In Washington today, we are witness to two depressing spectacles. We see a morally bankrupt Clinton White House, brazenly renting the Lincoln Bedroom. And we see a brain-dead Republican party, cowering in the halls of Congress.
There is nothing that can be done to change the first of these: Bill Clinton is who he is, after all. But the phenomenon of Republican timidity is unnatural and unnecessary. It can be changed. What’s needed is an insurrection — one, two, many insurrections — from within the ranks of the GOP
Every significant rightward shift in modern American politics has followed from an insurrectionary assault on the Republican establishment. Ronald Reagan’s 1976 primary challenge, animated by his rejection of the policy of detente, laid the groundwork for his triumph in 1980 and for his greatest achievement as president — American victory in the Cold War. Jack Kemp’s challenge in the late 1970s to Republican economic orthodoxy became the other pillar of Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign and the source of his greatest domestic accomplishment — cutting tax rates and restoring the nation’s economic health. And Newt Gingrich’s rebellion against the budget deal of 1990 made it possible for Gingrich, after George Bush’s defeat in 1992, to lead the GOP back to a Reaganite vision that inspired the watershed victory of 1994.
All of these insurrections came as shocks to the Republican establishment. No one believed they could succeed. The insurgents looked like mere troublemakers. And right now, the last thing Republican leaders on the Hill are interested in is making trouble. Majority leader Dick Armey, who used to be something of a firebrand, wrote in a memo to his colleagues last week that “making progress on the Republican agenda does not require us to create fireworks.” That might be fine if a solid Republican agenda were being advanced sans fireworks. But judging by the stated plans of Armey and Senate majority leader Trent Lott, that isn’t the case either. So: No agenda. No fireworks. No nothing.
Churchill once said that there is nothing more exhilarating than being shot at and missed. But Churchill didn’t know many Republicans. They’re not exhilarated after surviving the near-death electoral experience of 1996. They’re cautious, timid, and adrift. And so they comfort themselves with the thought that the Clinton administration may be in the process of self- destructing and that they can afford to sit back, bide their time, and wait for good things to fall into their laps.
But in politics, good things do not come to those who wait. The GOP is on the verge of a possibly historic realignment; such realignments don’t happen on their own. Important opportunities for conservative policy advances are falling by the wayside, and chances for Republican political victories are being ignored as well. For the key to such advances and victories is to stay on the strategic offensive. When liberalism was ascendant, liberals always had some plan to propose, some initiative to advance, some program to initiate. Sometimes they pursued their agenda cautiously, other times boldly, but they always knew where they were going and never ceased moving forward.
There’s no reason Republicans couldn’t be doing this now, except that for some reason they’ve talked themselves into timidity and passivity. Last week, for example, one of the arguments against a ban on partial-birth abortions collapsed. The director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers said he had knowingly lied last year by claiming that partial-birth abortions were performed almost exclusively in cases where the mother’s health was at stake or the unborn child was deformed. Now, the Washington Post reports as a fact that at least half “and possibly the great majority” of partial-birth abortions “are done on healthy fetuses carried by women who themselves are healthy.”
Why hasn’t the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill been trumpeting this revelation? There will never be a better time to resurrect the legislation banning partial-birth abortions that President Clinton vetoed last fall. Why not bring it to the floor of one or both houses this week? One advantage to having a majority in Congress is that it allows your party to control the schedule. It is time to seize the day — but Republicans seem paralyzed instead of energized by their majority status and disinclined to put it to strategic use.
Another example: There is a raging controversy in Alabama over whether a state judge can display the Ten Commandments on the wall of his courtroom. A Supreme Court decision from 1979 suggests such a display is unconstitutional, or so another judge in Alabama has ruled. Congress could seek to correct this constitutional interpretation by statute (pursuant to Article V of the Fifteenth Amendment). Or it could move quickly on a constitutional amendment that would give public officials the right to post the Ten Commandments if they so choose. There could be hearings on such an amendment tomorrow if the leadership wanted them. And Republicans would be using a newsworthy controversy to illustrate a fundamental difference between the two parties about the role of religion in American public life. Another opportunity wasted.
One more example: A single federal district judge in California has prevented the implementation of the California Civil Rights Initiative. This could have been the opening for the debate Republicans have been seeking on two key matters: judicial usurpation and racial preferences. Republicans could immediately have proposed that the law be changed to make it more difficult for a single judge to block a constitutional decision of almost 5 million voters, perhaps by requiring the vote of a three-judge panel to delay implementation of a state constitutional initiative. Such a proposal might pass, or it might not, but it would at least be a start.
More broadly, both the courts and affirmative action invite fundamental backbench insurrections that could force these issues to the front burner this year. Newt Gingrich has made clear his unwillingness to seek a vote on repealing race and sex preferences in federal government programs. Why? Because, Gingrich’s spokeswoman says, “we want to make sure we educate people about it.” Do the American people really need to be educated about the injustice of racial preferences? And if they do, are Republican leaders doing anything to educate them? Maybe Republican leaders are the ones who need the educating, and maybe their backbenchers are the ones to teach them.
Or take the courts. The many instances of judicial activism in the last two years have given us an inkling of what four more years of Clinton appointees to the federal bench could mean. There are now 93 vacancies on the federal bench. If the Republican Senate continues on a path of business as usual, the president could end up appointing some 250 judges before he leaves office. That would mean that about 60 percent of all federal judges would be Clinton appointees by the year 2001. Sen. Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has begun talking about examining the jurisprudential and constitutional views of Clinton’s nominees. Sen. Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican, has begun making the case that not all appellate court vacancies need to be filled. And there are rumblings that Republicans will try to block a couple of pending nominees to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, William Fletcher and Margaret McKeown.
But unless a few determined senators make the whole issue of the federal judiciary a cause celebre, such efforts will have limited effect. A backbench insurrection is needed. Some senator should stand up and say he is henceforth devoting himself to preventing the appointment of new liberal judges on the appellate courts; that he is willing to endure criticism from the New York Times and the American Bar Association to achieve such an end; and that, given the imperial reach of today’s judiciary, it is of fundamental importance to prevent Clinton from shaping the bench for decades to come. The battle cry “No new liberal judges” should go forth into the land. It would fall on receptive ears.
Insurrections are needed in other areas in order to return the GOP to sound principle and the moral high ground. In the case of China, the Republican establishment has joined the Clinton administration in subordinating both strategic concerns and American principles to business interests. The most- favorednation vote this spring will provide an opportunity for some brave soul to take the lead against the bipartisan policy of engagement. And the object of attack must be both the Clinton administration and the mandarins of the Republican foreign policy establishment — just as the objects of Reagan’s assault in 1976 were the McGovernite Democratic party of American decline and the Ford-Kissinger Republican party of detente.
The issue of China dovetails neatly with the looming problem of national defense. The Republican leadership’s obsession with balancing the budget, combined with their timidity in cutting domestic spending, has led them to accede to an irresponsibly low defense budget.
Despite a consensus that no one cares about defense or foreign policy, it is time for some insurrectionist to rise up to remind us that our national defense is the paramount obligation of the federal government. To be sure, the backbencher who offers the motion to cut domestic spending by a few percent for the sake of defense will receive little support at first. But by showing he has the gumption to bring so vital an issue to the attention of the public, that backbencher could eventually emerge as a major national figure when defense once again becomes (as it always does) a central issue of our political life.
There are other issues ripe for insurrectionary activity. An all-out assault on Clinton’s education proposal, coupled with advocacy of a conservative education agenda of parental choice and local control, holds greater promise than almost anyone in Washington realizes. So, too, would advocacy of real campaign-finance reform consistent with the First Amendment – – i.e., raising or lifting the caps on individual contributions — rather than merely blocking or compromising with Clinton’s proposals. And a rebellion against a pointless bipartisan budget deal that accomplishes no significant conservative policy objectives could prove interesting.
Recently, one conservative policy activist was asked why there seemed to be so few conservative ideas being aggressively advanced on the Hill. He answered that there was no shortage of ideas, but that every time he spoke to a congressman and suggested an initiative, the congressman would say, “Sounds interesting. . . . Let me check with the leadership on this.”
Well, it may be early in the 105th Congress, but it’s not too early to stop checking with the leadership. It’s time to start challenging the leadership in ways both big and small. It’s time for insurrection.
William Kristol is editor and publisher of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
