Let's start with
Christopher Buckley, novelist, former George HW Bush speechwriter, conservative, and son of William F. Buckley.
Let's quit while we're behind
With heavy heart, as a once-proud--indeed, staunch-- Republican, I here admit, behind enemy lines, to the guilty hope that my party loses; on both occasions.
--snip--
Six years later, the White House uses the phrase [Compassionate Conservative] about as much as it does "Mission Accomplished." Six years of record deficits and profligate expansion of entitlement programs. Incompetent expansion, at that: The actual cost of the President's Medicare drug benefit turned out, within months of being enacted, to be roughly one-third more than the stated price. Weren't Republicans supposed to be the ones who were good at accounting? All those years on Wall Street calculating CEO compensation....
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? Who knew, in 2000, that the only bill the president would veto, six years later, would be one on funding stem-cell research?
A more accurate term for Mr. Bush's political philosophy might be incontinent conservatism.
[Ed.'s note - OUCH] --snip--
What have they done to my party? Where does one go to get it back? One place comes to mind: the back benches. It's time for a time-out. Time to hand over this sorry enchilada to Hillary and Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden and Charlie Rangel and Harry Reid, who has the gift of being able to induce sleep in 30 seconds. Or, with any luck, to Mark Warner or, what the heck, Al Gore. I'm not much into polar bears, but this heat wave has me thinking the man might be on to something.
My fellow Republicans, it is time, as Madison said in Federalist 76, to "Hand over the tiller of governance, that others may fuck things up for a change."
Excellent, though exsqueeze me - the Republican have set the BAR for fucking things up pretty high. Hard to imagine that, tiller in hand, we could achieve their stellar level of incomptence.
Moving right along to Bruce Fein, Constitutional scholar, conservative columnist, and former Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan.
Restrain this White House
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.
--snip--
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.
This from a Constitutional scholar. What I liked about the whole article was that it pretty much revolved around the idea of The Constitution. Nice to see people returning to that.
Then there's Joe Scarborough, a real life Clutch Cargo, former Representative from Florida's 1st Congressional district, and current pundit-slash-personality on MSNBC.
And we thought Clinton had no self-control
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.
--snip--
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.
I'm telling you - those talking points about the percentage increase in spending in the departments highlighted in the column even shocked me. I didn't realize that it was THAT out of control. I, for one, intend to throw them around wildly as I shift to GOTV.
And finally, I'll turn to Richard Viguerie, so-called funding (not a typo) father of the modern conservative movement and "King of conservative direct mail".
The show must not go on
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?
--snip--
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, [Ed.'s note - interesting choice of words] 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.
The whole article is interesting insight into the minds of conservatives and the history of the conservative movement.
Other articles I have not highlighted from this "Republican Rebellion" edition of Washington Monthly:
Bring on Pelosi - By Bruce Bartlett
Give divided government a chance - By William A. Niskanen
Idéologie has taken over - By Jeffrey Hart
We talk a lot about the Rove message machine and the throwing of "red meat" to the far-right idological base. But really - that base is a small percentage (I think, an impression not a known fact) of people who would consider themselves conservatives. If the so-called "real" conservatives like the columnists who wrote these essays are rebelling on such substantive grounds, then I think they're in a lot worse shape than any of us is willing to recognize.
And that's ok - that will keep us working hard. But these columnists just served up GOTV talking points that each one of us can apply in phone banking, canvassing, and every-day conversation. It will surely rally OUR base and may even bring a fence-sitter or two over to our side.
Best to all this weekend - let's bring this one home.
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