"a425couple" wrote in
news:hjpsn8011pm@news5.newsguy.com :
>
> It is very sad to me, that you are probably serious
> in believing the above
> ( that the Republican Party is "ideologically united").
This has to be seen in comparative/historical terms. Yes, the Senate GOP
ranges from Olympia Snowe to Jim DeMint. But the fact is that in the
1970's the Senate had a large number of GOP members who were to the left
of where Snowe is now: Jacob Javits, Clifford Case, Lowell Weicker, Ed
Brooke, Charles Mathias (who died the other day), Charles Percy, Mark
Hatfield, Richard Schweiker (who only moved rightward after Reagan named
him as running-mate-in-case-I'm-nominated in 1976), John Heinz, John
Chafee, John Sherman Cooper, Robert Stafford and others. They all got
higher ratings from liberal groups like the ADA (Americans for Democratic
Action) and COPE (the AFL-CIO's Committee on Political Education) than
many Democrats. The same was true of a fair number of House Republicans:
Gilbert Gude of Maryland, Silvio Conte of Massachusetts, Florence Dwyer of
New Jersey, Ogden Reid (who switched to the Democrats in 1972) and Bill
Green of New York, Edward Biester, Joseph McDade, and R. Lawrence Coughlin
of Pennsylvania, etc.
On social issues there are still disagreements among Republicans,
especially on abortion. But on economic issues, there *is* a remarkable
amount of unity compared to past decades: today's quarrels among
Republicans on economic issues historically would be seen as quarrels
between the Right and the Center-Right with the party's once substantial
Center-Left wing having almost totally disappeared. Note that exactly
*one* Republican in the House (from a heavily African American New
Orleans district which he carried only because the Democratic incumbent
was found with large amounts of cash in his refrigerator...) voted for the
healthcare bill (and of course no GOP senators voted for the Senate
version). And even the most "liberal" Republicans in the House, like Mark
Kirk, voted against the stimulus bill. Only eight House Republicans voted
for cap-and-trade, and at least one of them (Kirk) is trying to back off
from this vote now that he is running for the Senate.
To *some* extent this regrouping has happened with the Democrats also--
even the most conservative Democrats in the Senate today, like Ben Nelson,
are not nearly as far to the Right as James Eastland, John Stennis, John
McClellan or Strom Thurmond (back when he was a Democrat) were. And many,
though by no means all, of the "Blue Dogs" in the House voted for the
health care bill. Still, it does seem to me that at least on economic
issues, Republicans are more unified than Democrats.
So I would say that, yes, at least on economic issues, Republicans are
"ideologically united" in the sense that they are much more ideologically
united than they used to be and more ideologically united than the
Democrats. I would note that this is not quite as recent a phenomenon as
is sometimes thought: already in the early 1980's some moderate-to-
liberal Republicans voted for Reagan's budget and tax bills.
(I express no views whatever here on the merits or demerits of the bills
that Republicans have unanimously or almost unanimously voted against.
All I'm saying is that by definition unanimous or near-unanimous votes are
a sign of *some* sort of *unity*...)
--
David Tenner
dtenner@ameritech.net |
