Some conservatives say the GOP should lose in November

Overview

The October 2006 issue of Washington Monthly has a series of articles written by conservatives collectively entitled "Time for us to go; Conservatives on why the GOP should lose in 2006." While I am certainly glad to see actual conservatives feel this way, I still pose the question I asked on September 22, 2005, namely "What took you so long?"

The articles make for very interesting reading--for both Republicans and Democrats. There are some explanations as to why it is better for the country if one party does not control the government and some arguments as to why losing in 2006 will actually be a good thing for the GOP in 2008.

For now I will highlight three of the seven articles.

Joe Scarborough

Joe Scarborough (host of MSNBC's "Scarborough Country" and Congressman from 1994-2000) called his article "And we thought Clinton had no self-control." Scarborough details how under the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress spending has gone out of control, whereas under Clinton and a divided Congress, spending was controlled and the budget was balanced. According to Scarborough, discretionary spending under the Clinton administration "grew at a modest rate of 3.4 percent," and then he compared the recent Republican performance:

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.

Scarborough is just reiterating a theme that has been expressed for quite some time now, namely that George W. Bush is no conservative, and the "conservative" Congress has been anything but conservative. Scarborough's focus is on spending, as establsihed early in the article through his reponse to being asked to write the article:

“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.

I went a little further just over a year ago (see A possible reason why it took so long for some conservatives to become disenchanted with Bush).

Jeffrey Hart

"Idéologie has taken over," by Jeffrey Hart (senior editor at National Review and a speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan) laments how 1) under Bush our government has come to be controlled by ideologues, and 2) their ideology has no connection to true conservatism. As Hart explains,

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.

The issue of China financing our debt has been a concern for quite a while now [see Paying for Katrina (not to mention Rita)], but Hart points out the biggest problem with Bush's ideology, Iraq:

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.

I think "zealotry" is a most accurate word to describe the Bush administration and the Congress that has gone along with him on almost everything. There is no true ideology other than zealotry, and Bush and those who have supported and enabled him are zealots for power (as I explained in detail on September 23, 2005).

Hart opines that "[I]deological government deserves rejection, whatever its party affiliation. This November, the Republicans stand to face a tsunami of rejection. They’ve earned it."

Bruce Fein

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. His article has the title of "Restrain this White House." The theme of the article is that George W. Bush has consistently violated the Constitution, usurped legislative power, and the Republican-controlled Congress has allowed Bush to do this. Among Fein's examples are the following (and each is discussed in further detail in the article):

• "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."
• "Republicans in Congress have bowed to the president’s scorn for the rule of law and craving for secret government."
• "Republicans in the House and Senate have been equally invertebrate in the face of presidential signing statements that usurp the power to legislate." [I totally agree with Fein on this issue, as seen here and here.]
  
• "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."

Fein concludes that "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."

Is it possible to be a zealot for power and spineless at the same time?

Something to keep in mind...

While all of the Washington Monthly articles make a case that there needs to be a GOP loss in November, remember that most of them also say that a government divided among the two parties is best. That means the writers are also making a case that a government controlled completely by the Democrats would not be good thing. Democrats would be well advised to consider the reasoning and facts stated in the articles and at the very least try to apply the lessons stated thereby.