Sen. Lisa Murkowski speaks for much of the Republican
establishment when she derides the idea that acts of the federal
government are unconstitutional just “because they’re not
enumerated within the powers of the Constitution.”
At this writing, the results haven’t shown whether Ms. Murkowski
will remain in the U.S. Senate next year. But today conservatives
can deride the idea that she remains within the mainstream of their
movement or the Republican Party.
Murkowski was left weeping at the altar when Alaska Republicans
held their primary, reduced to running the first serious write-in
campaign for Senate since Strom Thurmond was elected. Win, lose or
draw, the path to power for establishment Republicans and
big-government conservatives has grown perilous.
All told, eight Republican senatorial candidates backed by the
GOP establishment lost their primaries. Some like Christine
O’Donnell in Delaware and Sharron Angle in Nevada came up short.
Others, like constitutional conservative Rand Paul in Kentucky, won
big. Paul the younger took 56 percent of the vote against a
Democrat who pulled out all the stops — including playing the
religion card — against him.
The fact that some of these Tea Party conservatives lost, and a
few old-school Republicans like John McCain and Mark Kirk won, does
not change this basic fact: the mood of the party’s primary
electorate has shifted right, with policy, principles, and values
trumping all other considerations. Slickness, savvy, and even
electability are no longer the determining factors.
Can the new Republican majority in the House and the new GOP
members of the Senate deliver on their promises to repeal
Obamacare, reverse the tide of red ink, and restore the
Constitution? Will Republicans stop ridiculing the doctrine of
enumerated powers and the work of the Founding Fathers, instead
becoming the party their conservative supporters demand?
It won’t be easy. The Republican leadership empowered by
yesterday’s election received a gift it did not deserve. The GOP
has been returned to power without showing it learned its lesson.
And many of the swing voters who aided that restoration are
independents, the very same fickle and pragmatic centrists who gave
us unified Democratic control of the federal government in the
first place.
Soon the Democrats, inspired by the example of Bill Clinton,
will look for ways to turn the swing voters against the Tea Party.
They will seek to undermine the coalition that produced Republican
victories just as the Republicans shattered the coalition that
elected the Democrats in 2006 and 2008.
For while the independents rejected George W. Bush’s wars, the
post-meltdown economy, and a Republican Congress that lost its way,
they did not endorse a total leftward shift of the country. These
same swing voters reject Obama’s deficits, high unemployment, and a
federal government that has failed to deliver without longing for
Speaker Boehner or his sequel to the Contract With America.
Nevertheless, the country needs entitlement reform. It needs
solvency. It needs a turn away from backbreaking tax increases that
are to come, government control of health care, and all the burdens
imposed by a federal leviathan unconstrained by the
Constitution.
Whether the newly elected Republicans can deliver without
tearing asunder the electoral majority that sent them to Washington
remains to be seen. But try they must.
