Conservatives Playing Their Scratchy Old Record Again-- Sealing Their Fate

When FDR won a landslide victory against Herbert Hoover in 1932 (472 electoral votes to 59, Hoover only winning 6 states), conservatives, whose policies had dragged the country into the worst economic catastrophe of its history, were surprised-- but not chastened or any wiser. They felt they could obstruct Roosevelt's policy agenda and scream "socialism" and predict apocalypse instead of working to clean up the mess they had made. Roosevelt's landslide in 1932 also gave Democrats majorities in the Senate (60-35) and in the House (313-117, nearly half the Republicans in the House going down to defeat). The orgy of hysterical GOP obstructionism didn't help them and they lost 14 more House seats in 1934 and another 15 in 1936 (for a grand total of 88 against 347 for the Democrats and their allies). Same thing in the Senate; another 10 Republicans got dumped in 1934 and then 8 more in 1936 (giving them a grand total of 25 senators to yell and scream impotently).

And yell and scream in exactly what they did. Mike Lux exposes an eerily familiar-sounding conservative strategy from the 1930s in his uplifting book The Progressive Revolution:

Conservatives protested mightily against these [New Deal] policies. Every single Republican in the House voted against Social Security, for example, and the leading Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee [the equivalent of knee jerk obstructionists Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and Dave Camp of those days] argued that "business and industry are already operating under very heavy burdens." They contended that Social Security and other forms of social insurance would cause more unemployment. (Sound familiar? It should-- these are the arguments conservatives have used, and still use, every time a progressive economic program is proposed.) The debate verged on hysteria: "Never in the history of the world has any measure brought here so insidiously designed as to prevent business recovery, the enslave workers, and to prevent any possibility of the employers providing work for the people" and "the lash of the dictator will be felt and 25 million American citizens will, for the first time, submit themselves to the figerprint test" (the fingerprint test being a rather odd way of describing the GOP's fera of big government). [Expect rightist hacks like Mike Pence and Jeb Hensarling to start using it on Fox News any day now.] One Republican [the day's John Ensign] protested, "This bill opens the door and invites the entrance into the political field of a power so vast, so powerful as to threaten the integrity of our institutions and to pull the pillars of the temple down upon the hands of our descendants."

Instead the pillars collapsed on the heads of the conservatives and Republicans. Lux again: "The only Republican to win the presidency between 1932 and 1968 was war hero Dwight Eisenhower, and he governed as a moderate, never challenging the basic tenets of the New Deal policy. Democrats controlled the House of Representatives for all but two terms after FDR's election in 1932, until 1994, an astounding and unprecedented sixty-two-year run, and they controlled both houses of Congress for fifty-two of those years."

Many mainstream conservatives are worried that Republicans, led by clueless GOP hacks like Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Jim DeMint, Paul Ryan, Sarah Palin, Mike Pence, lobbyist John Boehner, secessionist Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty and Eric Cantor, are following this disastrous playbook again-- banking, quite openly, on America failing-- and being seen to work towards national failure. Earlier we talked about how Oklahoma fanatic Jim Inhofe admitted as much in his analysis of the debate over health care reform. Listen to the deranged and treacherous Inhofe lying his head off on a far right radio show. Another Republican conservative, though, Lindsey Graham (R-SC), is himself tasting the lash from the far right for not toeing the line of lockstep obstructionism. Graham announced he would vote to confirm Sonia Sotomayor as a Supreme Court Justice and wingnutia exploded in rage.

[R]ight-wing radio talk show host Mark Levin said it was a sign that Graham is “unreliable ... as a thinker and a leader.”

Wendy Long, counsel for the conservative Judicial Confirmation Network, called it proof that Graham “still lacks courage, statesmanship and an understanding of the Constitution and rule of law.”

“May his antics get the attention they richly deserve.”

The response from Graham: Enjoy life in the minority.

In an interview with Politico Thursday, the South Carolina Republican defended his decision to back Sotomayor by laying out a broad critique of conservative activists who push “ideological purity” and refuse to cooperate with a Democratic Congress and White House.

“If we chase this attitude … that you have to say ‘no’ to every Democratic proposal, you can’t help the president ever, you can’t ever reach across the aisle, then I don’t want to be part of the movement because it’s a dead-end movement,” Graham said.

“I have no desire to be up here in an irrelevant status. I’m smart enough to know that this country doesn’t have a problem with conservatives. It has a problem with blind ideology. And those who are ideological-driven to a fault are never going to be able to take this party back into relevancy.”

...[B]y giving Sotomayor at least the patina of bipartisan support in the Judiciary Committee, Graham has infuriated activists all over again, robbing them of the opportunity to argue that Sotomayor is so far out of the mainstream that neither Republicans nor moderate Democrats could responsibly vote to confirm her... Club for Growth president Chris Chocola says Graham “has it backwards.” “It’s not about purity,” he said. “It’s about sticking to the fundamentals in order to build a sustainable majority. If you play a sport and you’re not performing well, you don’t say, “I have to try 10 new things.” You ask, “What are the fundamentals I’ve forgotten about?” The same thing is true in politics. If you’ve had a few bad cycles, what are the fundamentals you’re ignoring?” Graham calls that a recipe for a shrinking minority. “Nobody would appreciate the 30-Republican-senator model more than Harry Reid,” he said. “There’s an element within the conservative movement that is looking for purity. … I’m looking for coalition building.”

There are very few Republican elected officials who are. The only two other Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who were expected to even consider voting for confirmation-- Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT)-- are afraid of radical right activists who control the GOP in their own states and both have indicated they will vote no. Are the Republicans digging their own graves? If we can look to political history to predict the future, we can expect more conservative losses in 2010 and 2012.