The Grand Old Party’s future shock
Friday’s Supreme Court ruling shows
Republicans fumbling for answers in an America changing faster than they are.
Updated 6/26/15 7:24 PM EDT
In a week of painstakingly drafted Supreme Court decisions, no literary effort was crafted more gingerly than Jeb Bush’s statement following the high court’s 5-to-4 endorsement of same-sex marriage rights on Friday.
First, the former Florida governor
paid homage to his beliefs and to evangelical political orthodoxy. “Guided by
my faith, I believe in traditional marriage,” he wrote.
Then, he quickly pivoted to the more
popular political center: “I also believe that we should love our neighbor and
respect others, including those making lifetime commitments. In a country as
diverse as ours, good people who have opposing views should be able to live
side by side.”
That statement – a live-and-let-live
strategy that closely mirrors his brother George’s approach to abortion a
decade ago – underscored Bush’s personal opposition to same-sex marriage as a
devout Catholic. But more than anything, it revealed a maneuvering, modern
conservative worried about his party being caught on the wrong side of history
– whatever his personal view of the issue.
Democrats, and many other Americans
of varying political stripes enjoyed a feel-good national moment, but the GOP
wasn’t invited to the party – Republicans were worrying about how to keep from
being trampled by the accelerating gallop of 21st-century social change.
“In the state of Nevada, you can get
married to a hooker who you met at the bar 30 minutes after meeting her with a
blood alcohol level of 3.2 by an Elvis at a drive-through,” said Steve Schmidt,
who managed the 2008 presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain. “At the end of
the day, it’s an untenable position to be against ultimately millions of actual
Americans’ marriages and commitments.”
Richard Land, the firebrand
evangelical leader who wrote the famous letter urging Christians to support
George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, summed up the view of many on the right tier
of the Republican presidential field. “It’s a sad day for the country and now
the battlefield shifts to freedom of conscience,” he told POLITICO. “It’s going
to be an important issue in 2016.”
It’s also a matter of old-fashioned
wedge politics, and Democrats are delighted at the growing roster of issues
pulling the GOP backward through time. Last week, Southern Republicans were
stunned by the wave of public, bipartisan sentiment against state-sanctioned
displays of the Confederate flag in the wake of the Charleston massacre. After
a stumbling start, local Republicans acted with deliberate speed, and not just
in South Carolina: Alabama’s Robert Bentley, one of the country’s most
conservative governors, ordered the rebel battle flag lowered over the capitol
in Montgomery, where the civil war was declared and George Wallace delivered
his “segregation forever” speech.”
Still, many standard-issue
Republican positions, though they remain regional political assets in the South
and parts of the Midwest, are underwater: The GOP’s blanket opposition to
minimum-wage hikes, a more open immigration policy, and background checks on
guns and lockstep support for tough anti-abortion laws and tax breaks for the
wealthy all poll relatively poorly.
“The problem for the Republican
Party is that you have a recalcitrant minority trying to hold off a tolerant
majority,” says David Boaz of the libertarian Cato Institute. “The increased
salience of social issues is a challenge for Republicans. Candidates like Bush
– who have to think about running in a general election – know there’s a shift
going on and they have to react… That’s why most of the [top-tier] candidates
will try to avoid these issues. But the ones who aren’t at that level, they are
going to keep bringing them back.”
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, the
most conservative of the top GOP candidates, put his rivals on notice by
calling for a Constitutional amendment to allow states to roll back the ruling.
Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, accused “five unelected judges”
of redefining “the foundational unit that binds together our society.” Mike
Huckabee, a long-shot Arkansas ex-governor staking everything on an appeal to
evangelicals, made an opaque reference to civil disobedience. “I will not
acquiesce to an imperial court any more than our Founders acquiesced to an
imperial British monarch,” he said in a statement as gay and lesbian couples
were posting their plans to wed on thousands of Facebook pages. “We must resist
and reject judicial tyranny, not retreat.”
That may be smart primary politics
in states like Iowa, but it’s a potentially toxic general-election position.
Six out of 10 Republican voters oppose gay marriage – but most national polls
show that between 54 and 57 percent of American voters as a whole back same-sex
marriage, a number that has increased dramatically in the last five years.
Ominously for GOP candidates, 60 percent of young Republicans support the
court’s move. Even among white evangelical Protestants, support for gay
marriage has increased from 13 percent in 2001 to about 27 percent today,
according to the Pew Research Center.
The culture wars of the last three
decades have taken their toll on the conservative brand. Self-declared conservatives
still out-number liberals, but Ronald Reagan’s success at turning the L-word
into an epithet has come undone. Gallup polling
out last week suggested 24 percent of Americans identify as liberal, a
high-water mark since at least 1992. Though at 38 percent, self-identified
conservatives still outnumber them, it’s a sign of new muscle for the left.
With numbers like these, the
Republican establishment is eager to shove most social issues into the closet
for 2016 – as they did successfully in the 2014 midterms, when the party
showcased candidates like Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, camera-ready social
conservatives who are less likely to push their agenda than a previous
generation of candidates.
“From the top down, you are seeing
Republicans really trying to thread the needle on this issue, to remain
consistently opposed to marriage equality while not trying alienate voters in
the general election,” said Gregory Angelo, executive director of the Log Cabin
Republicans, which has long advocated for the rights of gay and lesbian
conservatives.
Even Angelo, who celebrated the
ruling, is eager to put it behind Republicans – and urged the 2016 presidential
candidates to focus on issues he believes should dominate the election: the
economy, Hillary Clinton’s woes, and the Obama administration’s struggle to
fight the Islamic State. “It’s not going to go away,” he said of the
gay-marriage divide. “But there are civil wars on the Democratic side as well.
It’s no accident that Bernie Sanders is surging in New Hampshire – it’s not
that his opinion on marriage is doing that – it’s about income inequality and
immigration and issues where he’s beating Clinton.”
Still, all the GOP infighting has
obscured the tortured history of the gay-marriage issue in the Democratic Party
on victory-lap day.
Both Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton flat-out refused to endorse marriage equality in the 2008 campaign –
when it didn’t poll quite as well as it does these days – and initially refused
to condemn a senior Bush administration official who declared homosexuality
“immoral.”
That didn’t stop White House senior
adviser Valerie Jarrett this week from tweeting Obama’s observation that “When
I became President, same sex marriage was legal in only two states” – a time
when he was still evolving on the issue.
Over the past several years,
Democrats have largely closed ranks over social issues – in part because young
voters tend to be socially liberal, in part because more conservative Democrats
have been defeated by Republicans or frog-marched out of the party.
The court did the GOP a big favor,
though, by disposing of the gay marriage (and Obamacare rulings) six months
before the first primary ballots are cast, giving the Republican camps time to
sort out their differences. For the moment, the most unifying default position
for Republicans is to blame the Roberts Court for the Obamacare and marriage
decisions, even though evangelicals played a critical role in winning the
appointments of its ostensibly conservative majority. Florida Sen. Marco
Rubio’s response to the marriage decision was dour enough, but his
disappointment was directed more at the court than at backers of the marriage
equality movement. “We live in a republic and must abide by the law,” the
Florida senator said in a more-in-sorrow-than-anger statement. “As we look
ahead, it must be a priority of the next president to nominate judges and
justices committed to applying the Constitution as written and originally
understood.”
But no serious candidate has steered
as close to the center on gay marriage as Bush. He supported Indiana’s
anti-gay-marriage religious freedom law, then subsequently told donors he
wanted to avoid all “the yelling and screaming” of the debate.
But the demands of the GOP debate
and primary process are sure to drag everyone to the right – because white,
religious-minded, social conservatives participate in disproportionate numbers.
By wedging moderate New Hampshire between social conservative bastions like
Iowa and New Hampshire, Republican presidential candidates are forced into
rhetorical contortions that muddy their messages and force them to mix
conservative nostalgia with a wink to trending, moderate undercurrents.
“You’ve got a lot of social
conservatives in Iowa and South Carolina and you’ve got more a pragmatic or, I
guess, an economic electorate in places like New Hampshire and Michigan and
probably Florida,” said Craig Stevens, a Republican activist in the Granite
State. “Folks are picking their battleground.”
In the aftermath of the gay marriage
ruling, Stevens said establishment-oriented candidates are pantomiming another
Bush — George W. Bush – who walked the finest of lines on abortion: He
acknowledged Roe v. Wade as the law of the land but urged the nation to reduce
the number of abortions. The parallel, Schmidt said, would be a call to “ensure
that marriage is strong in America” and reject incursions on religious
institutions whose faith precludes same-sex unions.
It was George W. Bush and his aide
Karl Rove who saw the Republican Party’s demographic nightmare coming 15 years
ago, when they pushed conservatives to embrace immigration reform as a way to
woo young Hispanic voters. And gay marriage, above all else, is a generational
issue.
“We look at this issue as left and
right to some degree. It’s really under 40-over 40. Under-40 Republicans
support the ruling,” said Steve Schmidt, who thinks Walker should drop his
marriage amendment idea for the sake of the party.
“Support for gay marriage is not
going to start suddenly contracting now that it’s legal everywhere,” he added.
“This will be the last presidential election where you have Republicans trapped
into the positions they have on this issue because it’s no longer a political
issue. This is a settled issue now.”
Source:http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/the-grand-old-partys-future-shock-119484.html?ml=m_po
Comments
This Supreme Court opinion was accomplished
by intentionally misinterpreting “State Exchange” to mean “government exchange.
It joins the parade of misinterpretations made by the Court including: “Life”
to exclude the unborn, “Born” to ignore parents’ foreign citizenship, “Natural
Born” to include our illegal alien Muslim Communist President and the
agonizingly contorted “Church and State separation opinion.
The Court also offered no objections over the
years to the federal government taking 1/3 of the US landmass, setting up the
Federal Reserve to create inflation and adding all the unconstitutional
departments, agencies and programs in violation of the enumerated powers and
the 10th Amendment.
Gays are being used as pawns in Obama’s
blitzkrieg on American Law and culture as outlined by Saul Alinsky’s Rules for
Radicals. It is the American Communist Party plan.
Gays should be free to exercise their free
will and live with the consequences. If they take this Supreme Court Opinion to
get in our face, they would further alienate “straights”. Gays who are
Communist activists will seize this opportunity.
Gays are a tiny minority subculture and up to
now have demonstrated their competence and talent. Many Gays are “cafeteria
Christians”. They are the majority of this tiny minority and they should weigh
in against the activists.
Libertarians are correct to assert that
government should not be in the marriage business. Marriage is the business of
the churches. Gay churches will take it from here.
Some Gays were molested and they need to end
the cycle of molestation to stay out of trouble.
Government has been very active in
implementing the UN notion that children belong to the state and will use
molestation and cruelty accusations to remove well-adjusted children from their
innocent parents.
Child Protective Services are given federal
money for each adoption, so they are “on the hunt”. This is part of the UN
Agenda 21 destabilization plan.
Government always harasses and abuses the
innocent and ignores and rewards the guilty. This UN Agenda 21 implementing
government is “the enemy within”.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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