Politics

Over the last few weeks, we've been chronicling the Religious Right's growing resentment toward the Republican establishment as it seeks a path back to electoral success that appears to be trying to push social conservatives aside.

The Family Research Council has been particularly vocal in its criticism of the Republican Party ... and it continues to hammer away today in response to the news that the National Republican Senatorial Committee endorsed Florida Gov. Charlie Crist's Senate bid and might even be looking about for someone to challenge Pat Toomey's Senate bid in Pennsylvania:

Considering his unpredictability on key party issues, the departure of Sen. Arlen Specter should have come as a relief to the Senate GOP. But now, less than a month later, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) seems to be hunting for the moderate's replacement. Yesterday, the Committee finally found the centrist it was seeking, throwing its support behind Gov. Charlie Crist's (R-Fla.) Senate candidacy minutes after it was announced.

While he continues to be popular among Floridians, Crist is known for bucking the conservative platform--even going so far as to hit the road with President Obama in support of his controversial stimulus package. Despite promises to the contrary, the National Republican Senatorial Committee jumped into the Florida primary and picked moderate Crist over other qualified candidates who have proven their conservative mettle through support for the core issues of life, marriage, faith, and family. There are even rumblings that the NRSC is looking for a candidate to challenge conservative Pat Toomey in his bid to take defector Specter's seat.

Unfortunately, this is vintage GOP Establishment. For years, the Republican Party gravitated toward moderates over fidelity to the GOP's core principles. It's a longstanding pattern that I've seen up close. The Republican leadership in Washington appears to be on a path that will turn what could have been two or three terms in the minority into a lengthy sojourn in the political wilderness.

The sad thing about this is the assertion that the GOP does this sort of thing to the Right all the time ... and yet the Right remains doggedly committed to the Republican Party nontheless. 

Maybe it is time for the Right to start considering the possibility that this "longstanding pattern" exists in large part due to the fact that the "GOP Establishment" knows full well that, while the Right complains about it a lot, they never seem to actually do anything about it.

The GOP may very well spend two or three more terms wandering around in the political wilderness ... and the Religious Right will still be following right along, complaining the whole time.

One of the clichés of modern politics is that “outside the Beltway” is where the “real” America exists.  While those “inside the Beltway” are nothing but a bunch of politicos, wonks, and lobbyists who represent everything that is wrong with politics, those who live “outside the Beltway” are the manifestations of everything true, right, and decent about this nation.

And, as someone who actually lives “outside the Beltway,” allow me to say that this is undoubtedly and universally true.  Everyone who lives “inside” is a horrible, horrible person while all of us who live “outside” are virtuous and delightful. 

As such, if you want to get in touch with everything good about America, you have to get “outside the Beltway” which, as Steve Benen reports, is exactly what Republicans are doing as they set about re-branding their party:

As part of the Republican Party's rebranding effort, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) hosted a National Council for a New America event at a pizza shop over the weekend. Roll Call reported, "Cantor said the idea of the road show is to gather ideas from outside the Beltway to shape the Republican agenda."

CQ had a similar item: "After consecutive catastrophic electoral losses ... Republican leaders are turning their attention outside the Capital Beltway -- and outside their severely diminished party ranks -- to gather ideas from the public that they hope will help them rebound."

Cantor said the meeting represented a baby step in the GOP’s effort to get "outside the Beltway."  There was only one problem, as Benen pointed out - it was actually held “inside the Beltway”:  

At the risk of sounding picky, it's probably worth noting that Republicans started gathering ideas "from outside the Beltway" at an event inside the Beltway.

A place called Pie-tanza, in an Arlington strip mall, hosted the event. Pie-tanza is just a few minutes from the Washington Golf and Country Club. Indeed, it's only about six miles from Capitol Hill.  

Indeed.  See that big circular road?  It’s the Capital Beltway.  And see that “A” inside that big circular road? That’s Pie-tanza.

It might be easier for Cantor and the Republicans to gather ideas from “outside the Beltway” if their next meeting is actually held, you know, outside of the Beltway.

In recent days there have appeared two pieces that have generated a lot of attention suggesting that the Religious Right days as a political and cultural force are coming to an end.

The first was Kathleen Parker’s column covering the recent skirmish between right-wing radio host Steve Deace and Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family about James Dobson's and Focus on the Family’s support of John McCain’s presidential campaign. In this fight, Parker sees evidence that “the Christian right [might be] finished as a political entity”:

Deace's point was that established Christian activist groups too often settle for lesser evils in exchange for electing Republicans. He cited as examples Dobson's support of Mitt Romney and John McCain, neither of whom is pro-life or pro-family enough from Deace's perspective.

Compromise may be the grease of politics, but it has no place in Christian orthodoxy, according to Deace.

Put another way, Christians may have no place in the political fray of dealmaking. That doesn't mean one disengages from political life, but it might mean that the church shouldn't be a branch of the Republican Party. It might mean trading fame and fortune (green rooms and fundraisers) for humility and charity.

Deace's radio show may be beneath the radar of most Americans and even most Christians, but he is not alone in his thinking. I was alerted to the Deace-Minnery interview by E. Ray Moore -- founder of the South Carolina-based Exodus Mandate, an initiative to encourage Christian education and home schooling. Moore, who considers himself a member of the Christian right, thinks the movement is imploding.

"It's hard to admit defeat, but this one was self-inflicted," he wrote in an e-mail. "Yes, Dr. Dobson and the pro-family or Christian right political movement is a failure; it would have made me sad to say this in the past, but they have done it to themselves."

A somewhat similar article appears as the cover story of the upcoming issue of Newsweek in which author Jon Meacham predicts that the most recent American Religious Identification Survey showing a rise in the number of self-identified non-believers signals that the United States may be moving into a “post-Christian” era:

This is not to say that the Christian God is dead, but that he is less of a force in American politics and culture than at any other time in recent memory. To the surprise of liberals who fear the advent of an evangelical theocracy and to the dismay of religious conservatives who long to see their faith more fully expressed in public life, Christians are now making up a declining percentage of the American population.

Much of Meacham’s piece is predicated on concerns raised by Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who notes that, according to the survey, “the Northeast emerged in 2008 as the new stronghold of the religiously unidentified” which signals that “the historic foundation of America's religious culture was cracking:

"The post-Christian narrative is radically different; it offers spirituality, however defined, without binding authority," [Mohler] told me. "It is based on an understanding of history that presumes a less tolerant past and a more tolerant future, with the present as an important transitional step." The present, in this sense, is less about the death of God and more about the birth of many gods. The rising numbers of religiously unaffiliated Americans are people more apt to call themselves "spiritual" rather than "religious."

…

Evangelical Christians have long believed that the United States should be a nation whose political life is based upon and governed by their interpretation of biblical and theological principles. If the church believes drinking to be a sin, for instance, then the laws of the state should ban the consumption of alcohol. If the church believes the theory of evolution conflicts with a literal reading of the Book of Genesis, then the public schools should tailor their lessons accordingly. If the church believes abortion should be outlawed, then the legislatures and courts of the land should follow suit. The intensity of feeling about how Christian the nation should be has ebbed and flowed since Jamestown; there is, as the Bible says, no thing new under the sun. For more than 40 years, the debate that began with the Supreme Court's decision to end mandatory school prayer in 1962 (and accelerated with the Roe v. Wade ruling 11 years later) may not have been novel, but it has been ferocious. Fearing the coming of a Europe-like secular state, the right longed to engineer a return to what it believed was a Christian America of yore.

But that project has failed, at least for now. In Texas, authorities have decided to side with science, not theology, in a dispute over the teaching of evolution. The terrible economic times have not led to an increase in church attendance. In Iowa last Friday, the state Supreme Court ruled against a ban on same-sex marriage, a defeat for religious conservatives. Such evidence is what has believers fretting about the possibility of an age dominated by a newly muscular secularism. "The moral teachings of Christianity have exerted an incalculable influence on Western civilization," Mohler says. "As those moral teachings fade into cultural memory, a secularized morality takes their place. Once Christianity is abandoned by a significant portion of the population, the moral landscape necessarily changes. For the better part of the 20th century, the nations of Western Europe led the way in the abandonment of Christian commitments. Christian moral reflexes and moral principles gave way to the loosening grip of a Christian memory. Now even that Christian memory is absent from the lives of millions."

I have to say I find this temptation from commentators to write the Religious Right’s obituary after every Republican electoral setback rather remarkable.  For one thing, as we pointed out not too long ago, these sorts of pieces appear every few years, only to be overtaken a short time later with pieces marveling that the “sudden” and “unexpected” resurgence of the “values voters" crowd. In addition, despite the gloominess from the likes of Mohler and Deace, the Religious Right is more committed than ever to regrouping as a “resistance movement” to fight for its agenda and eventually regain its position as an influential and powerful political and social force.

And that day may come sooner than many realize. While it might seem at the moment that the Religious Right is on its way out, it is important to remember that the GOP has lost exactly one mid-term election and one presidential election and Democrats have controlled Congress and the White House for less than three months.  

Doesn’t anyone else remember all the talk following George W. Bush’s election, and especially his re-election, about the “values voters” and coming of a “permanent Republican majority” which would give the GOP ironclad control over the reigns of government for decades to come?

Remind me again: how did that all work out?  

The point is that political fortunes change … and often change rapidly. It is far, far too early to be declaring the Religious Right to be dead based on two elections and three months of Democratic government.

Frankly, the Religious Right’s political clout has never really been tested and so it is hard to know just if they are losing power because whenever the GOP wins elections, the Right is quick to claim credit for mobilizing grassroots support, but when the GOP loses the Right is quick to chalk the loss up to the party’s failure to embrace the right-wing agenda.

There are really only two scenarios under which predictions about the Right’s demise can reliably be made.  The first is a situation in which the GOP nominates a hard-line, right-wing true believer - someone like Rick Santorum - as its presidential candidate and sees that candidate get destroyed nationwide on Election Day.  The second is if the GOP can manage to actually nominate a presidential candidate who is fundamentally unacceptable to the Right – someone like Rudy Giuliani – and then have that candidate go on to win election to the White House.

But until the GOP nominates a true-believer and loses or right-wing heretic and wins, the Religious Right will continue to maintain a very significant amount of control of one of our nation’s two main political parties … and no amount of punditry announcing its demise will change that fact.

Anyone who paid even a minimal amount of attention to the battle over judicial nominations during the George W. Bush’s presidency knows that Senate Republicans were unified in their opposition to the Democrats’ use of the filibuster against a handful of his nominees, going so far as to threaten the “nuclear option” to do away with their ability to block his controversial nominees.

But those days are long gone, as the GOP made clear to President Obama when it pre-emptively threatened to filibuster all of his nominees before he had even made any. And true to form, it looks like they are contemplating using one right off the bat against his very first nominee, David Hamilton:

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the Judiciary Committee’s ranking Republican, has complained that the Democrats are moving too quickly to consider Mr. Hamilton, a federal trial judge in Indiana since 1994. The committee has set for Wednesday the confirmation hearing on Judge Hamilton, who was nominated only in mid-March.

While that possibility is still a bit down the road, a filibuster of Obama’s nominee head the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, Dawn Johnsen, looks like it might be coming soon:

Republicans senators and aides, granted anonymity to discuss their strategy, said they might consider a filibuster in an effort to block Ms. Johnsen’s confirmation. They will first gauge whether they can attract some support from conservative Democrats, they said, in order to help defeat any motion that would cut off debate.

Roll Call also reports that Republicans are considering filibustering Johnsen and that doing so would be a good way for Sen. Arlen Specter, who is likely facing a tough primary challenge from ultra-conservative Pat Toomey, to demonstrate his conservative bona fides:

Although Senate Judiciary ranking member Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) declined to comment on a possible filibuster until he meets with Johnsen again before leaving for recess at the end of the week, Republicans confirmed that the filibuster option has been discussed by members of the GOP Conference and that opposition to the nomination is mounting … Republicans said Johnsen’s record on a number of key issues has done something that has become increasingly rare in their fractured Conference — uniting social conservatives and security hard-liners.

“She’s got one of those résumés that unites the social conservatives and the war-on-terror conservatives,” a GOP leadership aide said. Johnsen has been a vocal critic of how the Bush administration conducted the war on terror and her views have rubbed hawkish conservatives in the GOP the wrong way.

…

Should Republicans ultimately decide to filibuster Johnsen’s nomination, it could be a boon to Specter’s re-election efforts. Specter is looking at a tough primary challenge from former Rep. Pat Toomey, who came within 17,000 votes of defeating him in the 2004 GOP primary. A recent poll showed Toomey with a double-digit lead over Specter in a hypothetical Republican primary, but with many voters still undecided and the primary more than one year away.

Specter also faces a dwindling base across the state as hundreds of thousands of moderate Republicans have changed their registrations to Democratic since 2004 in the Keystone State. Specter is at a disadvantage in the closed GOP primary without those moderate Republicans and will likely have to mount a voter registration drive to switch some of those Democrats back before 2010.

But a filibuster of Johnsen could help Specter significantly bolster his conservative credentials with the voters back home. One Republican said a filibuster “could be very good for him,” particularly because opposition to Johnsen’s nomination runs the spectrum of conservative constituencies.

That would be quite a change for Specter, who was no fan of the filibuster when Democrats used it against Bush judicial nominees like Miguel Estrada, according to his remarks on the Senate floor on April 2, 2003:

When you strip this argument down, it boils down to an effort by the other side of the aisle to rewrite the advice and consent clause of the Constitution. For more than 200 years, the President has had discretion in the nomination of Federal judges. And unless there is some reason not to confirm them, they then are confirmed … This is simply an effort, when 41 Members from the other side of the aisle decide to oppose cloture, to continue this filibuster … I do believe there is going to have to be some dramatic action taken so that Americans understand the travesty going on in the Senate Chamber today.

So the filibuster of a nominee to a life-time seat on the federal judiciary was a “travesty” to Specter, but a filibuster of an executive branch nominee to a political position might be perfectly acceptable to him?