No Contract, But Maybe A Big Hit

For those disenfranchised conservatives (like moi) looking mordantly for some, ANY sign of life from ANY part of the Republican Party to give us some, ANY hope of a positive change in November - in other words, fanatical diehards - this is not the sort of story we're looking for:

House Minority Leader John Boehner said Republicans are rejecting a call for a new “Contract With America” like the campaign that won them the majority in Congress in 1994.

“There will be no effort to try to nationalize the elections,” the Ohio congressman said Tuesday at a luncheon in Washington sponsored by the American Spectator magazine and Americans for Tax Reform.

He told reporters that GOP candidates could choose from a number of policy proposals offered by the national party, including healthcare, national security, and energy independence.

“But at the end of the day, people will have to run their own elections,” he said.

The New York Sun reported: “While the strategy will free up candidates to tout their independence and distance themselves from a party label that has been damaged in recent years, it may disappoint some activists looking for a more cohesive national strategy and a platform centered around new ideas.”

Upon reflection, I have mixed feelings about Boehner's disavowal.  On the one hand, it looks like he's pussing out, laying low, running away, wimping it, etc.  We Righties are so overcharged with frustration after the indignities and reversals of the last couple of years that our visceral political lust is to charge into battle with all weapons blazing.  We're looking to people like Boehner to, if not fight the good fight, at least fight, period.

However, we have to remember the context of the Gingrich Contract.  It was a mid-term election; the electorate was angry and up-in-arms about the double-crosses of Bill Clinton's first two years (a huge, across-the-board tax increase after promising a "middle class tax cut"; health care nationalization despite only barely and ambiguously hinting at "reform" during the 1992 campaign; gays in the military, which Clinton never mentioned at all as a candidate) and was hugely motivated to punish him vicariously through his party's congressional wing; and it was led by a visionary, charismatic figure in the aforementioned Newt Gingrich who didn't come into that campaign bearing debilitating baggage from the recent political past.

In many ways, it was the perfect storm.  A Contract strategy wouldn't have worked two years earlier because the GOP was crippled by Bush41's unpopularity.  It would have failed two years later because, leaving aside every other factor, the titular head of the party would have been the presidential candidate, meaning Bob Dole, who wouldn't have been any more credible trying to sell Gingrich's decalogue than he was that 15% tax cut.

In 2008, John Boehner is not only a holdover from the old GOP House regime, but he ain't no Newt Gingrich.  Plus it's a presidential election year, and the party would be taking its cues from its nominee anyway.

Given that our nominee is a de facto Lieberman Democrat, that would constitute the one substantive argument for an attempt to rally behind an alternative party leader who actually believes in what the party is supposed to stand for.

That probably isn't Boehner either, judging by this latest debacle in which forty-five 'Pubbies - almost a quarter of the GOP House caucus - voted for the $300 billion-plus "Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008," a heads-foolish-borrowers win/tails-taxpayers-lose boondoggle that Michelle Malkin more accurately dubs "this latest slush fund bonanza."  Sure sounds like the minority Members were "on their own" on this vote.  Others might call such laizzes faire "strategizing" an appalling absence of leadership.  And they'd be right.

And yet, amazingly, just a short walk away on the other side of the Capitol, Senate Pachyderms led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the man who should be the next Majority Leader if he lives long enough, South Carolina's Jim DeMint, are showing their House counterparts how partisan hardball is played:

Senate Republicans have threatened to block nearly all other bills pending before the August recess if Democrats refuse to vote with them on expanding offshore drilling.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said bills that do not pertain to energy can wait until after the August recess, with gas prices now surpassing $4 per gallon. McConnell and top Republicans indicated Wednesday they would oppose any procedural votes to take up other legislation, which require sixty votes to succeed. …

Following swift Senate action on the narrow energy bill, Reid wanted the Senate to approve a massive defense authorization bill, an overhaul of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, legislation to protect reporters’ sources, an extension of expiring energy tax incentives, and a major package of thirty-three bills held up by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK).

But Republicans are planning to keep the Senate on the energy issue until their demands are resolved. The massive housing-rescue package might be the only other measure that gets valuable floor time before the August recess.

I don't want to oversell McConnell's and DeMint's PR prowess here - it doesn't take genius to recognize the political opportunity that has been dropped in Republican laps by the explosion in energy prices as a consequence of decades of Democrat environmental extremism - but what cannot be oversold is their belated courage (for them, anyway) in making hay with this PR sunburst.  Because they have exerted honest-to-Barack leadership on an issue of vast importance on which the public is now overwhelmingly on their side, Harry Reid is trapped in a corner he evidently can't swindle and bluster his way out of.

For the minority, it's a can't lose proposition (at least while they still retain their testicular fortitude): either they force Dirty Harry to yield on domestic energy exploration, a substantial chunk of Dems who don't want to have to explain to the voters why their party wants them to have to take out a second mortgage (that the Dems will bail them out of - hey, maybe Reid DOES have a way out of this...) to keep their gas tanks full defect and help the GOP open up the homeland energy spigots; or the Republicans get an economy-linked wedge issue they never expected with which to, at the very least, deny the Donks any additional gains, and maybe start rolling back the losses they took in '06.

Who needs a full-blown Contract II when you can cry, "Drill here, drill now!"

Are Boehner, Blunt and the boys joining that cry?  Of course not.  But they are starting to whisper:

A procedural device is available to House minorities when the majority locks up popular legislation that could command a majority if given a chance on the House floor. It’s called a discharge petition.

A discharge petition is a procedural way for disgruntled members to release a bill from legislative limbo and force the entire House to consider it. Should a majority of members (218) sign one, the legislation in question is “discharged” from the committee of jurisdiction and brought immediately to the floor, debated, and voted on. Short of actual floor votes, signing a discharge petition is the most powerful (and potentially meaningful) tool available to a besieged legislative minority....

Quietly, in recent weeks House Republican leaders have adopted precisely this strategy. Rank-and-file Republicans have been filing one discharge petition per week (five thus far), demanding floor action on a far-reaching energy agenda. The agenda includes bills to construct new oil refineries; drill for oil and natural gas offshore as well as on a tiny portion of the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge; repeal regulations that needlessly increase the price of gasoline; produce energy from alternative sources such as oil shale, tar sands and coal-to-liquid; and explore the next generation of oil and natural gas fields in deep-sea regions far off our coasts.

With little media coverage, and lacking the visible support of business groups, conservative organizations or talk radio, these petitions have nevertheless garnered as many as 153 signatures, with one Democrat — Representative Neil Abercrombie (D-HA) — even risking the wrath of his leadership by signing on.

An informal head count suggests there are an additional 75 to 100 House members, including those forty Democrats, who, based on their previous support for proposals to increase American energy production, could be open to signing these petitions, thereby pushing the number of signatures over the required 218. [emphasis added]

Is it unfair of me to wonder aloud why Boehner and his somnolent "leadership" team aren't all over this like Germans on Lucifer - or, well, like Mitch McConnell and Jim DeMint?  Business groups are often more mercenary than ideological, but I have to think that the reason conservative organizations and talk radio aren't flogging these discharge petitions is because the House GOP has been utterly AWOL in publicizing them.  What are they afraid of?  That the forty (or more) pro-energy Dems will be scared away from acting in the public interest (to say nothing of their own political interests) by having the light of public attention shone on their choice between "risking the wrath" of Crazy Nancy and risking the wrath of voters who can do a lot worse to them than "end their advancement in the House"?  Piffle.  That's typical Republican timidity; it's in the interests of both the voters and the minority party to FORCE House Dems to choose between their neoBolshevik crazoid base and doing what's right for the country - and themselves.  That's a battle we disenfranchised conservatives - the Right's infantry, remember - can't join if even we don't know it's going on.

Maybe a reprise of the 1994 strategy isn't practicable.  The results of '94 certainly aren't.  But the reverse of 1998's outcome, denying Democrats the massive gains they were counting on, is not outside the realm of possibility.  But only if the GOP can once again be the party of Lincoln and Reagan, instead of the rump remnant of Rockefeller and Bush41 and Dole.

Even if we do have a Lieberman Democrat topping our ticket.