Right Down the Middle?
A bulwark. The public concern is that pressure from the religious right was pushing the Republican Party out of the mainstream and that it was this pressure that precipitated the showdown on federal judges resolved this past week. This was not a religious issue but a judgment about fitness for office. Yet a teleconference in which Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist participated characterized the filibuster as a campaign "against people of faith." For two centuries the filibuster has been a bulwark against majority tyranny. As such, it is a force for compromise and moderation, since it would enforce the need for support broad enough to gain the requisite 60 votes rather than the minimal 50 votes in the Senate. It also reflected the fact that the Senate is made up of two senators from every state, and thus a majority of senators voting does not reflect a majority of the popular will in the way that the House does. Wyoming has as many senators as California. Given that judicial appointments are lifetime appointments, the argument that only moderate judicial nominees merit confirmation by the Senate carried weight with the public. No wonder then that the elimination of the filibuster was opposed by 66 percent of the American people, compared with 26 percent in favor, in a recent ABC/ Washington Post poll.
Will the Republicans make the same mistakes the Democrats did when they abandoned centrism and centrists?
Republicans would do well to reflect on the fallout of 1995, when Newt Gingrich shut down the government and helped the re-election of Bill Clinton. But the more the Republican edge is concentrated in the South, the harder it will be for moderates to steer the party away from extremes that overreach and alienate noncommitted voters.
This does not imply that the public demeans the role of religion in American public life. Religious leaders, after all, have long played a crucial role in American history. In the Great Awakening of the 19th century, antislavery forces were marshaled by Christian ministers (virtually every soldier on both sides of the Civil War carried a Bible), and in the 20th century it was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who galvanized America to end segregation--both among the finest moral moments in American history.
Republicans and many of their supporters may not appreciate their vulnerability, since they have gone from triumph to triumph by embracing a strongly conservative agenda. But most Americans remain fairly centrist and pragmatic, and a plurality of over 40 percent like to think of themselves as moderates. No wonder the Republican Congress is altogether not an American Idol. In a striking NBC/ Wall Street Journal poll conducted two weeks ago, Americans, by 65 to 17 percent, said Congress does not share their priorities; only 42 percent say their representatives should be re-elected; and when asked which party they want to control Congress after the 2006 election, 45 percent called it time for somebody new. In their best showing since 1994, Democrats had a 47 percent to 40 percent edge; only 33 percent approved of lawmakers' performance (while 51 percent disapproved), the lowest approval rating of Congress since 1996. The greatest erosion of approval has been among self-described Republicans.
If this trend continues, it will frustrate Republican political hopes of a historic tipping point and return politics to the seesaw. Neither party has created a winning coalition with a large enough body of nonideological centrists, who now feel abandoned by both parties.
So which party will dominate over the next generation? The envelope, please. We will read it out at the midterm elections next fall.
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