The last few
weeks of news in America seem to have been dominated by the consequences of our
ruling class’s decision to go all-in with its nihilistic crackdown on unvaccinated
essential workers, along with the predictable trail of doubletalk – does anyone
really believe that Southwest
Airlines’ decision to cancel 28 percent of its flights last weekend was due to
weather?
Then there is
the woke cultural revolution in the universities, the global supply chain
breakdown, the Democrats’ attempts to endlessly relive the events of 6 January
through litigation and congressional hearings… I could go on and on.
With all this happening,
one can almost be forgiven for overlooking the new version of the National
Defence Authorization Act (NDAA) as it quietly works its way through Congress. ‘Almost’
is the key word here, because if the current NDAA passes, then this will be the
year that the government finally gets around to making women register for the
draft.
Both the full House and a Senate committee
have passed preliminary versions of the NDAA that make women eligible for
conscription. Now all that remains is for a reconciled bill to be passed
through both chambers and sent to President Biden’s desk – something which, if
recent patterns hold, will be finished sometime in December.
Support for the
measure is quite strong: Democrats are all in favor, and Republicans are split down the
middle. For instance, only five out of thirteen Republicans voted against it in
the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The list of
Republicans in favor of drafting women includes the usual centrists like Liz
Cheney, but it also includes people like Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, who won his
Senate primary last year by running to the right of Jeff Sessions, and who sided
with Donald Trump during the election-certification brouhaha. (Something tells
me that Tuberville was never much into sexual equality when it came time to
choose football players for the college teams he coached – apparently, there
are still some American institutions where results matter more than wokeness,
it’s just that the military isn’t one of them.)
The House
Freedom Caucus has sided against the bill, but
Republicans in the House Freedom Caucus are a minority. Meanwhile, the
Republican Conference has issued its members a summary of the bill that
describes it as “one of the most important bills we will pass in Congress” and flaunts
several of the bill’s upsides, without even mentioning the draft provision.
Such is the way
of moderate Republicans. They pretend to oppose whatever radical new thing the
Left is preparing to do, and then as the Left gets closer to doing it, the
opposition gets quieter and quieter, and then the thing gets done with
bipartisan support, and then the Republicans talk long and loud about why you
need to vote for them so they can stop some other thing that the Left is
preparing to do.
So why did I
subtitle this piece “How America is Ruled by Moderate Republicans?”
Because when
you have one party that’s for rapid leftward change, and another party that’s either
for slow rightward change, or for just maintaining the status quo, and both
parties develop moderate factions... the moderates will be for slow leftward
change.
The country
does not move left as fast as most Democrats would like (which is why the
Left’s activist base feels powerless) but it still moves left.
And moderate
Republicans are the gatekeepers. Democratic policies move from idea to reality
the moment that moderate Republicans get behind them.
When you’ve
learned to see moderate Republicans as America’s true rulers, a lot of things
in politics start making more sense.
For one thing,
the role of monied interests becomes clearer. Moderate republicans reliably serve
as lapdogs to the financial elite, which is why they typically side with
Democrats on illegal immigration (corporate America likes cheap labor) and the
sexual revolution (the plutocrat class is pro-abortion and pro-LGBT), and also
why they are pro-war (wars benefit the arms industry).
On
environmental issues, the Democrat/money-Republican alliance is a mixed bag. These
people will never tolerate a carbon tax (which would be bad for the lifestyles of the
people with private jets) but they will look the other way while the radical Left makes endless use of administrative and
judicial activism to harass and hobble the American coal/oil/gas industry. The
end result is that nothing actually gets done to reduce fossil fuel consumption, but a
lot gets done to make sure that the resulting jobs go to Arab or Russian oilmen
instead of to Americans.
Rule by
moderate Republicans also explains the direction of constitutional law over the
last 52 years. Ever since 1969, GOP appointees have been a majority on the
Supreme Court, with the size of that majority fluctuating between five and
eight (!) seats. Yet during that time, the federal judiciary has created and
defended the right to abortion, consistently supported illegal immigration, and
pushed through the LGBT agenda almost singlehandedly – imposing everything from
GSAs at high-schools to rewritten sex discrimination laws to same-sex marriage itself
at times when each of these developments was still a non-starter with the
voters.
For a
politically astute conservative, the following names are synonymous with
“traitor.” Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony
Kennedy, David Souter, John Roberts. But to whom are they traitors? Not to
moderate republicans like Nelson Rockefeller and Bob Packwood and John Sununu,
who were instrumental in getting them onto the Supreme Court.
John Roberts is
an especially good example of the kind of judge that moderate Republicans like.
He started his career firmly on the Right, clerking for William Rehnquist and
then working as a staff lawyer in the Reagan administration. But then in the
1990s, with the Republicans out of office, Roberts did pro bono work for
gay rights activists. This should have been a red flag – not because the gay
rights movement’s goals are always bad, but because its legal strategy, which
boils down to ‘use tortuous interpretations of the constitution to exclude
ordinary voters from the lawmaking process’ is unprincipled.
This isn’t the
only indication Roberts gave that he would end up as a turncoat; there were plenty more. Nonetheless, he
managed to win the good graces of America’s ruling moderate republicans by
working for the Bush campaign in Bush v. Gore. (This is another thing to
remember about moderate Republicans – despite their willingness to advance
left-wing policies, they are generally happy to see their fellow Republicans
win elections, perhaps because they know that such wins often don’t mean anything
in terms of policy!)
Rule by
moderate Republicans means that Democratic agendas keep advancing on the backs
of Republican electoral victories. Think of the legalization of abortion by
Nixon judges, the preservation of abortion rights by Reagan judges, George W.
Bush producing No-Child-Left-Behind and Medicare Part D as his signature
legislative accomplishments, Donald Trump failing to get his border wall
through the RINO congress, or every recent budget showdown ending with a bunch
of moderate Republicans peeling off and caving to all of the Democrats’ demands.
Drafting women
is only the latest development.
By now, it’s
really past time for the Republican base to become less gullible. People like
Liz Cheney and Tommy Tuberville need to be held accountable. If you have
Republican representatives or senators, call them and let them know what you
think about the new NDAA.
If they vote
for it anyway, then vote against them in the primaries. Yes, I know that
beating an incumbent in the primaries is a long shot, but if there’s going to
be a change, that’s where it needs to start. (I am proud to say that the first political
campaign I worked on as a young man was an attempt to unseat John McCain).
After all, the
alternative to this is just more rule by moderate Republicans.
We need real conservatives as Republicans, but not crazies. Too often, I think, primary challengers to sitting moderate Republicans have been cuckoos, so that people who might be critical of the incumbent fear to vote against him, not because they fear electing a nutcase, but because they fear that nominating a nutcase will throw the election to the Democrats.
ReplyDeleteI definitely see where you're coming from - one can make an argument that this is what happened with Roy Moore back in 2017. Still, I think that one the balance, Republicans who win offices, but do little or nothing to oppose the Left once in power, are the bigger problem.
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