As bad as the congressional Republicans are, the Democrats would
be worse.
That’s the argument one hears trotted out again and again as to
why it would be foolhardy for conservatives to sit these elections
out. And for good reason: While other arguments may attract certain
conservative subsets, this is the only argument that virtually
every American conservative can accept as being at least plausible
even if not entirely convincing. The record of the current
Congress, and for that matter every Congress since 1998, is bad
enough — big-spending enough, self-absorbed enough, anti-reformist
enough, feckless enough — that it is hard to make a positive case
for more of the same. Hence the need for the argument in the
alternative.
In short, Republicans can tell conservatives this: Vote for us,
because those other guys really stink.
Oddly enough, it might just be a winning message — or at least
one that limits the GOP’s losses. For one thing, it almost
assuredly has the virtue of being true.
Courtesy of NRO’s The Corner, House Majority Leader John Boehner
makes a compelling case that a Donkey Party ascension would give
all taxpayers good reason to watch their wallets. Key House
Democrat Charlie Rangel, who would chair the tax-writing Ways &
Means Committee if Democrats gain a House majority, said the other
day that he “cannot think of one” of President Bush’s tax cuts that
deserves to be renewed. Rangel’s words taken at face value mean
that the marriage penalty would be re-worsened, the death tax made
worse, child tax credits eliminated, and even the tax breaks for
families of fallen troops would be halted.
Then there is spending. As TAS’s Philip Klein
brilliantly explained
last week, in time of a military operation in Iraq so strongly
opposed by the left, the price for continuing the effort would
quite literally be exorbitant. Klein rightly adjudged to be likely
“a compromise whereby President Bush gets the Iraq spending he
wants, but only if he agrees to a budget that grants more domestic
spending to the Democrats’ pet projects.”
Of course, that’s if a Congress in a new party’s hands would
allow the mission in Iraq to be won at all. Rangel, for one, was
quoted in the Hill last week hinting broadly that he would
push to cut off all funding for the mission. More broadly,
Democrats are all over the map about when and how to pull American
troops out of Iraq, but I have yet to see a single leading
Democratic candidate say a single word about how to achieve victory
there. It’s as if the very idea of “victory” is not even in their
mindsets. And the lefty blogosphere that seems to be so dominant in
that party can fairly be characterized as going even further: Not
only do its adherents not have a plan for American victory in Iraq,
but they actually think our very cause is ignoble and deserving of
defeat. (With my apologies in advance for the language): For
instance, one recent commenter on the “My Left Wing” blog advised
in his subject heading that we should “Remove the diseased
American Penis from the Raped Vagina of Iraq,” because
that’s “what you hope any rapist will do after raping their victim.
Instead of hanging around.” The commenter ends by writing of these
United States that “This is a salacious nation that offers
nothing.”
Famed leftist anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan said in January
that it is possible that President George Bush is “10 times the
bigger terrorist than Osama bin Laden,” and appeared at a friendly
press conference with thuggish Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Yet
Democrats in high places continued to embrace her — as in when she
appeared as the guest of honor at a fundraiser
for the legal defense fund of longtime Democratic Rep. Jim
McDermott.
It’s hard to trust the defense of the United States to a party
that so openly indulges people who don’t think the Unites States is
worth defending.
But while the political left may not be interested in fighting
terrorists, it clearly is interested in attacking President George
W. Bush. Radical Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, who would be
chairman of the House Judiciary Committee if the Democrats re-take
control of that chamber, has made no secret of his desire to
impeach Bush for alleged misdeeds concerning Iraq. Indeed, the
official summary of his committee staff’s minority report called
“The Constitution in Crisis,” released this summer, already reads
like articles of impeachment.
Surely the American people don’t want to endure another
impeachment crisis — especially over what is far less a legal
matter (and a trumped-up one at that) than a policy dispute. To
understand the new paroxysm Conyers wants to put the country
through, one need only consider that the very first words of his
personal introduction to the report are: “Scandals such as
Watergate and Iran-Contra….”
The party of the left is just as out of tune with most Americans
on a host of other issues as well. Take immigration, for example.
Is there any doubt that a Congress controlled by the party of the
left would go beyond even President Bush’s “guest worker” proposal
and work to grant direct amnesty to millions of illegal aliens?
On issue after issue, conservatives could be sure that a
Democratic Congress would push, sometimes successfully, for
policies anathema to conservatives, and would block, even more
effectively than now, policies that conservatives support.
Energy exploration? Nope.
Government price controls on medicines? Yes.
Greater ballot security? Nope. Voting by felons? Yes.
Increasing regulation by government agencies? A push for greater
prevalence of abortion (even partial-birth) on demand? Greater use
of government takings of private property? Race-based privileges
and benefits? Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
Judges who think the Constitution means what it says and that
its meaning doesn’t change without formal amendment? Perish the
thought.
And so on, right down the line. Conservatives can honestly say
that the liberals who dominate the Democratic Party are in favor of
everything conservatives abhor, and oppose everything conservatives
hold dear. As disappointed as conservatives are with Republicans in
Congress, conservatives can’t make the same blanket statement about
the Grand Old Solons.
So the Republican message this fall could boil down to this:
Don’t you dare elect those soft-on-defense, tax-increasing,
big-spending, impeachment-obsessed, radical-coddling,
amnesty-offering, oil-shortage-causing,
socialized-medicine-pushing, felon-voting, property-confiscating,
race-hustling, activist-judging, partial-birth-abortioning
Democrats.
It might just work.
