The Hill had an interesting item today about how conservative activists, now that they’ve completely taken over the House and drive the chamber’s agenda, are laying the groundwork for similar influence in the Senate.
This morning, in a nondescript room in the Russell Building, some of Capitol Hill’s top conservative staffers and lobbyists will meet to plot Senate strategy, as they do most Tuesdays.
Coffee cups in hand, the staffers will assemble around a square boardroom table to exchange ideas and share intelligence, bounce thoughts off leadership staffers and, ultimately, shape the Senate’s conservative agenda.
The Conservative Working Group (CWG), as the group calls itself, is one of several invitation-only conservative gatherings making its influence felt in the Senate, a body known more for compromise and moderation than for advancing conservative ideals.
To be sure, this is discouraging. It’s bad enough that the House marches to a far-right beat; but the Senate is supposed to be above such things.
But the startling part isn’t that the most conservative elements of the GOP base are starting to gain influence; it’s that the far-right suddenly discovered that it already had what it was looking for.
[I]n many cases, Senate leaders and conservatives find themselves on the same page. Frist is one of the most conservative members of the Senate, as are Majority Whip Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and GOP Conference Chairman Rick Santorum (Pa.).
Some observers argue that as the Senate leadership moves farther to the right, organized meetings such as the CWG have had more say in leadership decisions.
“When we first started [in 1974], we didn’t really have anyone in leadership favorable to our point of view,” said Paul Weyrich, who led the CWG in its early years and now heads the Free Congress Foundation. “We had to figure out ways to get around them. … Today, it’s entirely different. Today, we have the most conservative leadership group in the modern history of Senate. … The Steering Committee under these circumstances is taken very seriously.”
[Chris Myers, a lobbyist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,] agreed. “They aren’t outsiders anymore. It used to be that to get attention, they had to throw bombs. Now they are in the room. They are leadership,” he said.
Therein lies the point. We’ve arrived at a moment at which far-right activists like Paul Weyrich, the man who coined the term “Moral Majority in the ’70s and who couldn’t find the mainstream political center with a map, are considered “leaders” in the U.S. Senate. They’ve discovered “the most conservative leadership group in the modern history of Senate” and begun to realize they hardly have to give marching orders anymore — far-right lawmakers already know how and why to advance an uncompromising conservative agenda.
In other words, extremists stormed the castle only to find that their friends were already inside running the joint.