Posted on 01/31/2006 9:50:43 AM PST by mosquitobite
Disagree. Most voters haven't the foggiest idea of what cloture is. The pro-aborts will only notice his vote against Alito, which the Pubs didn't need. Pragmatism, as I said.
There's a DU thread that is the creepy mirror image of this one. People who do not understand the realities of regional politics come up with ideas like this.
Yes, Chaffee's a pro-abortion RINO. So are the people who vote for him and keep him in office. But it's a 'Republican' seat, which counts for a lot. Majorities run the Senate, make committee appointments, etc., etc. So it's in the Pubbies' pragmatic interest to maintain the seat as long as possible even though Chaffee is off the ideological reservation.
The option is to risk a Democrat majority which would put Dingy Harry in Frist's job, let the Rats determine committee chairs and makeups, etc. For instance, bad as he is, Arlen Specter as chairman of Judiciary is much better than Leahy or Kennedy.
In an ideal world all Republicans would be real conservatives and no one would ever have to make compromises. Unfortunately this is not an ideal world as you may have noticed. Chaffee voted to limit debate (against the filibuster) where it really counted. He voted against Alito as a face-saving gesture to home state voters since there were already enough votes to put Alito over the top.
Whether abortion's Constitutional or not, it will remain the law of the land unless we can get Supremes appointed who'll take another look at Roe. We succeeded with Alito but all hell's going to break loose if Bush has the opportunity to make another appointment. That battle will be abortion Amageddon! I hope Frist or another Republican is around to go ahead with the Constitutional Option.
Actually, it would also be helpful if people went to the nrsc.org, clicked on 2006 races, then went to Rhode Island and clicked on the articles against Laffey and posted pro laffey stuff and anti chafee stuff.
Done.
Time to change that oversight before the 'Rats elect a pro-lifer. Not even the 2 'Rat Congressmen are as fringe-y as the Missing Linc. Let's send Mayor Laffey to Washington and have 2 pro-lifers from OUR side, joining the Conservative pro-life Governor Don Carcieri.
Is Laffey pro-life?
I've seen no evidence that he'd vote the pro-abort line as Missing Linc has.
My problem is not with your political calculations about the number of Republican Senate seats, but I would disagree with your analysis of why Chafee voted as he did, as well as Chafee's analysis of why he should vote as he did.
I do not believe that Chafee voted against the nomination as a political calculation. I believe he, Chafee, truly does not understand or believe in the necessity of a judge like Alito. He does not fully comprehend the Constitution, the separation of powers and the limited mandates of the Supreme Court. If he did, as I said, he could easily argue (and convince his constituency) that being pro-choice was a libertarian Republican position, which he supports, while demanding that such a choice be established "democratically" and not by judicial fiat was also Republican, and centrist. Chafee does not and cannot do that because he does not have any conservative-Republican respect for the constitutional limitations of the judiciary. He's more than a RINO, he dumb.
I believe his vote against the filibuster was the more political of his two votes on Alito. It was intended to not give fodder to those in the GOP who could seek to deny him Senate committee positions if he helped sustain the filibuster.
And, my complaint is not against the NSRC support for him in general, but their support for him during the primary. They should not be taking sides in GOP Senate primaries. They should be reserving their "national" standing and their money for the general election. Should Chafee lose the primary, they have alread wounded his GOP opponent. That is just stupid.
I am opposed to abortion on the same moral basis as you are - a human life in the womb is a human life already.
But, democracy, politics and our constitutional processes are the means with which our moral positions can be translated into legal positions, and still maintain the constitutional basis of our actions.
I care about the strict adherence to those constitutional processes as much as I care about the life of the unborn, because without those processes we are at the mercy of dictators and our lives as well as the lives of the unborn are subject to their whims. Maybe you could morally defend yourself, dictating as a judge our position to everyone else, I cannot. I can advocate for our position and seek others to advocate for our position and work to legally establish that position, through democratic consensus building, elections, and legislation.
This is why Christians have supported conservatives who favor originalist judges. The "Roe" ruling abrogated the rights of the people to place, or refuse to place, "rights" in their constitutions. It was done precisely because its advocates could not, democratically, overcome the consensus against abortion among a majority of people in a majority of states. Judicial dicatators circumvented our democratic processes and our right to write, or refuse to write, constitutional rights by, and only by, those processes.
And, I am no more prepared to defend judges who would declare, by judicial fiat, that they find our full moral postion (human life begins at conception) expresssed in any definitive form in the Constitution, just because they agree with us and they desire the result of that declaration; anymore than I can defend the Massachusettes judges who read their own version of marriage into the two-hundred-year old words of that state's Constitution, just because they personally agreed with that new definition. If you were hoping for judges who would simply dictate our moral position, just as previous judges dictated Roe, then yes, we are not on common ground about our judges.
On the other hand, judges could not offend our position if our constitutions, state or federal were/are amended to legally establish our position.
It is enough, for my moral position, that Roe be overturned because it is truly a piece of legislation from the bench; and has no principaled constitutional foundation. That ruling would put things where they belong, for all of us. Abortion would be decided by the states, as it was before Roe v Wade. That puts you and I on one side, and abortion advocates on the other side, seeking the legal implementation of our positions, through the legal means we have, founded on the Constitution - elections, legislation, constitutional amendments - NOT the declarations of judges.
My own view is that the long-term outcome of that process will satisfy no one 100%, but that it will least of all satisfy the "abortion on demand" crowd and the supporters of partial birth abortion.
Hopefully, in our imperfect world, and satisfying none of us completely, abortion-as-a-choice could be legally limited to rape, incest and saving the life of the mother, with appropriate requirements for parental consent for minors.
LINCOLN CHAFEE [Ramesh Ponnuru]
The more I think about it, the more important it seems to me that Steve Laffey beat him in the Rhode Island Senate primary.
None of the Republicans who voted against Bork in 1987, and none of the Democrats who voted against Thomas in 1991, paid any price. (It was the pro-Thomas senators who suffered: Democrat Alan Dixon lost a primary to Carol Moseley-Braun, and Arlen Specter had a tough general election.) If Chafee loses, it will make it harder for Snowe and Collins to vote against a qualified conservative in the next Supreme Court fight.
What do conservatives gain if Chafee wins? The hope that he would vote to keep Senate Republicans in the majority if it came down to him. We don't know that he would vote that way; and it's not clear that nominal control of the Senate matters all that much. Even if Laffey went on to lose the general election, taking out Chafee looks like a good move to me.
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