Friday I listened into a conversation on the Laura Ingram radio show; she was interviewing a legal expert (also a Conservative Republican) and discussing Barack Obama’s stated preferences for his upcoming nomination of a justice to replace Justice David Souter who has announced he’ll be retiring at the end of this Supreme Court session.
Ms. Ingram and her guest were criticizing statements that President Obama has made that clearly indicate his preference for a Justice who’s primary qualification is his or her compassion for the plight of society’s minorities and the president’s apparent lack of concern for nominating a judge who is first and foremost an impartial Constitutional expert and who will judge cases based on the law and the Constitution without bias based on the petitioner’s social situation.
I nodded my agreement through that part of the conversation — an unbiased, impartial Constitutional expert is exactly what is needed in each of the seven seats on the Supreme Court. No argument from me there!
Then the conversation switched and Ms. Ingram and her guest started discussing some of the “bad decisions” that might come out of a Supreme Court that was unbalanced in a Liberal direction — and what do you suppose were the two issues that were mentioned first and that apparently concerned them most? If you guessed Abortion and Gay Rights you would be correct!
That, in a nutshell, is one major problem with the Republican party today: The continued assumption that a political party’s philosophy — the Conservative philosophy in particular — must also be the moral compass for their constituency and for the country as a whole.
Fortunately for the Republicans who have been turned off by the religious right philosophy of the mainstream Republican party and fortunately for Conservatism itself, there is grass-roots effort underway that intends to reshape the Republican party into a party that concentrates on a REAL conservative agenda: e.g., lower taxes, smaller government, etc. while putting religious conservative hot-button issues on the back burner. Three prominent Republican conservatives: Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush and House Minority whip Eric Cantor, are leading this effort that they have named “The National Council for a New America.” The three, along with other members of the Council, are going to be traveling all over America to listen to the people and put forth their own ideas.
We can only hope that this initiative works in time to sway public opinion in 2010 and 2012 — before it’s too late. While Republicans are focused on remaking their party, President Obama has stated that he wants to “remake America”; it’s obvious to all but those who blindly accept his every move as the right move that what he wants to remake America into will not, in any significant way, resemble the America we grew up in, the America many of us fought for or the America we all have loved.
News Links:
USA Today: For Obama, the legal legacy begins with Souter replacement
Fox News: GOP Leaders Begin Outreach Effort to Re-energize Party
Blog Links:
Senatus: Hatch Worried Obama Will Pick Activist Supreme Court Judge
Virginia Virtucon: Cantor Creates “National Council for a New America”; First Meeting This Sat. in NoVA
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4 users commented in " Fixing the Problems With Today’s Republican Party "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackI have a few suggestions for the rebuilding of your party. Things to consider:
Keep running the same intellectual types as George W, Bush, Sarah Palin, and Dan Quale.
Keep protecting the people’s interest over that of big business.
Keep different groups divided by hate, that way they will never learn to work together for the greater good.
Always put the interest of big business over that of the environment.
Keep pushing the pro-life agenda, that way you get all the right wing radical Christians.
Keep up the poisonous rhetoric from people like Rush Limbaugh.
Maybe these ideas might help you in the rebuilding of your party, or maybe just try calling yourselves the party of NO.
Interestingly enough, Rush Limbaugh spent almost a full hour criticizing “The National Council for a New America” — he feels that if you are not a Christian Conservative you are simply not a conservative. I hope you got the mesage from the post that I adamantly disagree with him.
Perhaps what the Republican party needs to do is to schism into two affiliated parties. The far right conservative party existing now and a new “moderate” Republican Party that espouses the traditional philosophies on governing i.e. non-interventionist, free-market, strong on national defense etc, while at the same time actively centrist on social issues such as abortion/gay marriage/religion. They could cooperate as a coalition and govern that way. My thinking is that the moderate party could run for seats in the more liberal states (uncontested by their coalition partners) and the current party in the conservative states. It seems clear that there are a lot of voters who naturally lean toward the right but have been alienated by the hard stance taken on social issues and general inflexibility of the party. The Republican party needs to recognize that trying to get elected on a conservative values platform when only about 30% of the population agrees with those values is self-destructive.
The GOP does not look at what is best for America, they look at what they think is best for the party. They set back and cheered Bush when he built a huge bureacracy, ran our economy into the ground, lied to get us into a war, simply because he was a Republican. I do not see where they have any ideas, morals, or compassionat this state of time. Conservatives also forgot the meaning of the word “conserve”. They became my mortal enemy when they adopted their harsh anti-environment message back in the Reagan Era (remember Watt)And what do we have now? Chants of drill baby drill in the last election. How about some Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt, he could set down and listen to John Muir, todays GOP would villify him as a wacko-environmentalist.
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