Harold Meyerson makes a compelling argument today that the most important vote a lawmaker casts in a given Congress is his or her very first vote: for the chamber’s leadership. Using Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.) as an example, Meyerson noted that Chafee made a fuss about his presidential vote in ’04, but it’s his majority-leader vote that really matters.
Chafee and Maine’s Olympia Snowe and such deathbed converts to moderation as Ohio’s Mike DeWine are seeking reelection to the Senate by claiming that they represent a Republicanism less rabid than the Bush-Rove strain. They point to individual votes in which they broke with the president and flouted the party line. But those votes have been negated a hundred times over by their votes to make Bill Frist the majority leader, just as they would be negated when the new Senate takes office in 2007 if the moderates backed any Republican unwilling to make a fundamental break with Bush and Bushism.
The issue isn’t the individual voting records of Frist and McConnell, which are indistinguishable from each other and define the mainstream of today’s gorge-the-rich, drown-the-poor, stay-the-course Republicanism. The issue is that under the control of the Republicans, both the Senate and the House have abandoned their constitutionally mandated obligation to oversee executive branch endeavors, most especially endeavors gone as awry as the war in Iraq. The issue is that under Republican control, both houses have abandoned any effort to address America’s real problems.
Thank you, Mr. Meyerson. I’m delighted that Chafee has stood up to the Bush administration on several key issues, but if, in January 2009, control of the Senate and its agenda for the next two years comes down to one vote, Chafee will make Mitch McConnell the majority leader. This Mitch McConnell.
Indeed, it all comes down to the fact that moderate Republicans aren’t really moderate; they’re Republicans.
Problem is, Chafee and his moderate band are an ever weaker force in a party whose very essence is extreme, whose electoral strategy is solely to mobilize its base, whose legislative strategy is never to seek votes across party lines. And unless these moderates boldly go where they have not gone before and cast their vote for majority leader (and I don’t mean in caucus, I mean on the Senate floor) for someone other than the nominee of their party caucus, they are not moderates at all. They are loyal and indispensable foot soldiers in the Republicans’ continuing campaign to drag the nation rightward and backward.
And guess what. The moderates will vote for the extremist. “Moderate,” after all, is only an adjective; “Republican” is a noun. Chafee, Snowe, the whole lot of them, are moderate enablers of an extremist party. That leaves those voters in Rhode Island, Maine, Ohio and other states where these self-proclaimed Republican moderates are running only one choice if they seek a Congress to check and balance the president, if they want a more moderate nation: Vote for the Democrat.
This comes up quite a bit in my home state of Vermont. We have an open U.S. House race this year (it’s an at-large seat for the whole state — not a lot of people up here), in which a very moderate Republican will face a left-leaning Dem. It may be one of the bluest states in the nation, but the race is neck-in-neck, in part because voters are willing to overlook the Republican’s party affiliation.
It’s a mistake, of course, because as Meyerson explained, these “moderates” are backing a far-right agenda the second they show up on the floor of the chamber. Likewise, the same dynamic applies to right-leaning Dems in red states — they need our support because, even if they vote the wrong way on almost everything, they’ll still cast that first vote for the leadership. It’s the vote that helps establish the agenda for two years.
In other words, party matters.