Posted on 12/24/2010 7:29:13 AM PST by Kaslin
Here's both my qualifier and my bona fides for the opinion that follows: I earned my Republican stripes working for a GOP U.S. senator, for Ronald Reagan's first successful presidential campaign and for Newt Gingrich.
Since those days, I've occasionally branched out and suggested some policy or position that doesn't reflexively mirror some bedrock conservative outlook. Often some readers of this column, whom I deeply respect and appreciate, will call me out for this or that view by dismissing me as a "RINO" -- a "Republican in Name Only."
Of late, some of my friends are being labeled RINOs because they voted to approve the START anti-nuclear weapons pact with Russia. U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., did so following private briefings the rest of us weren't privileged to hear.
Isakson is such a RINO that he chose to first run for the Georgia state legislature as a Republican in 1974. That's when Richard Nixon had all but destroyed the Republican Party, and Democrats still ruled Georgia as all but a one-party state. To this day, Isakson's ratings as a conservative are almost always near the top.
Now he and a dozen of his fellow Republican senators, including a former presidential candidate, have chosen to act in good faith and sober reflection to pass a treaty to help limit nuclear arms. Even many of their detractors can't seem to fully articulate why they find fault with this.
Doubtless the treaty has warts. It makes little difference to me. In my years overseas in the advanced study of international relations, I learned foremost about treaties that they are made to be broken. Remember the Camp David Accords of Jimmy Carter? They were useful, even admirable. But they have hardly paved a road to a permanently peaceful Middle East.
I'd love for some of the conservatives who revere the Federalist Papers to actually pick up a copy of that body of work and read it. They might be startled to learn that the constitutional framers sagaciously designed America's lawmaking process to include a U. S. Senate that was elected not by direct vote by the people, but by state legislatures. This ensured that excessive public passions didn't drive the making of important laws and policies. I still believe the 17th Amendment, which provides for the direct election of senators, to be one of the most damaging political actions in our nation's history.
All this as it may be, I still believe that President Obama in his heart remains a stout redistributionist of wealth. If he could have kept enjoying a Congress ruled by Democrats for another two years, the lot of them might well have seriously jeopardized our free market system. Even after the Democrats' stinging defeat in November, damage continues to be done to our liberties by the president's legions of bureaucrats and policy czars.
Yet none of that can dissuade me from defending the many maligned Republicans who labored in the political vineyards a generation ago, when being a Republican meant having no more influence than the president of the local Elks Club. These brave men and women took the GOP from being all but irrelevant in Washington -- and from being too liberal under Presidents Nixon and Gerald Ford -- to today's world, in which the GOP represents the governing philosophy of at least a large plurality of Americans.
Many people are unhappy that the lame-duck Democratic Congress won some final victories before exiting stage left. But Republicans are like us all: They have to play the hand dealt them. I believe they've largely done that.
As for START, among other things it calls for onsite inspections of nuclear facilities. I'm only too happy to allow Russian inspectors stateside in exchange for our own inspectors being allowed access to nuclear facilities in the Russian regions of the old Soviet Union -- a potentially unstable place and situation. I learned in my long-ago studies that treaties are only as enforceable as the parties who enter into them are willing to make them.
As for those who like to use the label "RINO" like a political bludgeon, allow me to ask this question: Have you ever been pelted by rotten fruit and eggs as you rode in a parade, only because you were a Republican? Have you ever been an active Republican in a state overrun by little else but Democrats? I have. So has Johnny Isakson.
Sometimes it seems the only way to shed the dreaded "RINO" label is to forget about pragmatic lawmaking and instead just appear on radio or TV, selling CDs, books or other trinkets, and telling everybody only what they want to hear. And that's too bad, for conservatives and everybody else.
That’s only ‘cause so many of ‘em got college degrees ~ but once you’re in the pool you’ll find sex counts more than you can believe.
That’s only ‘cause so many of ‘em got college degrees ~ but once you’re in the pool you’ll find sex counts more than you can believe.
That's much more meaningful in this situation.
What percentage of voting with the liberals does one need to earn the epithet, RINO?
40% works with me, although the US Constitution should be the applied standard.
Given the alacrity with which we agreed to START, the Russians may be holding out for an even better deal (for them).
Exactly! They must be really pissed they didn’t demand more.
If they cast votes in opposition to the party platform, what else would they be?
Now is not the time to save our senators, but to SAVE our country! Undo the last two years before we all sink to the level BHO wants.
“labored in the political vineyards” and are now drunk with power! RINOs!!!!
"bipartisan" appeasement
You are so right, many here on FR are using the word RINO way to much and they have no clue what a RINO is. A RINO is someone who votes mostly with the democrats. Examples of RINOs are Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, Dick Lugar of Indiana, Voinovich of Ohio, and Scott Brown of Massachussets. Many Freepers call other people RINOs, just because they don't don't like or disagree with.
I am disappointed that my senator voted for the START treaty, especially since I urged him not to.
We always used RINOs where we could find a disaffected but otherwise popular Democrat to run in a district where there was an overwhelming Democrat majority.
That's one of the ways we broke the back of the Democrats in the Souf'.
The Country Clubbers are simply the higher income middle-class and young rich guys who do party work. Remember, the Democrats make use of their special interests to toss up "leidership" to use in the party structure itself. Ordinarily Democrats don't simply cut the rich people into the party structure ~ as Bloomberg can tell you, it doesn't matter how much money you've got, they don't respect you in the morning unless you've served on the Planned Parenthood board, been a kneecap breaker in the union, or taught gradeschool.
Ordinarily they vote to caucus with the Republicans and either vote the Republican line or abstain from voting when they disagree.
They are not allowed into party discussions on philosophy or candidate selection.
How they vote once in office has to do with whether they are SMART or STUPID.
In all fairness, while he is correct about the 17th Amendment being unwarranted populism, he misses the point about its ill effects. It is not “excessive populism”.
As one of the system of checks and balances that the founding fathers created, the idea was that the House of Representatives would be the most democratic and responsible to the people, hence its nickname of “The People’s House”.
The US Senate was indeed supposed to represent the interests of the individual States. And importantly, the President was, and still is, selected *not* by popular vote, but by the election of the electoral college electors, something that has mattered very much a few times in our history.
(And finally, a fourth member of the balance was that the President should nominate the justices of the Supreme Court, who the senate (and thus the States) would confirm, or not.)
But that is “just” representation, excepting the SCOTUS.
What *isn’t* obvious, is the hidden balance that exists with the sole purpose of *protecting the people* from government.
The founding fathers didn’t come up with this. It only happened because of the Civil War. Specifically the 14th Amendment, which was very clear and precise with what is called the “equal protection” clause:
“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. “
Basically, the 14th Amendment allows the federal government to *protect* the people from an abusive State government.
Just recently, in his concurring opinion in McDonald v. Chicago, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote an extended, and brilliant, resurrection of the equal protection clause, that is, and should be published in legal textbooks throughout the land.
But the 14th Amendment is only half the story. Until the passage of the 17th Amendment, the Direct Election of Senators, US senators were a powerful tool in just the *opposite* direction.
—That is, they were the means by which the individual States protected the people from an abusive federal government.—
But with the 17th Amendment, senators no longer needed to act on behalf of their States, but could just do a populist “tap dance” every six years to get reelected. Once elected, they could ignore both their States and the people of their State.
And this means that, since 1913 and the passage of the 17th Amendment, the federal government has been able to do anything it wants to us, the people. To directly involve itself in our lives, and to try and control us, oppress us, and manipulate us.
And the States cannot stand in their way.
And this is far, far worse than “excessive populism”.
And why RINOs are such a pain in the ass.
A RINO by any other name is still a RINO and still smells the same.
agreed, how about just cheap ass liberals?
This post was the sound of an unhappy RINO,, seeking a mate. Sorry sport, shaking hands with Reagan don’t mean do-do. If you embrace those new positions you speak of,, you’re a RINO.
And if you accept the premise that Obama is redistributionsist socialist, then you should NEVER hand him a victory such as START that will increase his overall strength. You gave him a chance to look effective when he should have had a public defeat.
What a RINO putz.
As a former Romanian spy chief who used to take orders from the Soviet KGB, it is perfectly obvious to me that Russia is behind the evanescence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction
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