{"id":2042,"date":"2004-07-01T12:27:56","date_gmt":"2004-07-01T17:27:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/2042.html"},"modified":"2004-07-01T12:27:56","modified_gmt":"2004-07-01T17:27:56","slug":"republican-aide-admits-the-party-is-playing-politics-with-the-constitution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/republican-aide-admits-the-party-is-playing-politics-with-the-constitution\/","title":{"rendered":"Republican aide admits the party is playing politics with the Constitution"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Senate Republicans are moving forward with their plan to hold a vote on the Federal Marriage Amendment in just two weeks. Fortunately, a brief <a href=\"http:\/\/www.time.com\/time\/magazine\/article\/0,9171,1101040705-658314,00.html\">report in Time magazine<\/a> included a candid quote about the real motivation behind the endeavor.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>G.O.P. conservatives argue that even a losing vote, besides putting Democrats in an uncomfortable spot, will fire up gay-marriage opponents in more than a dozen states likely to have initiatives on the November ballot to pass anti-gay-marriage amendments. The aim is to get gay-marriage opponents to the polls, says a Senate G.O.P. aide, &#8220;and while they&#8217;re in the booth, they&#8217;ll pull the trigger for Bush and Republicans.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Boy, am I glad this aide said that.<\/p>\n<p>For months, FMA supporters have maintained the fa\u00e7ade that the amendment was about preserving &#8220;traditional&#8221; families and stopping &#8220;activist&#8221; judges. It never made a lot of sense, but that was their argument and they were sticking to it.<\/p>\n<p>But the GOP aide who spoke to Time finally spelled out what we knew all along. The Senate hasn&#8217;t scheduled a vote on this constitutional pollution because lawmakers aren&#8217;t concerned about families or the law &#8212; they want a campaign ploy. The aim, his aide admitted, is to use a vote on a constitutional amendment as a Get-Out-The-Vote tool.<\/p>\n<p>Isn&#8217;t this practically the <i>definition<\/i> of playing politics with an issue?<\/p>\n<p>I realize that most of us recognized this ploy as a campaign stunt from the beginning, but still, I think that quote in Time was the first time I&#8217;ve seen a Republican admit it since this mess started.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Senate Republicans are moving forward with their plan to hold a vote on the Federal Marriage Amendment in just two weeks. Fortunately, a brief report in Time magazine included a candid quote about the real motivation behind the endeavor. G.O.P. conservatives argue that even a losing vote, besides putting Democrats in an uncomfortable spot, will [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2042\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}