GOP leadership changes?

I've asked a lot of my more politically connected friends what the chances are of a change in the top leadership for Republicans in the House and Senate when they caucus next month. Most of them tell me "Not much." Boehner has no real opposition for majority leader, though at least Pence is in the running for conference chair.


On the Senate side, I've been exceptionally surprised at the lack of chatter about replacing McConnell. Here's a guy who is only 214 votes and a run-off away having the filibuster lost on his watch and who nearly lost his own bid for reelection in Kentucky. Why would the GOP want to keep him in a leadership position?


Finally I've found at least one voice who agrees with me on this, in an opinion piece today from the DC Examiner.

In 2006 you settled on Mitch McConnell as your leader and quite frankly, the Republicans in the Senate and across the country have very little to show for that decision. We're down six seats in the Senate -- and they're still counting.

Moreover, Mitch McConnell, who supported the Bridge to Nowhere twice, who led you into a disastrous fight on illegal immigration, and who did little to strike back against the Democrats who were slandering the GOP on an almost daily basis, actually campaigned on bringing home pork to Kentucky.

Republican Senators, in their choice for minority leader, get to pick their chief spokesman for their legislative agenda and for the principles they wish to advance....or, in this case, defend. If the GOP really wants to begin the long climb back, it has to stick to principles. My hope - and the hope of so many disallusioned conservatives - is that they will use those principles to pick their leader rather than vice versa.

O'Rourke accounts for our sins

PJ O'Rourke is mad at everyone:

What will destroy our country and us is not the financial crisis but the fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult, which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith. That's not what the free market is. The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. "Jeeze, 230 pounds!" But you can't pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters--all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman Sachs--think so too.

We, the conservatives, who do understand the free market, had the responsibility to--as it were--foreclose upon this mess. The market is a measurement, but that measuring does not work to the advantage of a nation or its citizens unless the assessments of volume, circumference, and weight are conducted with transparency and under the rule of law. We've had the rule of law largely in our hands since 1980. Where is the transparency? It's one more job we botched.

Mostly, though, he's mad at conservatives for not making the most of 28 years on top (he dates being on top all the way to Reagan and dismisses the '93-'94 period, I suppose). His rant - which is quite lengthy - is half over-the-top and three-quarters spot-on.

What he does not offer are any ideas on how to fix it, though he seems a bit fatalistic and unencouraged that we shall ever get the opportunity in the lifetime of anyone alive today. But perhaps conservative leaders will read it and be jolted into reality, causing some smart thinker to begin getting us out of this mess.

Not all bad

Jeb Hensarling, chairman of the U.S. House's Republican Study Committee, is one Republican who's ready to stand atop history yelling stop. On Friday he released a statement about the impending bailout of corporate America. Here's the crux of it:

At this point, Congress is being asked to support an uncertain entity, costing
an uncertain amount of dollars, for an uncertain duration – a decision that will
have implications for generations to come and requires absolute certainty. We
are being asked to go ‘all in’ with taxpayer dollars, and once our government
and the taxpayer is on the hook, there is no fallback option. My fear is that
taxpayers will be left with the mother of all debts, the federal government
becomes the lender and guarantor of last resort, and our nation finds itself on
the slippery slope to socialism.

I'm beginning to hear more and more chatter from conservatives who are waiting anxiously for the elected leaders to stand up for this. Democrats are ready to stand up - and request more regulation. Who is brave enough to say maybe less government intrusion is a better way?

One post (against the bail-out) noted that there is significant risk to the markets and the economy without the bailouts as well. So the choice is between pain now but a clear message that the government will not save corporate America (or individual Americans who make bad decisions) or pain down the road spread lightly on those who caused this mess and burdonsomely on those who had no hand in it at all.

It may surprise you, but $700 billion is quite a bit of money

One headline on CNN right now reads, "Democrats push back." It's in regards to the massive federal bailout of Wall Street proposed over the past few days.

Why aren't the Republicans pushing back?! We have to be done with giving a blank check to the Bush administration to do crazy things. We don't get to be the party of fiscal responsibility if we don't at least just ask the question of if this is the right move - or the right amount of money.

Now, maybe there are Republicans in Congress who are questioning and CNN isn't looking at them. The article mentions Shelby of Alabama at least noting the size of this thing. If anyone sees any members of the GOP asking tough questions and avoiding the blank check, please let me know.

Another reason the GOP brand is so tarnished

Jim Wooten of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a nice post today on AJC.com decrying Georgia's Republicans in the state House to lead like Republicans. The Speaker and the Governor are both playing with taxes, and not necessarily in beneficial ways. He very nicely sums up how me and many others are feeling:

The great frustration with the new majority under the Gold Dome is that, with rare exception — tort reform and special education vouchers, for example — they are largely indistinguishable from the Democrats who preceded them. The semantics game on taxes is right out of the Democratic playbook.

It was only a few years ago that Republicans climbed down power in Georgia after more than 140 years of Democrats holding all the reigns of power. Yet, just like we saw on the national level, the Republicans have squandered their majority. And unlike at the national level, where at least the GOP started with a clear set of goals, Glenn Richardson and the Republicans never really knew what they wanted to get accomplished. Wooten's assessment matches my own:

What this majority really needs to do is develop an agenda based on the state’s transportation, education, medical and water objectives — and then determine priorities and funding requirements. If a tax increase is warranted — and it may be — Perdue, Richardson and Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle should make the case, and explain to Georgians what we’re getting and why the additional money is needed.

Instead, we get tax shifts and new tax targets and tax semantics.

This frustration is something the GOP is going to have to deal with at the federal level and in many states during the 2008 election. Republicans are tired of unprincipled leadership from their own party. I don't think they'll go vote for Democrats, but I do wonder if they'll vote at all, and that's just as dangerous.

GOP - get it together. Limit spending, hold or cut taxes, find (and sell!) some creative approaches to social issues like health care, live your values instead of just claiming them, and rebuild this party.

Scenes from an Advance

I stopped by the Virginia Republican Advance, a sort of mini-convention the party holds every year. It's just like a convention, and brings together all the same types of folks you'd expect at a convention. I only went to drop in on an acquaintance who's considering a bid for Congress, and as it was being held only a few blocks from my house, I figured I didn't have much of an excuse to not drop by.

The meat of my political experience is in Georgia, and so I know the Georgia political hacks and players, but I know very very few of the ones in Virginia, and none of the ones I knew were there last night. Without anyone to seek out except the candidate, I got stuck in a conversation with a Ron Paul supporter. He supports him because of the war, and I think that's about it. I tried to engage on government spending, but that didn't go very far. He told me as a second choice, he'd go with Fred Thompson.

"Yeah, Fred Thompson's nice," I said, "in that way that sitting by a pond is nice - it looks pretty but it's too shallow to swim in."

We didn't talk much after that.

Except for not knowing anyone, it's interesting to see that the politicos of Virginia are really just like the politicos of Georgia when they get together. There are the overzealous but personally insecure young campaign workers, the College Republicans who think they're the coolest for being there, even when they're just crowding the elevator and sending it to the wrong floor. There are the Republican women with fancy elephant brooches, and the old man in the funny outfit that always gets noticed and is as pleased as punch to be there. There are the candidates, with charm oozing from their pores, and stray county party leaders, forcing out some synthetic variation of charm.

Yet despite all that, there's an energy in the air that brings back memories of excitement tinged with exhaustion and hope. The energy of politics, of The Campaign, of winning.

I came home and reported to the wife that it was just awful. Yet I know that my eye-rolling exasperation with the event wasn't fair. I would have eaten it up if I were in Georgia - even though I'd probably still do the same amount of exasperated eye rolling. Same idiosyncratic people. Same energy. Shared party. Shared goals.