Keeping the Republic Blog

Is There a Speaker in the House? 10/21/06

No time to write much, but a pair of articles from the Washington Post to bring to your attention on the current Speaker of the House  Micheal Grunwald and Jim VandeHei, Hastert’s Team Mentality to be Tested as Foley Scandal Unfolds, 10/16/06)  and the woman who would like to replace him (Lois Romano, The Woman Who Would be Speaker, 10/21/06) .   Nice analyses of their respective leadership styles.

Also, see this fun one on the origin and  scope of “October surprises.”  (Linton Weeks, Boo! An Inevitable October Surprise, 10/21/06)

Terror Bills and Party Splits -- 10/18/06

Yesterday President Bush signed the terror investigation bill that Congress passed nearly a month ago.  According to the Washington Post (Michael A. Fletcher, Bush Signs Terrorism Measure, 10/18/06), here’s what the bill does in a nutshell: “The new law imposes tight limits on defendants' traditional courtroom rights, including restrictions on their ability to examine the evidence against them, to challenge their incarceration and to exclude evidence gained through witness coercion.” That alone is enough to dramatically change the traditional guarantees of procedural justice that the founders put in place to ensure that people could not be jailed and sentenced in the United States on purely political grounds.  The Bush administration says it will use the new powers only to prosecute terrorists, but the trouble with altering the fundamental protection of rights is that, once you’ve done it, you can’t control how it will be used in the future. What might be the “unintended consequences” of this law?

Also in the news, but not “news” per se, is an article in the Los Angeles Times (Johanna Neuman, Some See “Pink Purge” in the GOP, 10/18/06) about the internal schism in the Republican Party between social conservatives who want the party to stay strictly to its anti-gay agenda, and the party policy of reaching out to moderate voters, some of whom are gay themselves or favor gay rights.  Remember the discussion in Chapter 2 of KTR on the difficulties the Republicans have in holding together a collation that includes those with a substantive position on the role of government in establishing the social order and those with a more procedural position.  The tension between the two sides, exacerbated by recent events like the Foley scandal and a new book that claims that the administration had privately mocked the evangelicals whose votes it has come to depend on, is likely to have repercussions in the upcoming election.  The GOP is counting on its fabled GOTV (get-out-the-vote) machinery, but if social conservatives stay home in large numbers on Election Day, the Republicans will probably lose control of one or both houses of Congress.

Government by Which People? 10/15/06

Congressional elections are just over three weeks away, and much of the coverage in the papers focuses on last minute strategy, polls, and expenditures.  A couple of interesting articles in the Sunday papers are this one in the NYT (Robin Toner, Democrats Have Intensity but G.O.P. Has its Machine, 10/14/06) on the edge Republicans believe they have on get-out-the-vote efforts  despite intense Democrat anger against the Bush adminstration and this similar piece in the Post on the White House confidence that they will prevail on November 7 because of their superior vote mobilizing machinery (Michael Abramowitz, White House Upbeat About GOP Prospects, 10/15/06).  They plan to spend the next three weeks hammering the theme that Democrats are soft of national security and urging conservative voters to get to the polls.

With polls showing widespread discontent with the Republican Party among the electorate, these articles raise interesting questions.  What is it elections really measure – popular opinion generally or the opinion of those who can be scared, or excited, or angered enough to get themselves to the polls?  What does “government by the people” translate into when most of the people themselves do not vote to register their sentiments and when leaders confidently believe they can motivate sufficient numbers to keep them in power despite the fact that they have lost the confidence of a majority of the public? 

Also on elections more generally, see this piece (David Kirkpatrick, Voters' Allegiances, Ripe for the Picking, 10/15/06) in the NYT on voter identification, the increase of those who say they are political independents, and the prospects for a realignment of the electorate.  Some interesting updates there to the discussion in KTR, Chapter 12.

All Foley, All the Time -- 10/8/06

Most of the news in the last week has been consumed with the latest developments concerning former congressman Mark Foley’s inappropriate and possibly criminal behavior toward the high school-aged congressional pages who come to DC each year to work in Congress, and debates about how much Republican leaders of Congress knew about his behavior and when they knew it. 

The coverage of the scandal has been a classic case of a media “feeding frenzy” (see KTR, p. 663) and rather than giving a minute by minute report of events as they have unfolded, I have delayed posting about this until we could see something of what the political fallout would be.

The short answer seems to be that, unlike the Abramoff scandal which involved fairly complex financial and lobbying improprieties, the Foley scandal resonates with the public.  Sex scandals make for good gossip and the question of whether the House Republicans violated the public trust in failing to care for kids in their custody is one that strikes at the heart of the family values that the Republicans base much of their electoral appeal on.  Since there are already issues of Republican competency in this election, this scandal has what news people call “legs”  -- it won’t go away quickly.

Today’s Washington Post has a good piece (Michael Grunwald and Chris Cillizza, Foley Consuming GOP as Elections Draw Near, 10/8/06) on what this scandal means politically for the Republicans, especially on the chances that it will disillusion the party’s value-concerned base and keep them home on election day.  

The Foley scandal has hindered Republican efforts to control the agenda in the days leading up to the election and the war news (casualties in Iraq are at a two year high ) will make that difficult even when the scandal begins to recede. That events are taking a measurable toll on Republicans is apparent as the first wave of post-Foley polls come in (See for example, Marcus Mabry, A Political Limbo, Newsweek, 10/7/06.)