Congress

Daniel Allott, a policy analyst for Gary Bauer’s group American Values, claims that liberals were “conspicuously absent” from last weekend’s Values Voter Summit, a gathering of the Religious Right and prominent Republican politicians where speakers from Rep. Mike Pence (R-Indiana) to James Dobson encouraged right-wing activists to work to preserve the Republican majority in Congress in November. Leaving aside the fine point that those who disagree strongly with the far Right – such as this blog – were in fact in attendance, Allott goes on to assert that liberals and Democrats are alienated from “religious voters.” “Despite the left’s recent values offensive, the ‘God gap’ is actually growing!” he writes.

But as a recent poll from PFAW Foundation’s Center for American Values in Public Life shows – despite years of efforts by the far Right to portray liberals as openly hostile to Christians – the difference is scant, with 16 percent believing Democrats unfriendly to religion and 13 percent believing Republicans unfriendly to religion.

Nevertheless, Allott goes on to claim that the reason for this purported “God gap” is that liberals “have yet to support the policies people of faith care most about” – citing abortion as an example, and claiming that interest groups who support choice, such as PFAW, are “actively seek[ing] to undermine religious freedom and family values.” Therefore, the argument goes, “values voters” shun Democrats at the polls.

But as the Center for American Values poll shows, when Americans are “voting their values,” they’re not talking about abortion (3%) or gay marriage, another bugbear cited constantly by speakers at the “Values Voter Summit” (9%). They’re talking about honest, integrity, and responsibility (39%); poverty and health care (23%); and protecting individual freedoms (21%). And more than eight in ten people think leaders use religion to talk about abortion and gay marriage too much, and don’t talk enough about values like loving your neighbor and caring for the poor.

While The New York Times took note of Connie Marshner’s workshop on turning out churchgoers to the polls using deceptive tactics and The Los Angeles Times revealed that Jerry Falwell joked to a pastors’ breakfast that the Religious Right base would be more riled up about Hillary Clinton’s nomination for president in 2008 than Satan’s, the theme that reporters covering the Values Voter Summit latched on to was whether a disillusioned Right Wing would come through for Republicans facing daunting mid-term elections.

• Christian Conservatives Look to Re-energize Base, New York Times. “Openly anxious about grass-roots disaffection from the Republican Party, conservative Christian organizers are reaching for ways to turn out voters this November, including arguing that recognizing same-sex marriage could also limit religious freedom.”
• Conservatives Confident Base Will Vote, Associated Press. “Critical to the Republican base, conservatives expressed confidence Friday that their rank-and-file will vote Nov. 7 even though the GOP-controlled Congress hasn't delivered this year on their core issues.”
• Tactic Uses Pulpits to Power the GOP, Los Angeles Times. “[T]op evangelical leaders pleaded with their followers Friday to put aside frustrations and turn out for GOP candidates.” As a side note, Televangelist Jerry Falwell – who confided that God will save the Republican majority this November –
• Dobson: Rallying family values voters, Rocky Mountain News. Despite disappointment, Dobson is committed to helping the GOP this year – holding rallies in battleground states Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Tennessee.

And while the Religious Right activists on the podium, at least, were sure of their commitment to the Republicans this election cycle, they still want to push through a few more items on their “values agenda.” At the conference, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said that House Republican action on some of the items in their wish list this summer “brought some trust and confidence back”; now, FRC is asking its supporters to pray for a few more.

The conference was also an opportunity for Republicans looking to solidify their credentials with the far Right. The right-wing Washington Times called speeches by Newt Gingrich, Sens. George Allen (R-Virginia), Sam Brownback (R-Kansas), and Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania) as well as Govs. Mitt Romney (R-Massachusetts) and Mike Huckabee (R-Arkansas) “auditions” for potential Republican presidential candidates – and noted that the Family Research Council says it invited Sens. Bill Frist (R-Tennessee), John McCain (R-Arizona), Hillary Clinton (D-New York), and John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) as well. Maggie Gallagher, a speaker on the marriage panel, concluded, “I believe Mitt Romney may be the only hope social conservatives have in 2008.”

The closing session of Day 1 at the Values Voters conference had the feel of an emotional roller coaster. The evening kicked off with stand-up comedy by Steve Bridges, whose impersonation of President Bush is uncanny - every shrug, eyebrow raise, hand gesture, whisper, squint, smirk, and laugh were instantly recognizable. The performance had people rolling in the aisles, even though there was a lot of good-natured humor playing on the very-popular-in-this-crowd president's difficulties with the English language and his reputation for not being, as he said, "the brightest bulb in the knife drawer." The tone shifted dramatically darker with the next two speakers, Religious Right strategist and former presidential candidate Gary Bauer and notorious pundit Ann Coulter. Bauer focused on "two wars"- the war against "Islamo-fascists" and the battle over values. Coulter's theme was "two evils" to be fought - Islamic terrorists and the Supreme Court. Both mocked concerns about mistreatment of detainees at Guantanamo. Bauer particularly seemed to take offense at the very notion that detainees would be treated humanely, which he said sends a signal of weakness to our enemies. He derided Republican Sens. McCain, Warner and Graham for trying to ensure that the U.S. retained its commitment to the Geneva Convention's requirement for humane treatment of prisoners of war. And he slammed the "left wing of American politics," which he said "appears to hate you and me and George Bush more than they hate the Taliban and Osama bin Laden." Bauer described the values battle - over abortion and marriage - in equally pugnacious terms, insisting that Roe will soon be overturned and declaring that "we are putting the radical gay rights movement on notice. You will not defeat us. We will defend marriage." Bauer closed by invoking the memories of people in the twin towers who called loved ones in their final moments, and of the passengers on flight 93 who sacrificed their lives to prevent another terror attack. He called on the image of those passengers charging up the aisle to shame anyone who stays out of the culture war or doesn't find time to vote. Bauer, of course, gave no sign of recognizing that among those callers and passengers were gay Americans with their own loved ones and families. Coulter, while extremely popular with the crowd, seemed a bit off, rushing through her speech in order to get to the book signing table, but not so quickly that she didn't throw out some tradmark outrageousness designed to delight right-wing audiences: liberals don't want to go to war with Islamic fascism, and the killing of doctors who provided abortions was basically the fault of the Supreme Court's decision in Casey. She derided Supreme Court decisions that "read like newsletters from NAMBLA" and asked when the other branches of government would finally start ignoring "absurd" Supreme Court decisions. (She suggested that Bush and Congress should have ignored decisions on the rights of detainees.) Without a trace of irony Coulter declared the war in Iraq a "magnificent success," made light of the massive looting that took place there ("broken pottery") and dismissed concerns about the conditions in Iraq raised by the "treason lobby." Now let's sell some books.

On Thursday, Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado) gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation to announce what he called a “new strategy for controlling illegal immigration.” This “new strategy” is in fact a political tactic for achieving his old policy goals of enforcement-only reform, deportation by “attrition,” and protection of “Anglo-Protestant values.” The “new strategy” is to embrace the localities adopting Hazleton-like anti-immigrant ordinances.

If Congress does not enact key enforcement provisions to achieve border security and immigration law enforcement, proponents of the enforcement strategy will carry to all 50 states and into thousands of local communities. Illegal aliens will begin to self-deport as more and more states adopt measures to discourage residence and employment by illegal aliens.

If the Senate rejects the enforcement-first approach by refusing to enact serious enforcement legislation this year, advocates of border security and immigration law enforcement should move to a new strategy – a strategy aimed at local initiatives in lieu of federal action. If we can’t get the federal government to do what it’s supposed to do, we have to turn to states and local communities to help us.

This new strategy will be called simply “Enforcement Works.”

Listen to the audio clip. Heritage has the full audio and streaming video of the speech.

“It’s been the White House that’s been out of step with the mainstream of the Republican Party, not Tom Tancredo,” said Tancredo, who just last week was singing “Dixie” with neo-Confederates in South Carolina. The congressman offered praise to the Minuteman Project, which he said “demonstrated to the world the flow of aliens across the border can be controlled by physical presence at the border,” and he said that immigrants from Mexico live in “cultural enclaves,” preventing their assimilation, and warned of a coming “civil war” and economic collapse in Mexico due to political strife following that country’s recent elections – and of a “larger exodus” of Mexicans to the U.S. Because of this threat, he said, “the notion of discussing any amnesty or new guest workers becomes more absurd every minute.”

But while Tancredo explicitly avowed that policymakers must completely separate the issue of border enforcement from the issue of resolving the status of immigrants in the country, he was just as clear that his intent was to deport all “illegal aliens” – first through “attrition,” by denying them housing, jobs, and any social services, and then through enforcement.

When people say to me, and they do all the time, I hear this constantly---people go up, and tell me, they go, “Hey listen, what are you going to do with all the people who are presently in the country illegally? There’s 15 to 20 million – you can’t deport them.” And then they go on. Right. And I say “Hold it! Why not?” [laughter] I mean, why not? Now, you may not want to. You may have political reasons why it’s difficult. You will see every single night on television somebody’s family being torn apart somebody, you know … all that’s true. But don’t just go – don’t make that leap and go, “Well, you can’t deport them.” Because you can. Heh-heh. It is the truth, you can. We could do that. Now we may certainly choose not to, and there are other options that are probably even easier.

Listen to the audio clip.

In recent days, two high-profile former Republican members of Congress have publicly stated that their party has become completely beholden to its right-wing base and are pointing to the Terri Schiavo debacle as the moment when they finally realized that “something has gone very wrong.” 

From an interview with former Senator John Danforth, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Q: Religion and politics are two subjects themselves that are hard to reconcile. Have you been thinking about this your whole career?

A: For decades, I've been thinking about these two subjects, but not with the urgency of the past year and a half. This was triggered by the Terri Schiavo case; that was the specific tipping point in my own thinking. That was when I thought, "Something has gone very wrong here."

Q: But these signs have been around for at least a decade or so, haven't they?

A: Maybe I was obtuse. People like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell have been involved in Republican politics for a long time. Of course, abortion has been a political issue since 1973. But in my own mind, it didn't have the urgency until the Schiavo case. In the past year or so, what was maybe a general interest of Robertson and others in politics and one particular issue, namely abortion, has been transformed into something much more detailed and much more a full-fledged political agenda.

You have Terri Schiavo, the stem-cell issue, the gay marriage issue, the Ten Commandments in courthouses - all occurring about the same time.

But, I thought, particularly with Schiavo, something different had happened: Namely, basic Republican principles had been tossed overboard at the bidding of Christian conservatives.

Echoing the same note is former Congressman Dick Armey in an excerpt of an interview conducted by Ryan Sager for his new book, “The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party.”

What’s wrong with today’s Republican Congress?

"Where in the hell did this Terri Schiavo thing come from? There's not a conservative, Constitution-loving, separation-of-powers guy alive in the world that could have wanted that bill on the floor. That was pure, blatant pandering to [Focus on the Family President] James Dobson. That's all that was. It was silly, stupid, and irresponsible. Nobody serious about the Constitution would do that. But the question was will this energize our Christian conservative base for the next election.

Why does it seem Christian conservatives are more powerful now than in the 1990s?

"Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies. I pray devoutly every day, but being a Christian is no excuse for being stupid. There's a high demagoguery coefficient to issues like prayer in schools. Demagoguery doesn't work unless it's dumb, shallow as water on a plate. These issues are easy for the intellectually lazy and can appeal to a large demographic. These issues become bigger than life, largely because they're easy. There ain't no thinking."

Armey’s remarks are particularly surprising considering that he was named 1999’s Distinguished Christian Statesman by D. James Kennedy and, when he retired from Congress, the Family Research Council lamented his departure saying "We are going to lose a very good friend … He has met with us every single week. His staff is available to us when we go there, so it has been a close relationship. Over the years he has been the defender of the family."   

Presumably, Armey kept his feeling that people like Dobson are a bunch of intellectually lazy demagogues to himself when he was accepting his Distinguished Christian Statesman award or meeting with FRC on a weekly basis.  

What is the difference between a “special interest” organization and a “general interest” organization?  According to  Steve Laffey, who is trying to take down Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee,  it seems to depend on who they are supporting,

No senator in Rhode Island history has faced a primary opponent as well-financed as Laffey. No Republican in the country is in greater danger of losing a Senate primary this year than Chafee.

The Club for Growth has been a key to Laffey's rise to the big leagues this election season, raising almost $705,000 for his campaign -- about 42 percent of his late-August total of nearly $1.7 million.

…

While one branch of the club spurred its members to write checks to Laffey, another has spent several hundred thousand dollars to criticize Chafee --and sometimes ridicule him -- in television ads. In the past week alone, the Club for Growth has reported expenditures of more than $300,000 on TV advertising and related costs. …

Chafee has much deeper pockets than Laffey, a fact that the challenger has tried to exploit by presenting himself as the foe of "special interests" intent on protecting Chafee and the status quo in Washington.

But his reliance on the Washington-based Club for Growth raises the question of whether Laffey is beholden to a "special interest."

On the contrary, Laffey replied last week, the club is a "general interest" group because it favors tax cuts that would provide a general benefit to the public.

His defines "special interests" in the language of Washington and the FEC, as groups that use "political action committees" or PACs. But Laffey does not count himself as indebted to the Club for Growth's PAC because it has made no direct contributions to his campaign. Rather, it has aired the anti-Chafee ads, outside his legal control, Laffey said.

All the same, Laffey said he does not turn away special interest money from PACs. "I just don't get very much of it," Laffey said. The large majority of his PAC contributions, more than $23,000 so far, have come from groups that support the state of Israel.

He has accepted contributions from conservative PACs -- $5,000, for example, from the Washington-based Citizens United Political Victory Fund.

Several well-known conservatives have contributed to Laffey, including William F. Buckley Jr., a founder of the National Review, who gave $1,000.

Laffey has also received contributions from some individuals listed in his FEC reports as employees of anti-abortion groups. He did not directly answer the question of whether those constitute "special interest" contributions.

The Club for Growth has spent more than a half-million dollars on Laffey’s behalf and helped raised nearly three-quarters of a million dollars for his campaign.  CFG says it “exists to encourage, and make possible, the enactment of pro-growth economic policies by the federal government. The primary tactic of the Club for Growth PAC has been to provide financial support from Club members to viable pro-growth candidates to Congress, particularly in Republican primaries” in order to elect candidates who share the Club’s goals

* Making the Bush tax cuts permanent
* Death tax repeal
* Legal reform to end abusive lawsuits
* Replacing the current tax code
* Regulatory reform and deregulation  

Laffey says these goals benefit the general public and so CFG is not a “special interest” group.  

If by “general public” Laffey means rich, Republican millionaires and business owners, then he is correct.   

The Eagle Forum’s Phyllis Schlafly has reportedly blasted Steve Forbes for apologizing for publishing a widely criticized piece by Michael Noer in his magazine entitled “Don't Marry Career Women.”  

According to Agape Press

Eagle Forum's Phyllis Schlafly feels Forbes has no reason to apologize since the facts and statistics Noer cited were sound. In fact, she suggests, an article like this should have been written 20 years ago, and this one still hits the right note today because, contrary to the feminist myth, a woman really cannot "have it all" -- at least, not all at the same time.

It is more than a little ironic that a woman as successful as Schlafly - who put herself on the map with 1964’s “A Choice Not An Echo,”  almost single-handedly killed the Equal Rights Amendment, possesses a Masters degree and  a law degree, runs one of the most influential right-wing organizations in Washington, DC, has testified before more than 50 congressional and state legislative committees, has been a delegate to the Republican National Convention nearly ten times, has thrice been elected President of the Illinois Federation of Republican Women, and was twice a candidate for Congress from Illinois – would come out in defense of a piece arguing that men should not marry “career women.” 

In today’s Wall Street Journal, voucher warrior Clint Bolick takes aim at Bush Administration Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. It seems Bolick doesn’t think the No Child Left Behind Act is destroying public schools fast enough and Spellings is to blame. Bolick is upset that not enough parents have yanked their children out of LA public schools.

The question is whether Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings--whose administration has made NCLB the centerpiece of its education agenda--will do anything about it. She has the power to withhold federal funds from districts that fail to comply with NCLB, and has threatened to do just that. Rhetoric, so far, has exceeded action.

Incredulous that parents would actually prefer to keep their children in public schools, Bolick laments that “as of yet private school choice is not an option under NCLB.” Bolick reminds us that right-wingers in Congress have proposed a national voucher bill, but until then, he says, the battle against public schools must be led by Secretary Spellings.

In response, Republican Sens. Lamar Alexander and John Ensign and Reps. Buck McKeon and Sam Johnson have proposed adding private options under NCLB for children in chronically failing schools. But for now, the only hope for these kids is for Secretary Spellings to hold the districts' feet to the fire.

For her part Spellings, thinks NCLB is a nearly perfect law, but Bolick is not appeased. Pleading with her to withhold funding from LA public schools, Bolick issues a final warning to Spellings.

Will she or won't she? Margaret Spellings's actions in the coming days will determine far more than the Bush administration's education legacy.

Ouch.

There has been a lot of talk in the media in recent months about that the idea that the Right is angry with President Bush and the Republicans and that this anger might hurt the party in November.  

For instance, there is this piece today from McClatchy Newspapers making just this sort of prediction regarding the FDA’s recent decision to make the “morning after pill” available over the counter  - something the Right is none-too-happy about

Now the Family Research Council and other allies among social conservatives and in Congress are weighing a lawsuit to challenge the FDA's decision. News of such a confrontation just before this fall's elections could aggravate the White House's hopes of energizing conservatives to vote.

"This is not an issue that grabs people around the dinner table. It doesn't grab people like the war or taxes, or even marriage or the abortion decision in South Dakota," [Family Research Council’s Tom] McClusky said.

"But people are going to wonder why all these pro-life, pro-family groups are suing this administration."

Sitting at their kitchen tables in districts with close House races or states with close Senate races, some social conservatives could react with anger and not vote at all. Or they might remain sufficiently afraid of the Democrats to vote but too apathetic to help get anyone else to vote.

Just how much danger does this supposed right-wing rage really pose to the GOP?  Well, judge for yourself

Focus on the Family Action today announced a Stand for the Family rally to be held this fall in Nashville, Tenn. The event is designed to motivate and inform voters about the importance of voting their values in November.

"It's clear that people of faith must continue to go to the polls and vote their values," said James C. Dobson, Ph.D., chairman of Focus Action. "Our calling to be good citizens did not end in 2004 -– it requires us to be informed, diligent voters in each election.

"The issues at stake in this election demand our careful attention and involvement. The men and women elected to office will be entrusted with decisions that most affect America's families – protecting traditional marriage and the sanctity of life, as well as rolling back the judicial tyranny that plagues our nation. Voters in eight states, including Tennessee, will also have the opportunity to directly protect marriage by voting for state marriage-protection amendments."

Dobson will be joined by Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council Action; Gary Bauer, former presidential candidate and chairman of American Values and the Campaign for Working Families; Dr. Ken Hutcherson, pastor of Antioch Bible Church, near Seattle, Wash; and Dr. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

As we have noted before, if the Right is indeed angry, they sure have a funny way of showing it.