Guns to the left of them, guns to the right of them,Imagine! After sticking with President Bush through thick and thin, through a failing war and a flailing economy, congressional Republicans have suddenly stood up and told the president, No: We will not accept your choice.
Into the valley of death rode the six hundred.
-- Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”
The conservatives on Harriet Miers? Sure. But also -- if we can remember back as far as Wednesday -- the moderates on the Davis-Bacon Act as well.
The point is that the president is not just caving to his right. He's caving to his left, too. Reality is mugging the Republican Party, and its elected officials are scrambling to save themselves.
And it's taken nothing less than elemental self-preservation to force Republican moderates -- aptly dubbed “The Fraud Caucus” by our own Mark Goldberg and Matt Yglesias -- to finally resist the unending rightward galumph of their party. Life is unfair, and these Northeastern and Midwestern moderates seem to be realizing that if 2006 turns out to be a really good year for the Democrats, it will be their asses, not those of their Sunbelt yahoo brethren, that will be out of a job.
So earlier this week, the leaders of their hitherto-raison-d'etre-less alliance, the Republican Mainstream Partnership, told Andy Card that they could not support the president's suspension of the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act, which guarantees the payment of prevailing wages on federally-funded construction jobs, for post-Katrina reconstruction efforts. On Wednesday, the administration announced that it would end that suspension on November 8.
The moderates' hand was forced by George Miller, the veteran San Francisco Democrat, who had uncovered an obscure parliamentary provision that enables congressmen to force a vote on rescinding statutes that a president suspends. With the unified support of the Democratic caucus, Miller had done just that, and Congress would have had to vote on the week of November 7 on his bill rescinding Bush's action. The maneuver solidified Miller's standing as a worthy successor to his long-ago mentor, the late San Francisco Congressman Phil Burton, by common consent the most effective liberal legislator of the past half-century.
Miller's motion put Republican moderates in a bind. Disproportionately hailing from such states as New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Ohio, they still represent sizable numbers of union members. Worse yet, those union members most likely to vote for them come disproportionately from the (still mainly white, male) building trades -- the very unions Bush's order was intended to hurt. A number of these members are frequently endorsed by the building trades locals in their districts, and the prospect of the trades on the warpath against them in 2006 was one they were eager to avoid. “Why pick this fight?” New York Republican Peter King wondered aloud in The New York Times.
It's already been a dangerous year for the moderates. Bush's plan to privatize Social Security was wildly unpopular in their districts, and many of them made known that they were cool to the idea. The abysmal polling of Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum, who pushed the proposal, confirms the wisdom of their course. Now, a number of them are resisting current conservative efforts to reduce further the budget for Medicaid and student loans as a way to offset spending on Katrina -- the chief reason why many of those cuts have yet to come to a vote.
It's critical, then, not to fall prey to the conservative spin on the Miers nomination: Bush's political problem is not simply that he has estranged conservatives with his now aborted pick of Miers. More fundamentally, it's that the conservative agenda of the Republican Party, so widely at variance with the sentiments of the American public on almost every issue, no longer commands automatic allegiance from previously invertebrate, now increasingly apprehensive Republican moderates. Polling shows a collapse of Bush support among independent voters, who've had it with the administration's foreign, domestic, and economic policies, and performance. Against their natural instincts, the moderates are being forced to heed common sense. Which makes the hard-right policies the conservatives wish to pursue all the more difficult to enact.
So it's not just discipline breaking down. It's reality crowding in. And reality has never been this administration's strong suit.
Prospect editor-at-large Harold Meyerson shares three syllables with Harriet Miers.
