February 19, 2009

Collins and Snowe: Time to Endanger the RINOs

Wrong holiday. Right result.

It took New Hampshire Republican Senator Judd Gregg until the bicentennial birthday of his party’s first president to celebrate his epiphany. President Obama’s “bipartisan” nominee for Secretary of Commerce withdrew from consideration when he ran into “irresolvable conflicts” on “many critical items of policy.”

Gee, ya think? Like that $800-billion “stimulust” package that mostly stimulated every Democratic constituency from welfare moms to unions to tree-huggers to “community organizers?”

Or the Sun King’s power play yanking control over the Census from Commerce to the White House – the better to displace the constitutionally mandated “actual Enumeration” with statistical methodologies designed to uncover “undercounted” poor and minorities (read: more Democratic voters)?

But, hey, let’s give Gregg some credit for rediscovering his principles in a manner that was not only timely, but also embarrassed the heck out of an O-ministration that could use a dose of humility, however small and temporary.

Contrast the gentleladies representing the neighboring jurisdiction: Maine’s Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, who, along with the Keystone State’s Arlen Specter, abandoned their party to put Sleek Barry over the top on the Godzilla of spending bills.

Naturally, the “Mainers” basked in the usual attention accorded GOP deserters – network news cameras; adulatory profiles in the Washington Post, the New York Times and Time magazine; praise for their “courage.” And of course, that coveted characterization – “moderate Republicans.”

Gag.

I prefer another, vastly more appropriate term frequently applied to Snowe’s and Collins’ ilk: RINOs . . .  Republicans In Name Only.

How better to describe legislators who not only spoiled their party’s perfect unity in standing up to Barack I’s legislative diktat, but in Time’s words, have frequently “found themselves at odds with the GOP leadership on taxes, budgets, the environment and social issues?” Both “voted for stem-cell research, against a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, for giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship and against a ban on partial-birth abortion.”

But they’re both foursquare with their party on the really important party matters like, uh, hmmm . . .

Yeah.

If the GOP is serious about regaining its stature as a dominant national party, it will go about making these two RINOs as endangered as their counterparts in the wild.

Say what? I hear the justifications pouring in. For the GOP to pursue a “50-state strategy,” many will exclaim, surely officials from a state with Maine’s “flinty Yankee independence” (double-gag) must be cut some slack.

Hooey. I participated in a Republican presidential campaign that came within a whisker of winning all 50 states. Three guesses which one. Hint: It did not involve a weasely, party-bucking “moderate.”

The Gipper proved that to win nationwide, Republicans must stand for something, not anything. As conservative activist Grover Norquist recently described it, breaks with GOP orthodoxy on fiscal discipline in particular are like finding a dead mouse in a bottle of Coke. They ravage the brand.

Especially since Sleek Barry keeps reminding us about “what the last election was all about.” As I recall, it was about pledges of tax cuts and going through the budget “line by line” – a task made infinitely tougher by adding 1,400 pages of line items. In other words, it was about the usual Republican mandate that the party was beginning to reclaim through its show of almost-unity against the budget-busting stimulus.

Certainly primary challengers can be found to restore real Republicanism – and party solidarity – even in “independent” Maine. Because if these two RINOs are going to keep charging forward to dilute the party brand by taking the stumbling rookie president off the hook, it’s time they were given it.