GOP Moderates Make Strides Despite Party’s Minority Status
MODERATES
The Hour
Anthony Rotunno
Boston University Washington News Service
4/20/2007
WASHINGTON, April 20 – Although the curtain fell on their party’s majority last November, many Republican centrists now say they are more integral to Congress than during the 12 years their party played the lead, despite their early fears of being shoved off stage by the new Democratic-led cast on Capitol Hill.
After only four months since the Democratic majority took control in January, Republican moderates already say they’ve been able to vote in favor of issues they could not support under their own party’s control.
“A lot of the legislation we passed early on – ethics reform, strengthening the civil liberties board, expanding stem cell research, increasing the minimum wage – these were all things championed by moderates,” said Rep. Chris Shays of Connecticut’s 4th Congressional District, now New England’s lone Republican House member. “And some of the bills were actually our bills.”
“They’re in the minority of the minority but they’re closer to the majority,” added former Rep. Nancy Johnson, who lost Connecticut’s 5th District seat in November to Democrat Christopher Murphy. “They give the majority the power to go down a centrist route, despite their extremists.”
Many points on the Democratic leadership’s agenda during Congress’s first 100 days focused on issues that moderate Republicans tried to address in previous years, Shays said.
Implementing the remaining security recommendations of the 9/11 commission was one area, he said, where moderate Republican members could not succeed under their own party’s control. In 2006, Shays co-sponsored a bill to implement the remaining recommendations almost identical to the one passed by the House earlier this year, but it was never voted on.
“The Republicans didn’t understand the importance of dealing with an issue like that and so they didn’t do it,” said Sherwood Boehlert, a New York Republican who retired in 2006 after 13 terms in the House. Like Shays, Boehlert proposed legislation in the last Congress similar to the bill passed this year to raise the minimum wage, but the then Republican majority did not approve it.
“It looked like the Democrats were taking the moderate Republican agenda and making it [their own],” Boehlert said of the first 100 days legislation.
Traditionally defined as fiscal conservatives who can lean to the left on social issues, most Republican members of Congress who are considered moderate belong to the Republican Main Street Partnership, a Washington-based organization comprised of 48 members of Congress, two governors and several former members of Congress that promotes “centrist values” and the “Republican ideals of fiscal responsibility and limited government.”
“We’re not moderate in our passion,” Shays, a member of the partnership, said of his faction of Republican centrists. “We’re simply not at one edge of the political ideology. Moderates tend to be people who bring others together. We tend to work with both ends of the political spectrum and say, you know, ‘Can we meet in the middle?’”
Among the 35 congressional seats lost by the Republican Party last November, seven or eight belonged to moderate members, according to former Rep. Charlie Bass of New Hampshire, a six-term incumbent who lost his seat last fall and is now the president and CEO of the Republican Main Street Partnership. Although the challenges are greater representing “the minority within a minority caucus,” Bass said, the role moderate GOP members play in congressional processes is “just as significant as it was before.”
Although the partnership lost some key members following last year’s midterm elections, Bass said, some new moderate members who were elected helped to fill their vacancies. “There’s a very incremental loss, but it’s not significant,” he said. “Moderates are more united in terms of interpersonal relationships than they ever have been.”
Despite Bass’s optimistic assessment, the Republican Party suffered some significant blows last fall. The traditionally liberal bastion of New England moved even further to the left, with Democrats taking 21 of the region’s 22 House seats and also picking up a Senate seat in Rhode Island.
Connecticut, with three of the region’s hottest House races, emerged from the midterms as the only New England state not awash in a sea of blue. Reps. Johnson and Rob Simmons, both moderates, were ousted in very close races, making Shays the only New England Republican who returned to the House..
“The state lost two extraordinarily good legislators,” Shays said of the midterm election results. “I lost two of my best friends. It has given me leverage in my own party to point out we need to be a party that is listening to people, looking to solve their problems and we need more people like Rob and Nancy, not less.”
“A lot of good Republicans were caught up in that firestorm,” added Chris Healy, chairman of the Connecticut Republican Party. “I’m very confident that Chris [Shays] will be there as long as he wants to be. He’s doing everything he needs to do.”
After being targeted last fall by Democrats and constituents who disapproved of the Republicans’ handling of the war in Iraq and the general corruption in Washington, Boehlert said, the moderate members who survived the election could return to a much less stressful environment on the Hill.
“I think the moderate Republicans have a much more enjoyable experience,” he said. “Although they don’t like being in the minority, a lot of the pressure is off of being charged with all the sins of a majority. And there were a number of sins.”
The legislative leeway many moderate members encountered following their party’s fall to minority status is “far more a liberation than anything else,” according to Norm Ornstein, congressional scholar and co-author of “The Broken Branch,” an in-depth analysis of Congress’s evolution over the past several decades.
“The moderate Republicans were really in a series of difficult boxes,” Ornstein added. “They had to walk the plank frequently on votes; frankly none were rank and file conservatives. [Now] they have more freedom when it comes to casting votes, and more freedom to be engaged in the policy process.”
The new Democratic majority in Congress is by no means overwhelming, and with such narrow margins, the Democrats need to be conscious of moderates across the aisle, according to Paul Weinstein, chief operating officer of the Democratic Leadership Council and a former member of the Clinton administration
The Democrats hold a 31 seat advantage in the House and a two seat advantage in the Senate, because independents Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Bernard Sanders of Vermont caucus with the Democratic Party. “There’s going to be some tight votes they will need them on,” Weinstein added.
“Right now this is a very partisan place,” Shays said of the House. “The speaker is as partisan to the left as Tom DeLay was to the right, and because she is focused on how to increase her majority, she’s not reaching out to anybody right now on the Republican side of the aisle. But eventually I think she will have to.”
Bills to raise the minimum wage and relegate federal funding to expand stem cell research were two that already drew support from centrist Republicans in this Congress. Defecting Republican moderates were critical in giving House and Senate Democrats the majorities they needed to pass the controversial war spending bills that include timelines for troop withdrawal from Iraq as well.
“Some votes you will need those Republican moderates,” Weinstein said. “You’ve got to govern from the center out. You’ve got to start in the center and move left.”
“You do need to be able to build coalitions across party lines,” added Johnson. “If they are smart enough to work with the moderate Republicans, they can free themselves.”
For many centrist members in the minority who represent evenly divided districts like Shays, voting in favor of certain Democratic bills shows their constituents they’re listening to the concerns of their districts, Boehlert said.
“They actually get to work on and vote on issues that they favor,” added Thomas Mann, congressional scholar and co-author of “The Broken Branch.” “Matters that were often time kept from the floor while their own party was in power. That’s the most satisfying part.”
Despite the changes brought by the new Democratic leadership, Shays said, the remaining Republican moderate members will still continue to endorse legislation they believe will strengthen the center.
“We get it done in the majority or minority, but some things are easier for me now than they were under my own party,” he said. “Moderates are always going to be relevant, and we’re always going to be in the thick of the battle because we’re basically dealing with the issues the constituents are concerned about.”
#####
