GOP Warning Falls on Deaf Ears

Vincent Fiore

Several weeks ago, I wrote a commentary that stressed to the Republican-controlled Congress--and President Bush--the perils of not following through on the conservative platform that the GOP stressed during the long campaign of 2004.
(www.gopusa.com/commentary/vfiore/2005/vf_04251.shtml)

The article, “For the GOP, a Warning,” was an attempt to relay to the Republican Party the general dissatisfaction of the conservative base and its many other constituents--all 62,000,000 of them--that labored for that platform in 2004, and believed in the Republican Party and the promise of 2005.

With last Monday’s debacle, in what is now forever know as “The Deal” on President Bush’s judicial nominees, the Republican majority in Washington has possibly assured itself of--at the very least--congressional losses in 2006 and has put in peril the presidency in 2008.

The deal on the president’s Circuit Court nominees can be looked upon as one looks upon a politician’s stock campaign speech—long on promises, yet woefully short on delivery.

If Bush is lucky, he gets four Federal Appeals Courts judges out of an original starting number of sixteen nominees. Many have forgotten judicial nominees Miguel Estrada, Charles Pickering (who received a recess appointment in January, 2004), Carolyn Kuhl, and Claude Allen. All have either withdrawn from the nomination process, or have not been re-nominated by Bush, primarily because of Democratic demonizing and prolonged obstructionism.

Of the original sixteen, only three are assured of an up-or-down vote in the Senate. Jurists Janice Rogers Brown, William Pryor, and Priscilla Owen, the three most “radically right-wing” and “extreme” in the eyes of Democrats, will receive a vote. These three nominees have received seven failed cloture votes between them, as well as the unrelenting vitriol of Democratic Senate leaders and the character-assassination of the press.

The remaining nominations of Susan Bieke Neilson, Terrence William Boyle, Richard Allen Griffin, Thomas B. Griffith, William Haynes, Brett Kavanaugh, David W. McKeague, William G. Myers III and Henry Saad are assured of nothing if only defeat.

The “Deal” was supposed to return “comity” to the world’s most deliberative, yet reactionary body, the U.S. Senate. It was supposed to return the Senate to doing the people’s business, and not upstage and overshadow the “kids [that] are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. The last thing we want to do as a nation is to distract the Senate from doing the big things that have been neglected.”

That oblique and self-serving nonsense was uttered by Senator Lindsey Graham, (R, SC), an acolyte of the much-beloved media “maverick,” Senator John McCain (R, AZ), who summed-up the real reason for this “Deal” when he said “I don‘t think the president won or lost. I think the institution of the Senate won.”

Indeed, part of the Senate did win. Democrats, emboldened by Republican faint-heartedness and what can only be described as the ineptitude of the majority, capitalized early by filibustering the nomination of John Bolton to the United Nations, in which the New York Times shamefully called the failed cloture vote against Bolton “a delay.”

But what of the “Deal” to avert the nuclear option? What of the comity of the Senate? What of the people’s business?

Ronald Reagan once said “Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”

You wonder if these seven Republican senators, as they bask in the power and privilege of the majority, thought of this as they thwarted the will of the president and casually discarded most of his judicial nominees. You wonder if, for lack of a more civil, yet wholly deserved sentiment, they though about the senatorial screwing they gave to all concerned with seeing a Republican majority act upon the mandate given to them by a majority of the voters.

Yes, it’s partisan, but so what? That’s what elections are for. The winners do not “share” power with the losers. The minority does not “co-rule” with the majority. But then again, these axioms that hold true for most everyone else in the United States, is openly--and more lately--serially ignored in the GOP-controlled Senate.

Frankly, the Senate is a supranational body that serves the needs of the 100 “presidents-in-waiting,” possibly none more so than John McCain. Party loyalty or discipline--or even the straight-forward and fair process of an up or down vote for a president’s nominees--has become fractured and diluted.

As John Bolton dangles upon the rope that Senate Democrats have tied him up with, Bolton might take comfort in knowing that he is not alone. Next to him are 1 president, 13 Appeals Court nominees, 48 Republican Senators, and a whole lot of “broken-glass Republicans” who did not bargain for this.

But I do not blame the Democrats. They are the minority party, and obstruction and delay are what the minority party does in Washington. There is little else they can do. But, Democrats have access to the “enlightened” members of the majority. To these seven senators, the idea of party discipline and majority control is to speak first at the press-podium before a pack of left-leaning journalist signing their praises.

To the GOP, I say yet again: Put up or get put out.

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Vincent Fiore is a small business owner and is an active "Citizen Politician" for the GOP. He currently contributes commentary to several political web sites on a weekly basis, and occasionally has had his commentary posted on NewsMax.com.

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