The Republican Moment

opinionjournal.com (WSJ) ^ | January 20, 2005 | PAUL A. GIGOT

[neverdem]

Will the GOP have the courage, at last, to change the face of government?

When President George W. Bush looks down across the mall today to deliver his second inaugural address, he will survey a Republican landscape. Not since 1928 has a president continued GOP control of the White House into a new term along with a re-elected Republican House and Senate. So it is fair to say that we are about to find out if the GOP really is a governing party. I don't mean "governing" in the sense of merely making the Beltway trains run on time and surviving as a majority. The Republican test going forward, and one voters should hold them to, is whether the party can now put its permanent stamp on Washington in a way that is consistent with its professed conservative philosophy. More than just a challenge for Mr. Bush, the next two years will tell us if this GOP majority is made to last or will be as evanescent as the Whigs.

Whatever one thinks of its policies, the Democratic Party surely made a difference during its 20th-century heyday. Set aside its last, corrupted years in power. When liberalism was ascendant, from the 1930s through the 1970s, Democrats permanently altered the face of government. They ended poverty for the elderly with cross-generational entitlement programs, broke Jim Crow's hold in the South with civil-rights laws, built the alphabet soup of regulatory agencies that bedevil American business every day, turned our courts into quasi-legislative bodies, and planted the seeds of government-run health care that continue to grow today.

--snip--

What, in the decade since they've retaken the House, have Republicans done that is consequential in the same way? If the GOP majorities vanished tomorrow, what couldn't Democrats easily repeal?

[neverdem]

Those last two sentences of the excerpt are prescient. We have a long way to go before the dems are buried.

[sphinx]

Some of this can be blamed, first, on having a Democrat in the White House, and later having only small majorities on Capitol Hill, especially in the Senate. But not anymore. After November's victory, Republicans don't have any more excuses.

No more excuses? That can only mean one thing -- Paul has got 60 votes in the Senate already lined up for conservative judges, Social Security reform, vouchering the schools, free market medicine, and tax reform. I can relax now -- Paul's got it under control.

I am all for pressing as hard as possible on the Big Issues, but we still have to deal in political realities. On three separate occasions -- the New Deal majorities, the LBJ landslide, the post-Watergate landslide -- the Democrats had House and Senate majorities exceeding two-thirds. That is when they drove the country left in a big way. In contrast, we are still governing with tiny, RINO-riddled majorities.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the current GOP caucuses that wouldn't be solved with, say, 72 votes in the Senate and 300-plus in the House. (Lincoln Chafee, Olympia Snowe -- who dat?) Those are the kinds of majorities we need -- either that, or we need an outbreak of intelligence and courage in the Democratic caucus, leading eight or ten Democratic Senators to support significant reform.