"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing,
if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803

Monday, April 11, 2005

Once again, I was right.

Almost three months into President Bush’s second term, a raft of economic and social issues—Social Security, immigration, gay marriage and the recent national debate over Terri Schiavo—is splintering the Republican base.

After winning re-election on the strength of support from nine in 10 Republican voters, the president is seeing significant chunks of that base balk at major initiatives, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows. One-third of Republicans say Democrats in Congress should prevent Mr. Bush and party leaders from “going too far in pushing their agenda,” and 41% oppose eliminating filibusters against Mr. Bush’s judicial nominees—the “nuclear option” that Senate Republican leaders are considering.

The Schiavo case has opened another rift. Though Mr. Bush and Republican congressional leaders acted to maximize the opportunity for reinserting Ms. Schiavo’s feeding tube, 39% of Republicans said removing the tube was “the right thing to do,” while 48% said it was wrong. About 18% of Republicans say they lost respect for Mr. Bush on the issue and 41% lost respect for Congress. The survey of 1,002 adults, conducted March 31-April 3, has a margin for error of 3.1 percentage points in either direction; the error margin for Republicans alone is 5.2 percentage points.

This president was reelected, if not with a mandate, with a solid majority.  He immediately spoke of spending the political capital that he had rightly earned with his victory.  Unfortunatlely, rather than spend that capital on the core principles of the Republican Party he chose, instead, to waste it on the Terri Schiavo debacle.  True, I believe that Bush was largely painted into a corner over the issue, but the Schiavo incident can’t be taken in a vacuum.

Here’s how it breaks down.  America is a conservative country, it always has been.  As much as the American left would like to turn us into a market-socialist welfare state, by and large the American people reject those ideas.  America has a strong work ethic, and while Americans give an astonishing amount of their incomes to private charities, the idea of a European nanny state does not resonate with a people who believe in hard work and rugged individualism.  We also believe in a strong national defense, the right of the individual to own firearms, and a general concept that the government should only be as big as it needs to be.  So while there are genuine disagreements between the left and the right, as a whole I think the American people tend to lean right of center on most issues, though not dramatically so.

This explains the election.  Bush spoke of moral issues specifically to paint Kerry into a corner over his support for abortion and patrtial birth abortion, the latter being a point of contention even with people who overall support abortion rights.  And Bush had Kerry beaten hands-down on the issues of terrorism and national security.  Kerry’s “I’ll respond if we’re attacked again” attitude was demolished by Bush’s “Let’s put on our boots and go kill some fuckin’ terrorists” posture.  And Bush also played well with people who think their taxes are too high, which is just about everyone in the country.  Even though Bush’s economic policies are going to guarantee a massive tax increase at some point in the future, he was able to point out that Kerry would raise everyone’s taxes.  Advantage Bush.  So I think it’s fair to say that Bush was more in tune overall with the American people, even if those same people don’t particularly like Bush as a president.  He was a better choice than Kerry for most Americans.

The reason I bring this up is that rather than choose to take advantage of this victory in ways that could benefit the country as a whole, he chose to blow it on the Terri Schiavo case.  Not only did Bush and the Republicans stick their nose in where it wasn’t warranted, but they just solidified in the mind of every swing voter (who most likely voted with Bush over defense issues) that the GOP is nothing but the lapdog of the Religious Right.  So not only did Bush blow it over the Schiavo case, but now nobody is going to give him the benefit of the doubt over Social Security.  I think the concept of an “ownership society” is one that will easily ring true with the American people, but so far Bush and the GOP have done an absolutely pathetic job making their case.  And the fact that the Schiavo case has pissed off the libertarian contingent and the swing voters has done nothing to help him in this endeavor.

What the GOP needs to realize is that while America is an extremely religious country, people here do not want their religion and their politics fused into one.  There is a huge difference between being supporting of free religious expression (as I am) and having my morality dictated to me based upon a set of religious beliefs that I may or may not subscribe to.  Simply being a Christian does not inherently mean that you will be a supporter of radical politics dictated by Christian orthodoxy.  You can be a practicing, churchgoing Christian and still think that gays ought to be afforded every right that everyone else gets, or think that a public plot of land is an inappropriate place for a nativity scene, or question the logic of teaching creationism in school.  Simply looking at the numbers of Christians in America and assuming their support of a radical religious agenda is grossly overestimating the support base, and does nothing but do damage to the legitimate areas in which change is truly warranted. 

The true irony of this whole situation is that the ultra-religious in America already overwhelmingly supported Bush.  So all he and the Republicans accomplished with their moral posturing and public Christian preening was they lost the support the bulk of the rest of the country.  And Terri Schiavo is still just as dead as she would have been if they’d just decided to do what they should have done, which was nothing.

What a brilliant plan.  I hope that next year, when the Democrats take back one or both houses in Congress, they all think it was worth it.