The WaPo had an interesting item today about voters replacing some of the few remaining Republican moderates in Congress with Democrats.
Tuesday’s electoral upheaval wiped out many of the few remaining Republican moderates in Congress, further cementing the geographic partitioning of the House and potentially widening the ideological divisions that have contributed to partisanship and gridlock on Capitol Hill. […]
The most prominent House Republicans who lost their seats were among the chamber’s best-known moderates, including Rep. Jim Leach (Iowa), a veteran legislator who was not seen as endangered by either party; Rep. Nancy L. Johnson (Conn.), who won her first election to the House during what was otherwise a Republican shellacking in 1982; and Rep. Charles Bass (N.H.), who suffered in a historic wipeout of his party at all levels in the Granite State on Tuesday. […]
The elimination of GOP moderates could push House Republicans farther to the right…. With fewer moderates, Republicans are less likely to feel pressure to bow to the wishes of moderates, especially on fiscal issues.
This seems like a fairly reasonable observation — right up until you remember that Republicans haven’t felt any pressure to bow to the wishes of moderates on any issues in recent years, so it’s a little tough to see how, exactly, the GOP caucus is going to change.
It’s not that I found relative centrists like Leach and Linc Chafee offensive; it’s that I found them utterly irrelevant.
On what major issue or legislation have Republican moderates made their presence known over the last six years? One could possibly make the case that the Gang of 14 compromise might qualify, but it was a relatively weak deal, and stands out as a rare instance.
Someone might also suggest that Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who’s been slightly less right-wing than most of his colleagues, was able to speak out on occasion on behalf of a more moderate GOP path, but I’m hard pressed to think of a single instance in which his “moderation” actually led to a substantive change in policy.
Matt Yglesias described Jim Leach (R-Iowa), who lost in a surprise upset on Tuesday, as someone “possessed of genuinely decent instincts and some fundamentally sound ideas about how the United States should conduct itself in the world.” I agree, but I also agree with Yglesias’ description of Leach’s inconsequential role in recent years.
[I[n practice [Leach] was useless. His presence in the congress did the world no good whatsoever. He’d be more valuable as a professional talking head or stashed away in some think tank somewhere. Whether his total inability to affect the direction of the country was due to a lack of personal courage and savvy, or simply a consequence of the structure of contemporary American conservative politics I couldn’t really say. But useless is what he’d become, and a Democratic vote in the House will be useful. Chuck Hagel, who’s very much the Jim Leach of the Senate, ought to take a good, hard look at this — he, like Leach, has for years now been saying many good things and doing essentially no good at all.
The few remaining GOP moderates were simply locked out of the process by the party’s far-right mainstream. The centrists would ask for changes to the party platform, and they’d be ignored. They’d ask for changes to the party’s agenda, and they’d be ignored. They’d ask for role in the party’s leadership, and they’d be ignored. They’d ask for policy changes, and they’d be ignored. Moderates, in other words, had no moderating influence to speak of. They would vote for the party’s leadership, occasionally vote with Dems on key bills that wound up passing anyway, and then disappear.
My friend Tom Schaller, a poli scie professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, found that 10 of the 28 most liberal members of the Republican conference were defeated this week.
My question is, who’s going to notice?