What It Means To Be GOP

No longer the party of small government, ethics, or values, the GOP seems to have shipped its oars and gone adrift.

At every turn, the party has problems. At the national level, former front-runners like McCain, once viewed as the saving grace of conservatives, are preyed upon by also-rans from their own party. The immigration fiasco is a mess. The biggest victory(?) for Republicans in the Senate in weeks was a move to block extended leave for soldiers, of all things. And by filibuster. The party cannot agree, and the party will not agree.

This doesn't even cover the Values Problem the party now carries, weighing more heavily than any imaginary moral dilemma pleaded to conservative voters who are considering voting Democrat for the first time in a long while. This cartoon from Politico sums it up pretty well, or at least encapsulates the hope of the Republican caucus: please, traditional Republican voters, stick around, even though we appear to be morally bankrupt.

Here at home, corruption, values, and ethics problems have continued even beyond the leadership fiascoes of the last session. Corruption charges levied against former elected officials don't raise their profile in a positive way. Congressman Ted Poe is all over Harvey's buzz and blogs this week for some paperwork problems that might be serious. And Tom DeLay is a subject in and of himself.

Certainly at the national level, the Republican Party has no more claim to being the party of small government. They may have lost the right to that moniker forever. In Texas, Republican state legislators that engineer ever more invasive public policies are rewarded as champions. Burka outlines support building for Warren Chisum as speaker from a group within the state Republican caucus in a prominent example of this; of course, it goes without saying that the block of support that Craddick has — or just about any other high-ranking Republican in the state House — would also qualify as rewarding intrusive government in the social sphere. Maybe the perception that increasing the size of government in the name of imagined values is acceptable to some of them, but most Texans will see this for what it is, and they won't like it.

The Republican Party, when it was under unified leadership and had a mandate born of fear from the American people, was a formidable political opponent. That mandate's veneer has worn off now, and the bill of goods is plain to see. That's why America is turning away from the GOP — they are bereft of able leadership, unable to articulate a clear position on most matters of importance. On the matters they have delineated clear positions on, they are wrong.

So! Progressives have work to do for 2008, but despite my belief each morning that things can't get worse for the Republican Party, they continue to, for lack of a better phrase, shoot themselves in the face.