According to a letter sent out by the Campaign Committee to elect Bill Harsch, Harsch’s campaign for Attorney General is motivated by some very specific complaints against current AG Patrick Lynch…
Justice is not a privilege reserved for elite politicians, high-priced lobbyists, union bosses, and corporate fat cats. Justice is a right to which all Rhode Islanders are entitled.[Open full post]
Patrick Lynch’s tenure as Attorney General is a paltry record of justice delayed and justice denied. Just consider the facts. The health and safety of Rhode Island’s children are threatened by the weakest sex offender registration laws in the country, while Patrick uses his office as a billboard to proclaim the “wisdom” of Spider-Man. Our roadway safety is compromised by the highest rate of drunk driving incidents in the country, while as our chief law enforcement officer Patrick accepts thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from liquor interests. John Celona’s prosecution and the related investigation into corporate corruption in our halls of government is quietly left to the federal government, while as our constitutional guardian of justice Patrick takes no action against his former lobbying clients, such as CVS. Need we mention how Patrick has ignominiously bumbled and fumbled his way through the Station Nightclub Fire investigation?
The people of Rhode Island do not merely deserve better. We deserve equal justice!
We need Bill Harsch as our next Attorney General. Bill Harsch will bring a refreshing commitment to justice for all Rhode Islanders to the Attorney General’s office. Bill will not be beholden to any special interests, family relations, or political alliances. Bill is an experienced attorney and public servant whose dedication to preserving our rights and liberties by ensuring open, honest, and efficient government, and aggressively enforcing the criminal and civil laws of our state without regard for the race, wealth or political connections of the parties concerned, is unimpeachable.
We know Rhode Island can be a better place. We know justice can, must, and will be done. We know, with your help, Bill Harsch can win this election. Join us in this endeavor. Please support Bill Harsch for Attorney General.
A new editorial entitled The JFK Question: Sens. Specter and Feinstein impose an unconstitutional religious test has these words about the confirmation hearings for John Roberts:
…we appear to be traveling in the wrong direction.
Article VI of the Constitution prohibits a religious test from being imposed on nominees to public office. The clause was motivated by the experience of Catholics in the Maryland colony and Baptists in Virginia who had been the targets of Great Britain’s two Test Acts. These infamous laws of intolerance sought to prevent anyone who did not belong to the Church of England from holding public office. The Test Acts did not say that Catholics could not hold office; the bigotry was more subtle. Officials questioned would-be public servants to determine whether they believed in particular tenets of the Catholic faith.
While questioning John Roberts on Tuesday, Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter asked: “Would you say that your views are the same as those expressed by John Kennedy when he was a candidate, and he spoke to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in September of 1960: ‘I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.’ ”
Hours later, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California made it worse: “In 1960, there was much debate about President John F. Kennedy’s faith and what role Catholicism would play in his administration. At that time, he pledged to address the issues of conscience out of a focus on the national interests, not out of adherence to the dictates of one’s religion. . . . My question is: Do you?”
How insulting. How offensive. How invidiously ignorant to question someone like Judge Roberts with such apparent presumption and disdain for the religion he practices. The JFK question is not just the camel’s nose of religious intolerance; it is the whole smelly camel.
Outrage over this line of questioning was ecumenical. In his new blog, Jewdicious.blogspot.com, Jeff Ballabon of the Center for Jewish Values posted this from the Senate’s hallways:I mean how grotesque is it that the Left feels free to indulge openly in half-century-old religious prejudice? This is not some crazy person standing outside with a rusty hanger–it is a United States Senator in her official capacity on national television. And this is no off-the-cuff blurt–these questions are excruciatingly researched and drafted and worded and reviewed and approved and choreographed by teams of liberal lawyers and advisors both on her staff and off. She–the senator who keeps harping at this hearing that her concern is the protection of people of faith–thinks an obnoxious question born of religious bigotry is legitimate because it was posed in 1960?
Non-Catholic Christians also spoke up. Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America issued this statement:
It is precisely this kind of anti-Christian religious litmus test that many Americans find deeply offensive. . . . Feinstein is dipping her toe into the very ugly, muddy waters of religious bigotry. America’s Founding Fathers considered religious beliefs to be an asset, even essential to public officeholders. Sadly, Sen. Feinstein apparently believes the opposite of those wise men to whom we owe gratitude for our free and strong country.
Catholic leaders were stunned…Mr. Cella drew distinctions:
Of the two Senators remarks, Senator Feinstein’s were the most disturbing because she referred to the Catholic faith as ‘dictates.’ It shows her callous insensitivity and ignorance of the teachings of the Catholic faith…
The JFK question has no place in a Senate confirmation process. The Constitution says so…
…John Roberts will be only the 11th Catholic (out of 109 justices) to serve on the Supreme Court in its 215-year history. But his confirmation may be a historic first. It marks the introduction, on the record, of a constitutionally prohibited religious test for a Supreme Court nominee. We are going in the wrong direction.
This issue was also discussed in an earlier posting.
[Open full post]As an experiment of our own, AnchorRising will be liveblogging responses to tonight’s installment of “A Lively Experiment”, Rhode Island public television’s public affairs roundtable (Channel 36, 7:30 pm). This is not intended as a comprehensive review of the program, but as a supplement helping to add ideas and insights to the existing dialogue.
SHOW’s ON
They just said their good-bye to Steve Kass (Kass is leaving to become Don Carcieri’s communications director).
Topic 1: According to all 4 panelists, Steve Laffey has no chance. Because he is he is too conservative for the electorate (Lila Sapinsley) and becasue the electorate is too conservative for him (Dave Layman). As has been the case so far, most of the Laffey/Chafee discussion quickly becomes a Laffey discussion. Is this a good thing for an incumbent Senator?
Topic 2: Credit to Roger Begin; he wants tougher controls against voter fraud. Most panelists agree. Maureen Moakley has some reservations.
Topic 3: Roberts confirmation. Sapinsley, a Chafee Republican is strongly behind Roberts. Will Senator Chafee’s support be as strong?
Outrages:
Begin: We need a climate in this state that does not alienate successful people. This is Begin’s second major break with Dem CW. Is he planning to run for something? Or are you free to say what you want when you’re not running for anything?
Sapinsley: Pays tribute to Kass, but adds that Don Carcieri is too conservative!
Layman: Tribute to Kass.
Moakley: State legislature shouldn’t repeal gas tax. The country needs to find energy alternatives instead.
In “Katrina and the Media’s Demand for Racial Division,” I note that Hurricane Katrina seems to have undone some of the good that came from the evil of September 11 by rejuvenating racial divisiveness as a focus of conversation. Depressing. Sickening. Discouraging. And yet there’s hope if only we can find the patience to let the unimaginative among us think matters through… ideally without further catastrophes for precipitation.
[Open full post]Tom DeLay declares there is no fat left in the federal budget:
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said yesterday that Republicans have done so well in cutting spending that he declared an “ongoing victory,” and said there is simply no fat left to cut in the federal budget.
Mr. DeLay was defending Republicans’ choice to borrow money and add to this year’s expected $331 billion deficit to pay for Hurricane Katrina relief. Some Republicans have said Congress should make cuts in other areas, but Mr. DeLay said that doesn’t seem possible.
“My answer to those that want to offset the spending is sure, bring me the offsets, I’ll be glad to do it. But nobody has been able to come up with any yet,” the Texas Republican told reporters at his weekly briefing.
Asked if that meant the government was running at peak efficiency, Mr. DeLay said, “Yes, after 11 years of Republican majority we’ve pared it down pretty good.”
Congress has passed two hurricane relief bills totaling $62.3 billion, all of which will be added to the deficit…
Some Republicans wanted to offer an amendment, including cuts, to pay for hurricane spending but were denied the chance under procedural rules.
“This is hardly a well-oiled machine,” said Rep. Jeff Flake, Arizona Republican. “There’s a lot of fat to trim. … I wonder if we’ve been serving in the same Congress.”
American Conservative Union Chairman David A. Keene said federal spending already was “spiraling out of control” before Katrina, and conservatives are “increasingly losing faith in the president and the Republican leadership in Congress.”
“Excluding military and homeland security, American taxpayers have witnessed the largest spending increase under any preceding president and Congress since the Great Depression,” he said…
DeLay and his gang are drinking some serious Kool-Aid that only gets served up to people who spend too much time in Washington, D.C. and, thereby, lose touch with economic reality.
This posting extends the arguments made here and here.
How can these people talk and keep a straight face?
Here’s Sheldon Whitehouse’s response to the Brown University Senate preference poll…
Meanwhile, yesterday, the Whitehouse camp chose to focus on Chafee’s 3-point “downslide,” since the last Brown poll in June had him leading Democrat Whitehouse with 41 percent of the vote, and now it is 38 percent.Attention Whitehouse Campaign: The same poll shows a 10 to 11 point drop in support for your own efforts. Do you think that a 10 point drop is more or less significant than a 3 point one? (And wouldn’t that have been something worth pointing out in the Projo article?) [Open full post]
There are numerous aspects of Steve Laffey’s personal life history that many of us can relate to and all of us can respect. He is a living embodiment of the American Dream, achieving great things through the liberty found in America combined with getting a great education and then working hard.
If you read his announcement speech from last week, how can anyone not respond favorably to his working numerous jobs as a kid, earning a scholarship to a fine college like Bowdoin and becoming the first member of his family to go to college, attending a great business school at Harvard, and working his way up to be President of Morgan Keegan while still in his 30’s? All in all, it is a wonderful human interest story.
No less impressive is what he has started to accomplish in Cranston. He took a city on the verge of bankruptcy and led a meaningful change effort by publicly telling the truth about numerous independently verifiable problems, such as the crossing guard fiasco. He did step on the toes of some powerful interest groups and helped elevate those issues to statewide visibility. He was bold and many of us have admired his actions.
Now, I previously wrote why I think so little of Senator Chafee and the state Republican party. As a Republican myself, it would be a kind understatement to say I find many of the party’s leadership and their actions to be unimaginative and disappointing. I find it easy to respect a principled liberal, even if I thoroughly disagree with their policy preferences. What I don’t respect is vacillation and that is Senator Chafee’s trademark on a number of key issues.
That posting also stated that I thought it was a mistake – for different reasons than the Establishment has pushed – for Laffey to run against Chafee for the U.S. Senate seat. I thought it was a mistake for two reasons.
First, while he has started a turnaround in Cranston, the job is not complete. As a business executive myself who has led 6 successful turnarounds over the years, I believe the turnaround in Cranston will only be complete when there are significant and more permanent structural changes to Cranston’s financial future. Laffey deserves huge credit for stabilizing a wildly unstable mess and saving the town from bankruptcy. But can anyone say the turnaround is truly complete? Are the public sector union contracts across all aspects of Cranston materially different from when he first took office – so the past cannot repeat itself when some spineless politicians take his place? Are those contracts sufficiently different now so that the initial property tax increases he imposed can be rolled back? I don’t think so and that is why I thought one serious option he could have acted on was to stay and finish the turnaround. At the same time, I can also understand why his ambition might drive him to think bigger than Cranston.
Second, he could have thought bigger than Cranston by running for Treasurer. That would have played to his work experience and allowed him to focus on the brewing public pension financial disaster at both the state and national level. I lived in California when Jerry Brown became Secretary of State in the post-Watergate world of 1974 and turned what had been a sleepy position into one with national visibility. He was governor four years later in 1978 and a presidential candidate by 1980.
That being said, now that Laffey has opted for the U.S. Senate race, I read his announcement speech with great anticipation.
At first I was not disappointed. His speech hit a number of highly relevant and hot issues – such as outrageous public sector union demands, corporate welfare for the sugar industry, the excessive highway and energy bills, and a complete lack of spending restraint in general – that I have written about over the last year and are either linked together in a recent posting entitled Rancid Pork Leaves a Bad Taste in Your Mouth or contained in postings entitled Has the GOP Lost Its Soul? and Economics 101: Never Underestimate the Incentive Power of Marginal Tax Cuts.
We do need a more vigorous public debate about these issues, all of which center on the core question of what role government should play in our society – including how the size of government grows ever larger and, therefore, more subject to capture by special interests due to its fundamentally misguided structural incentives.
And I thought the Laffey campaign slogan of “The smallest state in the Union will have the strongest voice in Washington” was wonderfully clever.
But I found key portions of his speech to be troubling. Laffey’s speech contains words that no informed or business savvy person would say – unless he was pandering for votes. That possibility is most disappointing because it suggests opportunism – not principled behavior – is driving the Laffey campaign.
[Full disclosure: I have worked in the healthcare industry since 1983, spending most of my time since 1985 working in venture capital-financed startup companies. I worked briefly in the energy industry during 1981-1983, with a 1981 summer job in Saudi Arabia working for Aramco and then worked for ARCO in the USA during the subsequent two years.]
Here are the healthcare-related words from Laffey’s speech that bothered me:
The senior citizens of Rhode Island are paying twice the price for prescription drugs that seniors pay in Canada for the exact same prescriptions. And yet, our seniors are banned from buying cheaper medicine in Canada and Medicare is prohibited from negotiating for cheaper drugs through group buying. Why? Because the big drug companies have a financial strangehold on the politicians in Washington keeping prices high…while 2/3 of our seniors, like my parents, cannot afford their medicine because they depend on social security checks as their primary source of income…
In 2006, we need to set our own concrete goals for progressive ideas to come to fruition…ideas like offering Americans lower prices on prescription drugs as low as those offered to the rest of the world…
Someone needs to stand up and fight when the drug companies won’t let our seniors buy their prescriptions from Canada at a discount price…
Those words are nothing less than pure demagoguery. See this separate posting for specific counter arguments.
Here are the energy-related comments from Laffey’s speech that bothered me:
Look at what’s happening with gas prices and energy policy. The car companies have the technology today to make cars with double the gas mileage, but they won’t do it. So America stays dependent on Saudi Arabian oil, with tragic consequences when we don’t have to. We have the technology to design alternative energy solutions today. What we lack is the political will to do it…
Our lack of an energy policy today is a crisis on par with these challeges America has faced over the last seven decades…
Someone needs to stand up and fight when the oil companies get huge subsidies while we do nothing to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and we’re stuck paying more than $3.00 for a gallon of gasoline…
See this separate posting for specific comments on energy issues.
Laffey’s comments fail to address the complete set of issues that matter to working people in Rhode Island in a balanced, factual manner.
Here is my point of view:
Corporate welfare programs lobbied for by Big Business are nothing more than a hidden tax on working people that benefits only the few and powerful. Such taxes are unfair and unjust. But, as bad as they are, it would be unreasonable to focus just on the corporate welfare programs.
The ever-increasing regulatory burdens imposed by Big Government are at least as big a problem as they perpetuate the power of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats who impose unilateral costs on companies. Such burdens then show up as some combination of higher product prices to consumers or lost jobs due to the stifling of private sector innovation – both of which represent additional hidden taxes paid for by working people. Such taxes are also unfair and unjust.
The Establishment, consisting of Big Business and Big Government, has an incentive to propagate the growth of government. Why? Because such growth leads to more assets to tap into or control for their benefit. It provides the Big Business lobby with an incentive to pursue more corporate welfare programs and the Big Government lobby with an incentive to pursue more government regulation of both our economic and personal lives. All of which leaves the working people of America with less freedom: less financial freedom due to higher taxes and higher prices plus fewer opportunities to live the American Dream due to lower economic growth.
Unfortunately, Laffey’s words have confirmed that the Laffey vs. Chafee race is not a battle between Principles and the Establishment. With little use for the philosophically unmoored Establishment and its utilitarian focus on maintaining power, my greatest wish continues to be for a leader who, driven by empirically-based principles, stands up and tells the truth. Laffey’s comments, particularly about the drug industry, don’t tell the truth and amount to nothing more than an unprincipled pandering for votes. He is a smart enough man to know better and that means his ego is not under control. His words, if implemented, would lead to nothing less than a long-term policy fiasco.
But, even more importantly, this isn’t just about Laffey and his individual candidacy. My larger concern is that the failing status quo of the Establishment will become even more entrenched should they successfully swat down his candidacy – and his words have given them further ammunition to do just that. That further entrenchment will only magnify over time the hidden costs paid for solely by the working people of Rhode Island, adversely impacting the ability of many to realize the American Dream.
So all of us are still waiting for the first U.S. Senate candidate – from either party – to show the will to stand up for the hard-working taxpayers across the state by truly challenging the status quo of the Establishment.
John Fund has written a powerful editorial entitled Hey, Big Spender: FDR and Truman made cuts when crises demanded it. Why won’t Bush?. Here are some highlights:
With almost no debate and with precious few provisions for oversight, Congress has passed President Bush’s mammoth $62 billion request for emergency Katrina relief. House Speaker Denny Hastert says the final total will “probably [be] under the cost of the highway bill” that Congress passed last month with a pricetag of $286.4 billion.
Despite such sums, there are few calls for offsetting cuts in other programs, apart from antiwar opportunists who see in Katrina a chance to undermine the Iraq effort. Last week Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma asked White House Budget Director Josh Bolten if he planned to continue to pursue budget reductions the administration had already proposed in its January budget. Mr. Bolten said he “didn’t have time” to worry about that.
All this leaves Mr. Coburn and other budget hawks wondering what has happened to what might be called “the Republican wing of the Republican Party.” “The president could exercise leadership by insisting that we set priorities and offset the cost of Katrina relief by making changes elsewhere,” says Mr. Coburn. “Sadly, we don’t have that leadership.”…
Families hit by any disaster realize they have to reassess their situation and change their circumstances. There was a time when the nation acted the same way. After Pearl Harbor, the country sprang into action to win the war against Japan and Germany. But it realized that the old way of doing things wouldn’t do. Dramatic changes in government policy resulted.
After Pearl Harbor, it’s generally known that Franklin D. Roosevelt dramatically expanded the bite of the federal income tax so that, in the words of one tax professor, it “spread from the country club…down to the railroad tracks and then over to the other side of the tracks.”
Less well known is FDR’s decision to slash nondefense spending by over 20% between 1942 and 1944. Among the programs that were eliminated entirely were FDR’s own prized creations. By 1944, such pillars of the New Deal as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Youth Administration and the Work Projects Administration had been abolished. In 1939 those three programs had represented one-eighth of the federal budget. Roosevelt and the Congress of his day knew what to do in an emergency.
Indeed, FDR chose to begin the reordering of budget priorities long before Pearl Harbor. In October 1939, one month after Hitler invaded Poland, Roosevelt wrote Harold Smith, his budget director, ordering him to hold budgets for all government programs “at the present level and below, if possible.” The next month he told Smith that “the administration will not undertake any new activities, even if laudable ones.” He told reporters the next year that his policy would be to cut nonmilitary programs to the bone. He kept his word. Between 1939 and 1942, spending for nondefense programs was cut by 22%. Everyone realized that no matter how popular or politically entrenched a program, the nation’s priorities had to change.
Harry S. Truman acted with equal decisiveness after the Korean War began in 1950. In just one year, Truman and a Democratic Congress cut nonmilitary spending by 28%.
But the attitude of the nation’s political leaders changed after the beginning of the Great Society in the 1960s. Lyndon B. Johnson told advisers he could deliver “both guns and butter” and proceeded to avoid any hard choices between his favored domestic programs and the Vietnam War. Between 1965 and 1974, the fighting in Vietnam led to a 57% hike in defense spending. During the same period of time, nondefense spending also surged, nearly tripling over the same period.
Mitch Daniels, Mr. Bush’s former budget director and now the governor of Indiana, says, “We rightly remember the dismal consequences, both economic and fiscal, of the refusal to make hard choices back then.” They included inflation, which led to by foolhardy wage-and-price controls. The 1970s became a decade of economic stagnation under both Republican and Democratic presidents.
Mr. Daniels proposed the country make hard choices after the 9/11 attacks, urging spending restraint. In a speech in 2001, he noted that “to the average citizen, shifting resources when priorities change makes simple common sense. When the new priority is the survival of Americans, the cause is even more obvious, a straightforward matter of battle stations vs. business-as-usual.” But Mr. Daniels was thwarted by both a White House and Congress who paid lip service to spending restraint but never practiced it. Total federal spending is now up 20% in real terms since 2001…
…I fear that the White House and Congress have decided instead to throw money at the ravaged Gulf Coast and ignore the example of FDR and Truman…
This posting builds on an earlier posting entitled Has the GOP Lost Its Soul? with its many links to other postings.
[Open full post]The hearings for Chief Justice-in-waiting John Roberts begin today and can be seen and heard via C-SPAN beginning at 11:30 AM. As C-SPAN “warns,” however:
On Monday, the multi-day Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge John Roberts begin. They are expected to last all week. First, will be a series of opening statements by the eighteen members of the Senate Judiciary Cmte. These should take up most of the afternoon.
So get your hip-waders ready. For his part, Senate Judiciary member John Cornyn has outlined three things he’s going to be looking for throughout the hearings.
Will my colleagues misuse the term “judicial activism”?
Will my colleagues ask Judge Roberts questions they know he cannot answer?
Will my colleagues accuse Judge Roberts of being an extremist?
Cornyn elaborates on all three, so it’s worth reading the piece.
UPDATE:
Here is the text of Judge Roberts opening statement. Here is a substantive selection from his statement:
[Open full post]Judges and justices are servants of the law, not the other way around. Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them.
The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules.
But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.
Judges have to have the humility to recognize that they operate within a system of precedent, shaped by other judges equally striving to live up to the judicial oath.
And judges have to have the modesty to be open in the decisional process to the considered views of their colleagues on the bench.
Mr. Chairman, when I worked in the Department of Justice, in the office of the solicitor general, it was my job to argue cases for the United States before the Supreme court.
I always found it very moving to stand before the justices and say, “I speak for my country.”
But it was after I left the department and began arguing cases against the United States that I fully appreciated the importance of the Supreme Court and our constitutional system.
Here was the United States, the most powerful entity in the world, aligned against my client. And yet, all I had to do was convince the court that I was right on the law and the government was wrong and all that power and might would recede in deference to the rule of law.
That is a remarkable thing.
It is what we mean when we say that we are a government of laws and not of men. It is that rule of law that protects the rights and liberties of all Americans. It is the envy of the world. Because without the rule of law, any rights are meaningless.
President Ronald Reagan used to speak of the Soviet constitution, and he noted that it purported to grant wonderful rights of all sorts to people. But those rights were empty promises, because that system did not have an independent judiciary to uphold the rule of law and enforce those rights. We do, because of the wisdom of our founders and the sacrifices of our heroes over the generations to make their vision a reality.
Mr. Chairman, I come before the committee with no agenda. I have no platform. Judges are not politicians who can promise to do certain things in exchange for votes.
I have no agenda, but I do have a commitment. If I am confirmed, I will confront every case with an open mind. I will fully and fairly analyze the legal arguments that are presented. I will be open to the considered views of my colleagues on the bench. And I will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability. And I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.
The senate race between Laffey and Chafee offers a rare opportunity for the Rhode Island Republican party–both its leadership and, especially, the rank and file–to define itself. For decades now, the “traditional” (elected) Rhode Island Republican seems to almost pathologically belong to the “can’t-we-just-get-along” club. They smile and wink and get gut-punched by the Democrats to which they respond with an “aw, shucks” and keep smiling and winking. The leadership of the RIGOP long ago seems to have given up hope of real, statewide political strength. Instead, they too-often seem happy to continue playing their role of Washington General-like foil to the dominant, Globe-trotting Democrats.
With this sort of mindset, it must seem to them well-nigh a miracle that they have managed to maintain a U.S. Senate seat. They’ve played it safe and won a small piece of the pie. Now is not the time to risk it! Instead, they want to trot out the prevent defense and hold on to what they’ve got. Despite the perception, this tactic actually does work in football, but it often fails in politics.
Why don’t they support Steve Laffey’s candidacy? Partly it’s because he’s not one of “them”, the establishment RIGOP, the whole handful of them who have led Republicans to the Governorship and not much else. (As an aside, we shouldn’t forget that Gov. Carcieri was the outsider when he ran for, and won, the Governorship). Partly its because Steve Laffey seems like too big of a risk and they don’t think he can win statewide. I have also expressed some of those same doubts (here and here). A smidgen of dislike can also be thrown in as many probably just don’t like the Steve Laffey “act.” But I think the largest reason as to why the don’t support Steve Laffey is because he isn’t their kind of Republican.
Nationwide, conservatives generally support Republicans because, on a broad range of issues, Republicans tilt towards those values held by the average conservative voter. Much of the leadership of the RIGOP does not hold conservative ideals (if Sen. Chafee’s record is any indication of what a traditional RI Republican believes) and seems to routinely attempt to distance itself from the conservatives within its ranks.
For instance, in a recent airing of PBS-RI’s “Lively Experiment”, former Lt. Governor stated that Laffey was drawing support from the “extreme right-wing” (I saw it myself, no link to a transcript, but I’ll keep looking). Does that sound like a Republican amenable to party-building and fraternity by embracing the entire spectrum of Republican voters? And in the coming months, don’t let them fool you with the soon-to-be oft-parrotted reference to Laffey’s property tax hike in Cranston, either. Sen. Chafee is one of those Washington baseline budgeteers who thinks its a matter of course that tax-cuts have to be “paid for” and regularly receives mostly poor grades on tax issues.
It is ironic that 50%-Linc will be supported by the conservative Bush Administration that think it needs him to maintain the Republican Senate majority. They will do everything to keep Chafee in, which will include supporting a candidate against the wishes of their conservative (albeit relatively small) base in the Ocean State. It is the ultimate example of being on the wrong side of the ledger in political economics. Thus, RI conservatives have been left with a choice: standing up for political ideals in their state or striving to maintain national political power at their own continued expense?
Right now, many believe that a vote for the candidate with more conservative ideals, Steve Laffey, could result in a two-fold loss of Republican power: Rhode Island Republicans could lose a national voice and the National GOP could lose the U.S. Senate altogether. Yes, it is possible Steve Laffey could win in a statewide election, especially if he continues to emphasize the “populist” (as he did the other night) in his populist/conservative message. Nonetheless, even if he doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in Hades, Rhode Island conservatives will have been heard by bucking the establishment and sending Laffey on to the general election. Many ask: But what would be the purpose? The answer is: to find out who or what the RIGOP is going to be.
In the end, sending Laffey past Chafee to face a Democrat challenger may be nothing more than a romantically noble, and ultimately doomed, cause. Perhaps Rhode Island Republicans won’t see another of their own in the national delegation for decades. Yet, despite all of this and whatever the outcome may be, RICons will have made a statement about what they think the RIGOP should be and they will have forced the “establishment” to do the same.
The RIGOP needs to be shaken up and to find a direction. The political tactics used by the RIGOP over the last few years have not worked, if they existed at all. Wimpering under the table for scraps doesn’t make a party stronger–it barely keeps it alive and gives it false hope for more of the same. This sort of milquetoast Republicanism has failed in Rhode Island.
If nothing else, I hope that the coming debates will help RI Republicans decide the kind of party they want. I hope, like me, they will see that it’s time to heed a paraphrase of Robert Frost’s advice and take the road never traveled: the one that leads to a RI Republican party with conservative ideals at its core.
