Federal Judiciary

Rightward, How? -- By: An NRO Symposium

How should conservatives make use of the opportunity presented by the ?Massachusetts miracle?? We asked a few politics experts on the right.


GERARD ALEXANDER
The Massachusetts Miracle is first and foremost an opportunity to put the Democrats on defense in policy debates. In other words, Obama isn?t the only one who has to pivot now. Conservatives successfully played defense for the past year, and now need to go on offense with a coherent limited-government agenda for addressing real problems.

Most immediately, conservatives need to communicate clearly a short list of items that would make up a really desirable health-care reform, maybe starting with permitting the purchase of health insurance across state lines. If necessary, they can propose initially that this be available only for low-income or currently uninsured people. More ambitiously, conservatives need to hammer out and communicate a similar list of ways to let the private sector get its recovery underway.

The bad news: These sorts of things have to come from members of Congress, and conservatives have learned the hard way to expect them to be conservative only up to a point.

-- Gerard Alexander is a professor of politics at the University of Virginia.


VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Conservatives might do well to counter two antithetical reactions to the Massachusetts vote.

One, of course, is the Left?s reinvention of the voters? outrage as generic anger aimed at all incumbents and the residual discontent from the Bush years. That spin is ludicrous given the prominence of Obamacare in the populist crosshairs and the Left?s smears against grassroots dissidents.

The second problematic reaction attributes the rising unease to some sort of narrow, doctrinaire Republican litmus test. Scott Brown is not a card-carrying conservative; he embodies the manifestation of anger perfectly for the particular liberal landscape of Massachusetts. Conservatives should articulate just four or five inclusive themes that represent opposition to the present Obama attempt to transform America and yet do not get bogged down in whether one is or is not acceptable on the basis of a particular social issue.

I think most understand what the 2009-2010 furor was about, and what its remedies are: Reform candidates should agree to balance budgets; oppose earmarks and the current vote-buying sleaze; shrink government; quit burdening the entrepreneurial classes with new regulations, higher taxes, and constant hostile rhetoric; and promote a strong national defense and homeland security that put the focus explicitly on radical Islamic terrorism as acts of war rather than criminal activity.

The core message should serve as a unifier for a new generation of conservative reformers, without getting tangled up in a long laundry list of other issues, or in a Pavlovian effort to kick out all incumbents.

-- NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.

JOHN HOOD
You can be sure that within hours of Scott Brown?s improbable, spectacular victory, Republican pros were hard at work devising strategies for replicating his success in the fall -- and Democratic pros were hard at work devising counterstrategies.
 
That?s fine. But no one can confidently engineer or predict how campaigns will play out in October, so conservatives shouldn?t wait until the fall to translate Brown?s success into policy wins. Democrats aren?t without brains and resources. And Republicans spent years ruining their own reputation with incompetent governance and fiscal recklessness.
 
Conservatives should urge Democrats in Congress and the states to pull their own party back from the brink of political disaster. It would be in their self-interest to rethink Obamacare, to announce an indefinite postponement of cap-and-trade, to end the tax talk that is spooking investors, and to focus on defeating terrorists rather than on lawyering them up. There were already dozens of Dems in swing seats with ample reason to buck the leadership. Now there are dozens more in blue-leaning seats who have new reasons to be fearful.
 
Sun Tzu wrote that ?to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.? I?m not sure President Obama has it in him to adapt to changing circumstances. He?s no Bill Clinton. But others are. Now is the time to try to bank some Democratic votes against the president?s radical agenda.
 
-- John Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation, a public-policy think tank in Raleigh, N.C.


TERRY JEFFREY
The country is looking for leaders who will aggressively make the case for limited government. Conservatives need to say: President Obama and congressional liberals are trying to expand a federal welfare state that -- without even factoring in their proposed national health-care plan -- already threatens to sap our freedom and take us into bankruptcy. The government?s unfunded liabilities -- the amount by which promised entitlement benefits outstrip expected tax revenues -- now equal $56.4 trillion. That?s $483,000 for every full-time worker.

A Washington Post poll last week asked: ?Generally speaking, would you say you favor smaller government with fewer services, or larger government with more services?? Fifty-eight percent said they favor a smaller government. Similarly, a 7News/Suffolk University poll of likely voters in yesterday?s Massachusetts election asked: ?Can the federal government afford the proposed national health-care plan?? Sixty-one percent said no. Massachusetts gets it. America gets it. An ever-expanding federal government threatens our liberty and prosperity.

Conservatives -- like most Americans -- believe in individual responsibility and the Constitution. They should repeatedly counter Obama with two questions: (1) Where does the Constitution give you the power to do this? (2) Who?s going to pay for it?
 
-- Terry Jeffrey is editor-at-large of Human Events.
 

JOHN J. PITNEY JR.
A Republican takeover of the House is still unlikely, but it sounds more plausible than it did on Monday. So House Republican leader John Boehner is on to something when he talks about a 2010 version of the Contract with America.

It?s not accurate to say that the 1994 Contract caused the GOP victory that year. Most voters didn?t know about the document. But its indirect impact was significant, since it gave candidates a menu of issues to raise in their campaigns. More important, it supplied the new majority with an agenda to guide its early months in power. Without it, the Republicans would have wasted valuable time trying to set priorities.

With polls and special-election results turning against the party in power, today?s political setting bears some resemblance to 1994. But as conservatives work on a policy agenda, they must be alert to the differences as well. Republicans were in the majority just a few years ago, and they have to grapple with unhappy memories of scandals and policy problems. The deficit casts a shadow on every other issue, and it is much bigger than it was during the 1990s. And the aging of the baby-boom generation has brought the entitlement crisis much closer.

A serious agenda will have to address these problems. It won?t be easy. Deserving victory never is.

-- John J. Pitney Jr. is the Roy P. Crocker Professor of American Politics at Claremont McKenna College.


WILLIAM VOEGELI
Getting the right answer starts with asking the right question. Conservatives have today?s political opportunity -- surprisingly big, shockingly soon -- because liberals have been so brazen about exploiting their opportunity from November 2008. The import of Rahm?s Rule is not a mystery: ?Never let a crisis go to waste? has meant taking advantage of the financial crisis to enact, quickly and irreversibly, liberal aspirations that have been frustrated since 1980 or even 1966, when Lyndon Johnson lost his Great Society majority in Congress and the country.

The resulting ?shock-and-awe statism,? in Gov. Mitch Daniels?s phrase, has not been gratefully received by the public. The swing voters who took both houses of Congress and the presidency away from the Republicans and gave them to the Democrats did not cast their votes so that crises leaving us vulnerable to financial upheavals and terrorist attacks could be exploited, but rather so that those crises could solved. Part of the anger that has defeated Democrats in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, three states Obama won comfortably in 2008, is that these voters don?t like the details of the governing agenda the Obamacrats have rolled out. But the edge of it is that voters don?t like the feeling that their needs and fears are the pretext for that agenda, rather than the object of it.

Conservatives mustn?t make the same mistake of ?using? the opportunity presented today. The best way to succeed where liberals have blundered is to insist that what?s before us now is not a conservative but an American opportunity. The people have made clear that they want their economic and physical security taken seriously, and that they did not vote in 2008 to discard our constitutional heritage in favor of French or Swedish social democracy. As Ramesh Ponnuru wrote on this website three months ago, the key to addressing Americans? concerns while upholding America?s principles is to ?finish the sentence,? to show how applied conservatism not only strengthens constitutional government but enhances individual lives.

The result is a paradox: The conservative cause is best served when it is subordinated, rhetorically and operationally, to Americans? quotidian needs. Mitch Daniels, as is often the case, offers an instructive example. He didn?t privatize the Indiana Toll Road or institute a program of Health Savings Accounts for the uninsured because these were ideological imperatives, but because they were practical ones, addressing serious concerns for rebuilding infrastructure, assisting the vulnerable, and constraining taxes. Conservatives who emulate that approach will not only flourish, but deserve to.

-- William Voegeli is a visiting scholar at Claremont McKenna College?s Henry Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World, and a contributing editor of The Claremont Review of Books.

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on January 21, 2010 (boomark / email).