Jeffords 2.0?

March 6th, 2009

This is pretty amazing. Republicans screwed up big-time in 2001 by punishing Jim Jeffords for not toeing the party line. It had only taken a few months for any pretense of GOP bipartisanship to fade, and the Bush White House and the GOP started threatening and punishing their own moderate Republican Senator from Vermont so much that he crossed party lines.

Note that Obama and the Democrats are not being so stupid–witness Joe Lieberman. But the current GOP, despite their weak state, is being that stupid, threefold. With just a single-senator margin allowing them to use the filibuster (their favorite, in fact almost their only remaining procedural move), they are actually threatening three of their moderate senators–Specter, Snowe, and Collins–using the same hard-line measures that drove a similarly moderate northeastern senator to the other party eight years before. The GOP is telling the moderate three that if they fail to toe the party line, the GOP will withdraw party funding for these senators, and in the next election may run other Republicans in their seats.

How stupid is that? When you’re hanging on by a thread, you don’t thrash around wildly. The GOP has to suck up to these three; they need them far more than the Democrats needed Lieberman, but Obama was smart enough to say, “live with the reality that Lieberman is there, and use him to help us instead of driving him into the arms of the opposition.” Many on the left chafed at this, considering Lieberman’s back-stabbing propensities, but they recognized the wisdom and signed on. But the Republican Party seems blithely unaware of the danger they are courting. Specter is up for reelection in 2010 (Snowe is up in 2012, Collins in 2014), and in a liberal state like Pennsylvania, could almost certainly win by switching to Independent or even Democratic. If he sees his party as pushing him out, he could easily conclude that the Democrats would welcome and reward him strongly, not to mention that Democrats stand to be in power for the rest of his career.

So please, Mr. Steele, pretty please with a cherry on top, do apply the thumbscrews to these three senators. Because by doing so, one or more may bolt to the other side, and after Franken inevitably gets sworn in, that would make the Republican Party as powerless as the Democrats wish to make them. And then you’ll have to be grateful that the Democrats are not nearly as vindictive and partisan as you are, as they will likely continue to give you more than your due–but at the same time, a hell of a lot less than you could get with the filibuster in your pocket. And as weak as that may make you, (1) it’ll be your own fault, and (2) it is far, far more than you would give the other side were the tables turned.

  1. Tim Kane
    March 6th, 2009 at 07:04 | #1

    of those three, Collins seems to me the most likely to tow the party line for the Republicans. But the wingnuts have ridden roughshod over Specter for a while now, barely allowing him the wiggle room to run last time around. Snowe I don’t know about, for that matter, I don’t understand Maine for voting two Republican senators into office during the Bush dictatorship’s reign of terror. But one could easily see these two Senators switching or going independent. Perhaps this is where the new third party will come from: Northeastern former Republicans. This would not be a bad result. When they burst out of the Northeast into places like the midwest they would destroy what’s left of the Republican party. That would leave the ironical development where the Republican party was nothing more than a Southern and Mormon party and Abraham Lincoln spinning in his grave.

  2. Leszek Cyfer
    March 7th, 2009 at 00:14 | #2

    I second your pleas, Luis :)

Comments are closed.