[Mb-civic] A reassertion of GOP common sense - Scot Lehigh - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  A reassertion of GOP common sense

By Scot Lehigh  |  February 14, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

IT'S BEEN a long time coming, but more Republicans are waking up to the 
realization that the Bush administration is an inept exercise in 
ideological excess.

As the Globe's Rick Klein reported Sunday, Republican lawmakers are 
increasingly balking at the president's call to make his tax cuts 
permanent. Locking in tax cuts that disproportionately reward the 
well-to-do even as Congress pares back social programs for those of low 
and moderate incomes is too much for some of them to abide.

Granted, that objection may be motivated as much by fear of a voter 
backlash as by a genuine return to the balanced-budget Republicanism 
that prevailed before supply-side theory became GOP theology. But 
whatever the cause, it marks a long-overdue reassertion of common sense.

Then there's Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, a principled conservative now 
mulling a presidential candidacy of his own. Hagel, a pointed critic of 
the Bush administration, was the cover story of the Sunday New York 
Times Magazine. As Hagel makes clear, what's important to him is not 
loyalty to the Bush administration but rather telling the truth as he 
sees it.

Although he voted for the resolution authorizing force in Iraq, Hagel 
has become a sharp critic of the administration's policy there. ''When I 
think of issues like Iraq, of how we went into it -- no planning, no 
preparation, no sense of consequences, of where we were going, how we 
were going to get out, went in without enough men, no exit strategy . . 
. I'll speak out, I'll go against my party," he said.

In Sunday talk-show appearances, the magazine reports, Hagel can be this 
blunt in his critique: ''This party that sometimes I don't recognize 
anymore has presided over the largest growth of government in the 
history of this country and maybe even the history of man."

Bruce Bartlett, a conservative analyst, has been making a similar case 
for some time. A Reagan policy adviser and a deputy assistant treasurer 
in George H. W. Bush's administration, Bartlett is iconoclastic enough 
to acknowledge that Bill Clinton's fiscal and economic approach produced 
results conservatives should have hailed.

''At least on economic policy, there is much to praise and little to 
criticize in terms of what was actually done (or not done) on his 
watch," he wrote in July 2004.

Still, the title of his new book will surely make the White House 
squirm: ''Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed 
the Reagan Legacy." (Given the huge deficits Reagan's own policy 
occasioned, one could argue that Bush is Reagan's fiscal heir.)

The book also castigates the White House for ''an anti- intellectual 
distrust of facts and analysis" and an obsession with secrecy, according 
to yesterday's Times.

Even on the issue of warrantless eavesdropping, we're starting to see 
some real resistance from the president's own party. Displaying no 
regard for legitimate constitutional concerns, the White House has 
signaled that it may make the surveillance program a campaign issue in 
the midterm elections.

But at least some Republicans are refusing to give the administration 
political cover. In last week's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, 
several GOP senators made it clear they wouldn't countenance the 
administration's flimsy legal justifications.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for one, was 
dismissive of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's assertion that the 
resolution authorizing force in Iraq had conferred wiretapping authority 
on the president.

''This statutory force resolution argument that you're making is very 
dangerous in terms of its application for the future," Graham warned. 
''When I voted for it, I never envisioned that I was giving to this 
president or any other the ability to go around FISA carte blanche," he 
said, referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Since then, Republican Representative Heather Wilson of New Mexico, a 
member of the House Intelligence Committee and a National Security 
Council aide in George H. W. Bush's administration, has gone so far as 
to call for a congressional inquiry into the matter.

Then there's the congressional probe of the government's response to the 
New Orleans flooding. Despite fears that a Republican-led investigation 
would be a whitewash, the report, to be released tomorrow, is expected 
to be harshly critical of the administration's performance.

It's easy for a White House skilled at the art of the permanent campaign 
to dismiss Democratic criticism as politics as usual. It's far harder, 
however, to discount the increasingly vocal concerns of those on the 
president's own side of the aisle.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/02/14/a_reassertion_of_gop_common_sense/
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