GOP Establishment to Grassroots Conservatives - Up Yours

My boy Pat Toomey lost a squeaker to Arlen Specter, in spite of my calling 150 Pennsylvanians. Hey, I did my part.

Unfortunately President Bush and Rick Santorum, the other Senator from Pennsylvania, did theirs. Polls indicate that the Republican faithful took these men at their word that returning Specter to the Senate was an Important Thing. Many held their noses and pulled the lever.

I understand this calculus - to a point. The party has a slim majority. However, the margin is slimmer still when you consider that Specter votes the Democrat line infuriatingly often. Specter, who says this is his last term, will have no incentive to vote with the majority of the party, and I fear we can count on him becoming a royal pain in the keester.

He will in all likelihood end up as chair of the Judiciary committee, where Specter does his worst work. While serving on the committee, he raised a bunch of bogus objections to Reagan appointee Robert Bork, leading ultimately to his withdrawal. From then on, Republican presidents have cast a wide net for inoffensive justices like Kennedy and Souter, who treat the constitution like play-dough, warping it to suit the elite social whims. Foolishness that would be impossible to do through the legislatures routinely become the law of the land thanks to these feckless judges.

What really burns me, however, is that of all the social/fiscal conservative battles to take a risk with, this was the one. Rick Santorum is every bit as conservative as Toomey, and won handily. Moreover, the Democrats have far more seats at risk this next election than Republicans, and the tide is running against them. Specter's ouster would have meant that the GOP caucus would shift conservative, giving the President a much more like-minded vote in the Senate. All this without really risking the majority. My sources say that worst case scenario for the Republicans is to pick up two or more seats, so the whole "we are hanging on to the Senate by our fingernails" just doesn't wash.

In the end, this was the Establishment versus the grassroots, and this President sided with the establishment. Bush is well-liked and carries great gravitas among the faithful, and he put this goodwill and reputation in service to an odious troll who is a bane to his core supporters. This in spite of the fact that without we fiscal and conservative voters, the Republican Party would still be in the 1970's country club backwater from whence it came.

Bush and Santorum shafted everyone for an "establishment" type. This is the sort of corrosive good-old-boy nonsense that infuriates guys like me, and compels us to despair. We feel trapped between the bad and the worse when good was only 17,000 votes away.

I knew this was coming, I knew these guys' support would put Specter over the top, just as surely I know a knife with Specter's fingerprints will end up in Bush's back.

I hope it's worth it.

Tim McNabb