a person motivated by irrational enthusiasm (as for a cause). Yep, that describes today's Republican Party very well, sad to say.
In an article entitled "When Republican Moderates Walked the Earth," Ed Kilgore of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) uses the "Bush family saga" to illustrate the "long march" towards the harsh, know-nothing, "Nuclear Option" strain of conservativism we are suffering under today:
It's the Bush family saga that best represents the declining status of Republican moderates since 1976. After he was added to the Reagan ticket in 1980, Bush quickly abandoned his economic and social-issues deviations from conservative orthodoxy, winning the nomination in 1988 as the candidate of anti-tax absolutists and the Christian Right. He then lost the presidency in part because he offended his conservative "base."Without casting any aspersions on his personal beliefs, it must be noted that President George W. Bush has continued his family's Long March to the Right by rejecting everything about his father that made conservatives fear he was secretly a Jim Jeffords Republican. He espoused good-old-boy resentment of his own preppy education at Philips Andover and Yale. He traded in his father's Yankee twang for an authentic Texas drawl. He abandoned elite Episcopalianism for Main Street Methodism. He joined the tax-cutting Church of Supply-Side Economics so fervently that he almost handled snakes. Nothing of the old-fashioned Liberal Establishment Republican doctrine remained other than a rhetorical commitment to "compassion" that smacked of noblesse oblige.
Today, the old "Establishment Republicans," people who actually cared about civility, institutions, and order, are now ridiculed and marginalized as "RINOs" ("Republicans in Name Only") -- and other such terms of opprobrium -- by the radical right. However, these ad hominem attacks do not alter the fact that the current breed of Republicans are actually the RINOs. Just look at their record. These people are for bigger government, more meddling in our personal lives, and a complete lack of respect for the institutions that have made this country great for 200 years - the constitution, checks and balances, rule of law, a strong and independent judiciary, separation of church and state, and respect for minority rights.
And that's exactly why the current filibuster debate exposes the Republican Party's fissures so starkly, because it is about all of the aforementioned things. Make no mistake about it, this "Nuclear Option" on the filibuster is part of the radical right's attempt to advance their agenda at all costs. If they have to trash the constitution, rule of law, and all the rest in the process, so be it, people like George Allen say. Which is why people like John Warner, the "dinosaurs" who used to rule the earth and are powerful still, are so critically important today. Will John Warner throw his lot in with the "Dark Side" of the Republican Party, or will he stay true to his core beliefs of a lifetime? That's what we'll see over the next week or so -- a battle for the soul of the Republican Party, for the integrity of the US Senate, and for the future of representative democracy in the United States of America.
P.S. To contact John Warner and let him know how you feel about the assault on the Senate filibuster, please see his list of phone and fax numbers, or e-mail him. From what I understand, he is honestly torn about what to do at this point, and is listening to what his constituents have to say.