ISR Issue 48, July–August 2006

The Crisis of the GOP

By LANCE SELFA

Lance Selfa is a member of the ISR editorial board

WITH EACH new day, more bad political news seems to befall the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress. Major national opinion polls estimate that only about one-third of Americans support President Bush and the Republicans in Congress. It has gotten so bad that even Ken Mehlman, chair of the Republican National Committee, was said to have told congressional leaders that the GOP could lose twenty-five seats in the U.S. House, giving the Democrats a majority.¹ Liberal commentators are already predicting the possibility of a “tsunami” of angry voters sweeping the Republican Congress out of power in November.² A Democratic-controlled Congress would likely make Bush a lame duck for the last two years of his presidency, and could possibly, further tarnish the GOP with investigations of the gross manipulation and cronyism that has been the hallmark of Republican Washington.³

Topping the list of voter concerns driving this discontent with Bush and the GOP is, of course, the war in Iraq. Since early 2005, growing majorities of Americans have told pollsters that they believe the war “wasn't worth it” and that they want to see U.S. troops withdrawn soon. Added to this are more economic issues, from rising gas prices to affordability of health care. A May 2006 Washington Post poll showed that 69 percent of those surveyed believe the nation is “off track,” a finding that belies what Wall Street considers solid figures on economic growth and falling unemployment. Yet, in an economy in which median income has fallen each year since Bush took office, much of the business press's celebration of good economic figures seems like a cruel joke to most Americans. For these reasons, the same Washington Post poll showed 56 percent of the public preferring a Democratic Congress in November, with three times as many people saying they would use their vote to express opposition to Bush rather than support for him.⁴

While the public seems to be tiring of Republican Washington, the Republicans in Washington seem to be tiring of each other. President Bush's appointment of his lawyer and Texas crony Harriet Myers to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Conner led to a revolt among Senate conservatives who thought Myers wasn't conservative enough. Myers was forced to withdraw. Then, in early 2006, demagogic Democrats and right-wing congressional Republicans, citing concerns about Arab terrorism, forced Bush to abandon a deal to hand over management of U.S. ports to a Dubai company. At the time of writing, congressional Republicans were again divided on the question of immigration, the GOPers in the House and Senate backing different, and likely irreconcilable, versions of immigration reform bills.

Strife between the White House and congressional Republicans erupted in the bizarre flap over a May 17 FBI raid on U.S. Rep. William Jefferson's (D-La.) congressional office. In response to the raid, Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert-as well as the Democratic leadership of the chamber-demanded that the FBI return documents taken from Jefferson's office. According to press reports, Bush was on the verge of ordering the FBI to comply with Hastert's demands when top-level executive branch appointees, including Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller, threatened to resign rather than hand over the documents. Bush ordered the documents sealed for forty-five days while congressional and Justice Department officials worked out a solution.

Coming only a few days after the sudden resignation of former CIA Director Porter Goss amid speculation of his clashes with the White House and his involvement in a brewing scandal involving bribery and lobbyists' provision of hookers to CIA officials, the clash over the FBI raids reinforced the image of a government in disarray, with different factions of the ruling party squaring off against each other.

Many have speculated about the ultimate backstory of this clash between the Bush White House and the Republican congressional leadership, with some liberal bloggers dismissing it as a mere “kabuki” performance. But it is certainly a departure from what appeared only eighteen months ago to be an unstoppable Republican juggernaut. Some commentators even likened the Bush administration's modus operandi to be akin to a parliamentary system where the prime minister (Bush or Cheney, depending on who you believe really runs the government) announces party and state policy and the parliamentary (i.e., congressional) majority votes it into law.⁵

The failure of success

Bush started his second term determined to remake American politics by dismantling Social Security. But his campaign to win support for attacking the most popular social program in U.S. history ran headlong into two countervailing forces: the ideological fallout of his and the GOP's program; and, more generally, a leftward shift in popular consciousness.

The first of these is, in a large part, a reaction to the success the Republicans have had in pushing through their program of tax cuts for the richest Americans, cutting government spending on programs to benefit working Americans, and exposing more government policies to “market forces.” While Bush and his advisers would like to tout these policies for their alleged role in bringing the economy back from recession in 2001, they are finding it difficult to do so. This is because the Bush program-in reality the neoliberal economic program that U.S. business overwhelmingly supports-has produced results that its critics predicted. It has lined the pockets of the rich and corporations, while eroding working Americans' incomes. Total compensation going to ordinary Americans fell as a percentage of national income from 66.2 percent in 2001 to 65.4 percent in 2005. At the same time, the percent of national income going to corporate profits leaped from 8.5 percent to 12.3 percent. Even a Federal Reserve study reported that Bush's dividend tax cuts had no real effect on the stock market.⁶ The clear public perception that Bush has been a president for the rich, coupled with the increasing precariousness of ordinary people's lives reinforced by the bipartisan neoliberal consensus, has discredited neoliberal nostrums. A consistent public opinion finding throughout Bush's terms has been the public's decided lack of enthusiasm for tax cuts that are holy writ to Republicans-especially when pollsters ask respondents to choose between receiving tax cuts and increased spending on other priorities, like health, education, and infrastructure.

This opinion is part of a larger shift in consciousness that has remained largely inchoate. While Republican politicians (and Democrats who want to mimic them) use rhetoric that appeals to a 1950s image of the U.S., in reality, the U.S. is a far more tolerant and less paranoid country than it was in the 1950s. With the partial exception of a slight rightward shift on attitudes toward abortion in the late 1990s, the majority of white workers-the supposed inhabitants of “Bush country”-are more tolerant on their social issue stands and more liberal on their positions on economic issues than they were two decades ago. And ordinary whites certainly hold more liberal attitudes regarding government economic policy than do wealthier whites, a disproportionately Republican voting base.⁷ Despite Republican success in using cultural conservative “wedge issues”-successful largely because Democrats cave in on them-the genuine Kulturkampf that leading figures of the Christian Right want to impose on the nation is anathema to the majority of Americans. This became obvious early last year when every major GOP politician, including Bush himself, rushed to endorse the Christian Right's cause célèbre-the attempt to prevent the husband of vegetative Terri Schiavo from removing her from life support. As they found during their crusade to impeach Bill Clinton over his affair with a White House intern, a large majority of Americans rejected the Religious Right's view of the need to “save” Schiavo from her own wishes to be removed from life support. More substantively, South Dakota's passage of the country's most restrictive abortion law earlier this year provoked a petition campaign that suspended the law's implementation. And a referendum on the bill, set for November 2006, has a good chance of repealing the law.

The scandalous GOP

More than just differences and divisions over policy, there is a climate of scandal enveloping Republican Washington. Just attempting to keep up with the exploding crises and scandals that threaten to undermine Republican control is a full-time job. Consider these:

The Abramoff scandal: The April 2006 guilty plea of GOP “super lobbyist” Jack Abramoff on charges of bribery, tax evasion, and defrauding Indian tribe clients, as well as on wire and mail fraud in a separate Florida case, has already implicated several leading Republican power brokers in Washington, from former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and House Administration Committee Chairman Robert Ney (R-Ohio) to Senator Conrad Burns (R-Mont.). Abramoff ran a lobbying firm that acted as a conduit of clients' money (including bilking tens of millions from Indian tribes that hired him to lobby on behalf of their casinos) to leading GOP politicians and activists. The Center for Responsive Politics tracked up to $55 million in Abramoff-connected money that has made its way into the coffers of Washington politicians, most of them Republicans. The scandal has the potential to bring down not only leading congressional committee chairmen, but it has also ensnared David Safavian, the man in charge of approving procurement contracts for the White House.

The DeLay/Texas reapportionment scandal: In September 2005, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was indicted for criminal conspiracy in Texas for violating an election law that bars corporate contributions to political parties. The indictment alleges that DeLay and his aides laundered money collected from Texas corporations though his Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC) and the Republican National Committee, and then funneled it to Republican candidates to win a majority in the Texas legislature in 2002. The Texas legislature then rewrote the state's congressional apportionment plan, leading ultimately to a gain of six more Republican seats in Congress in 2004. Several DeLay aides have already pled guilty to charges stemming from the investigation. DeLay himself has stepped down as majority leader and announced his resignation from Congress. And the U.S. Supreme Court is considering the legality of the mid-term reapportionment.

The Pentagon/CIA procurement scandal: A San Diego Union Tribune investigative journalist researching the assets of local congressmen discovered that former Rep. Randy (“Duke”) Cunningham benefited from a huge mark-up in the sale of his house in a toney San Diego suburb. Noting the buyer to be a firm with a Washington, D.C., post office box, some more digging led to Cunningham's admission that he had been on the take from Washington lobbyist and defense sector consultant Mitchell Wade. Cunningham's subsequent conviction, and the federal investigation of Wade and his business partner, Brent Wilkes, suggested that Cunningham's brazen corruption (he allegedly wrote out lists of desired payoffs on his congressional stationery!) was only the tip of the iceberg. Wade and Wilkes were connected closely to Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, who, until he resigned, was the CIA's number three in charge of procurement-as well as being a childhood friend of Wilkes. The ongoing investigation raises suspicion that CIA contracts-and beyond that, Pentagon contracts-were being handed out to firms that bribed lawmakers, like Cunningham, who sat on key congressional committees overseeing military procurement. Goss resigned amid press questions about how Foggo, who was a middle-ranking bureaucrat in the agency, received a promotion to the CIA's third-ranked official as soon as Goss became director of the agency in 2005.

The Valerie Plame scandal: This is arguably the most threatening scandal to White House since it involves Bush's closest political adviser, Karl Rove, and Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald won a grand jury indictment of Libby for perjury in his testimony on the source of the 2003 leak of the identity of CIA undercover agent Valerie Plame, the wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson. In 2002, Wilson, an experienced diplomat undertook a mission at the CIA's behest to investigate allegations peddled by Iraqi expatriates that the Saddam Hussein regime had procured nuclear materials from Niger as part of a covert weapons program. Wilson's 2002 report debunked those rumors. Nevertheless, the administration and its water carriers in the press continued to peddle the falsehood in their propaganda for war against Iraq, leading Wilson to reveal his findings publicly in a July 2003 New York Times article. Because this exposed the administration to charges of lying and manipulation of intelligence, the White House launched a crude attempt to discredit Wilson by “outing” his wife to suggest that Wilson had merely taken a junket to Africa at his wife's request. Libby and Rove were involved in the campaign to smear Wilson among the Washington press corps. And Fitzgerald is investigating whether outing Plame constitutes a violation of federal law that forbids revealing covert operatives' identities.

These scandals hang an aura of corruption, opportunism, and dishonesty around the Republican-dominated government in Washington. And this is not even to mention the demonstration of rank incompetence and disregard for the well being of ordinary Americans the administration's non-response to the Hurricane Katrina crisis created in August/September 2005. Or charges of money laundering, election tampering, and petty corruption that threaten to engulf the Republican-dominated state governments of Ohio and Kentucky. Or investigations of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist for securities fraud. Or the other, more substantive, scandals like disclosures of the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping, alleged corruption in Iraq contracts, among others. Everywhere Bush and the GOP turn, another scandal or problem jumps up at them.

What do the scandals mean?

All of the scandals described above are potentially lethal blows to pillars of GOP control. That is because they do not stem from “bad apples” or second-rate politicians on the make-although there are plenty of both involved in all of these incidents. They represent the normal functioning of a highly effective political machine.

Since taking Congress in 1994 and the presidency in 2000, the GOP has managed to exert a pull on politics to the right that has been largely successful, despite governing with fairly slim majorities in the Congress. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 and won only 51.1 percent of the vote in 2004, the narrowest reelection victory of a president since 1916. These are hardly ringing endorsements of Republican tax cuts for the rich, eternal war, and corporate welfare from the majority of the American public. With the brief exception of the period immediately following the September 11, 2001, attacks through the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Bush's administration has been largely unpopular with the majority (or at least a plurality) of the public. In the weeks before September 11, Bush's administration was already being described as aimless and failed. Yet the GOP machine has been extremely effective in pushing through its right-wing agenda-despite popular opposition or indifference to the issues that excite the GOP's conservative “base.”⁸

Political scientists have documented the many ways in which the GOP majority has relied on a compliant media, parliamentary maneuvering, huge campaign contributions, stacking government agencies with GOP loyalists, ruthless gerrymandering to improve GOP election prospects, smashmouth political campaigning, and other tactics that confident political parties employ.⁹

Take, for instance, the Abramoff scandal. On its surface, it is a story of a Washington power broker who pushed the envelope too far and fell because of it. But Abramoff wouldn't have been in the position to exploit his connections if he weren't part of the architecture of Republican rule in Washington. Abramoff was a cog in DeLay's “K-Street Project,” a plan to enforce Republican hegemony on the lobbying industry that had had a “bipartisan” approach to Congress and the executive branch before the GOP won the Congress in 1994. As a cost of doing business with the new GOP majority, DeLay and his henchmen demanded that corporations and lobbying firms hire Republican loyalists. Or, in the case of Abramoff's firm, that they funnel their business through the firm of a Republican loyalist. Abramoff had been a long-time GOP activist from the days he knew Karl Rove and Grover Norquist-a consigliere of the GOP-linked conservative activist groups and former president of Americans for Tax Reform-from their days in the leadership of the College Republicans. Abramoff's shakedowns of Indian tribes weren't really for services rendered so much as they were used to create a slush fund that made available millions of dollars for the congressional leadership, namely DeLay and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.), to distribute to Republican politicians in both Houses. In this way, Abramoff worked with DeLay, even sharing staffers, to build the patronage machine that assured that DeLay would almost always have the votes he and his errand boy Dennis Hastert needed to pass through the GOP-corporate agenda. ¹⁰

It was no small endeavor. According to researchers from the Center for Responsive Politics:

More than 300 members of the 109th Congress received campaign contributions from a client of Jack Abramoff while he was their lobbyist-81 Senators and 227 members of the House of Representatives, the Center found. On average, each recipient got about $16,000.

President Bush received nearly $50,000 from Abramoff's clients. Top congressional recipients included a who's who of the Republican leadership in Congress. Prominent names include House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois ($68,300 in contributions), House Republican Conference Secretary John Doolittle of California ($56,250) and Montana Sen. Conrad Burns ($52,340). Also on the list is former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas ($44,000), who once employed convicted Abramoff associates Tony Rudy and Michael Scanlon on Capitol Hill. DeLay's successor, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, received $30,500.¹¹

Meanwhile, Abramoff funneled money to other worthy causes, such as hiring the choirboy-faced and former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed to organize conservative evangelicals to campaign against a 1999 Alabama referendum that would approve online gambling. Rather than this being an example of Christian “moral values” in action-or an illustration of the thrall in which the Christian Right holds the GOP-it was really a testament to the cynicism (or, seen from a different perspective, the political skill) of the modern GOP. In reality, one Indian tribe client of Abramoff's, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, hired Reed to help it eliminate the threat from online gambling in a neighboring state, while Reed whipped up his evangelical followers to vote against the evils of gambling.¹²

It remains to be seen what the impact of DeLay's departure from Congress and further convictions of politicians and leading congressional staffers stemming from the Abramoff case will have on the machine that DeLay built. The important point is that the Abramoff case isn't just a story of petty corruption, but one with potential to undermine GOP rule. If the highly centralized patronage machine that functioned under DeLay breaks down, then the discipline that has welded a narrow majority into a governing force could be shattered.

Likewise, the Plame case isn't just about the unauthorized leak of a covert operative's name. At its root, it is about the single biggest issue bringing down Bush and the GOP-the war in Iraq. In 2003, when Rove stage managed Bush's Hollywood-like landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln to declare “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq, the administration and the GOP thought quick victory in Iraq would make them unassailable in 2004, as well as delivering an example to all U.S. adversaries about the “Bush doctrine” of preemptive war and regime change. But within a few weeks, it became clear that the rosy scenario of the Iraqi people's welcoming of U.S. troops with flowers and candy wasn't developing. And when Wilson went public with his revelations, it threatened to unravel the entire administration case for war. Because the whole war had been based on deceit and manipulation of public fear, the White House acted with such ferocity to silence a trustworthy administration critic who threatened to blow the administration's credibility. Inside the White House, reportedly, Cheney and Rove were obsessed with discrediting Wilson because they felt his revelations-coupled with the failure to find the “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq and direct evidence that Bush had been apprised of intelligence agency doubts of his case against Iraq-could cost Bush the 2004 election.¹³ The increasing chaos in Iraq also pointed back at the reckless incompetence of the administration that insisted it could wage its war in the face of opposition from most governments, with a much smaller force than many military professionals advised with little plan for the occupation.

The Watergate precedent is worth considering in this light. The Nixon dirty tricks campaign that led to the 1972 break-in at Democratic Party headquarters started with the White House's obsession with discrediting Daniel Ellsberg, a former Marine officer and Pentagon analyst who had leaked The Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. Rather than face up to the fact that the U.S. was losing the Vietnam War, the Nixonites attacked Ellsberg, whose revelations showed that three U.S. administrations were lying about progress in Vietnam.¹⁴ Ostensibly, Fitzgerald is investigating a violation of a highly technical law. In reality, the investigation is part of the fallout from the American ruling class's failure to make good its takeover of Iraq. This is the way it works in a political system whose establishment forms two political parties that differ mainly on the margins. From the point of view of justice, the White House's trafficking of classified information with favored Washington reporters is the least of this administration's crimes. But a scandal that implicates a handful of corrupt individuals allows the system to blame them while allowing the same policies, or slightly modified versions of them, to continue under new management.

There is also a sense that the Plame investigation and even some of the corruption investigations represent the revenge of career officials in the Justice Department and the CIA for the blatant manipulation and bullying that the White House and its henchmen used to force through its policies. Because CIA analysts failed to sustain the administration's most fanciful talking points about the “imminent threat” from Iraq, the neoconservatives who were the most zealous advocates for war in Iraq considered the CIA to be in the enemy camp. “If we lived in a primitive age, the ground at Langley would be laid waste and salted, and there would be heads on spikes,” wrote neoconservative columnist David Brooks in the New York Times on November 13, 2004, citing White House officials and “members of the executive branch” as his sources. Reflecting their rage, he called on Bush to “punish the mutineers.... If the C.I.A. pays no price for its behavior, no one will pay a price for anything, and everything is permitted. That, Mr. President, is a slam-dunk.”¹⁵ Strange as it may seem that the Bush administration considered one of the most ruthless and blood-stained agencies in the U.S. government to be composed of closet peaceniks, outing Plame and discrediting Wilson was part of this guerrilla war against the CIA and other establishment critics of the war. When Bush appointed Goss in 2005, he gave Goss carte blanche to purge the agency of its leading professionals-even if it meant promoting barely competent, but loyalist officials, like Foggo. Whatever the ultimate reason for Goss's resignation, he had performed the White House's dirty work in the time he was CIA director.

In 2004, Bush managed to convince just enough voters not to desert him on the promise that the situation in Iraq would improve. But with each announced “turning point” becoming undone by events and the Iraqi resistance, support for Bush's administration dropped below 50 percent for good in March 2005. Cindy Sheehan's August 2005 vigil at Bush's ranch-coinciding with a particularly bloody attack in which twenty U.S. Marines from Ohio lost their lives in two days-illustrated how Bush has been made a prisoner of the U.S. disaster in Iraq. “Public dissatisfaction with Bush has grown in lockstep with opposition to the conflict in Iraq,” reported the Washington Post's Richard Morin and Dan Balz. They pointed out that Bush's support stood at 33 percent in mid-May 2006, while support for his handling of Iraq stood at 32 percent at the same time.¹⁶

What's the GOP to do?

As they do every time their extreme agenda alienates large numbers of Americans, conservatives accused the administration and Republicans in Congress of “deserting the base”-i.e., not being conservative enough. They counsel a path to recovery for the GOP of providing another steady diet of red meat to fire up conservative voters, who, they warn, will stay away from the polls in November otherwise. Bush's May 15 speech on immigration, where he called for militarization of the border and other punitive measures aimed at pacifying conservatives, appeared to follow this script. But the conservatives were not satisfied. They intend to run on ever more conservative positions: “going to the base” to save Republican seats in 2006.

It's doubtful whether this advice will really stave off GOP losses. For one thing, opinion polls show that Bush and the GOP by and large retain the support of conservatives. Instead, they have lost more moderate Republicans-the people least exercised by Religious Right and anti-immigrant rhetoric.¹⁷ Besides the Iraq war, the two most unpopular initiatives that the second Bush administration took had to be its months-long campaign to privatize Security Security and its March 2005 intervention into the Terri Schiavo “right to die” case. Both of these appealed most directly to segments of the GOP “base”: economic libertarians and Wall Streeters in the case of Social Security privatization and the Christian Right in the Schiavo case. Whereas the first was part of a long-term strategic goal of undermining the New Deal and the second was a more short-term gesture to its hard-core supporters, both of them produced the same reaction: an overwhelming rejection on the part of the public. So, if the opinion polls are predictive of strategy, going to the base might be a way to preserve hard-core GOP support, at the cost of losing the 2006 elections. Democrats are even attempting to win support among downscale Christian conservatives by reminding them of the GOP's attempt to abolish Social Security.

The Republican collapse has exposed the reality of the balancing act that allows the modern GOP to group under its tent several different types of conservatives, from Wall Street neoliberals to hard Right nationalists with an affinity for white supremacy. “[A] number of political scientists and pundits have suggested that the Republicans are on the verge of domestic unrest that, if circumstances are right, could evolve into the kind of civil war the Democrats experienced in the 1960s and 1970s.”¹⁸ While this may be too much to hope for, one kind of split can be seen in the Washington debate over “immigration reform” where Bush and Corporate America find more support among moderate Republicans and Democrats for their staged legalization and “guest worker” programs. Arrayed against them are the hard Right base of the party that insists only on criminalizing immigrants and trucks with the likes of the Minutemen. For this reason, at the time of writing, it appeared doubtful that Congress would be able to produce a single immigration reform bill before the 2006 election. And the GOP hard-liners believe that their intransigence will produce gains at the ballot box.

In some ways, this is the bitter fruit of the “Southern strategy” that GOP politicians have exploited to become the majority party in the South. As the Democrats in the 1960s and 1970s jettisoned their racist Dixiecrat wing and opened their ranks to Black voters and their electoral lists to Black politicians, Republicans used veiled appeals to racism and other aspects of cultural conservatism to woo conservative Democrats in the South into their tent. Today, a section of the GOP is attempting to spread this strategy westward by targeting Latinos-the most prominent object of racial prejudice from West Texas to California-with the hope of repeating the GOP's success in the South. But as was the case when the Dixiecrats and the Northern Democrats fell out, this appeal to nativism narrows the GOP's appeal to only the most retrograde elements in society. At the same time, this makes it more difficult for big business to get what it wants.

While the split over immigration is both ideological and tactical (in relation to the upcoming elections), there are other causes that might shatter GOP unity. One has already been mentioned: a crippling of the GOP patronage machine under the weight of federal indictments could lead to more freelancing among GOP politicians. Another, more long-term problem, is the likelihood that budgetary constraints caused by the deliberate emptying out of the federal treasury into the pockets of the richest Americans will end up pitting GOP constituencies against each other. Despite the GOP rhetoric about championing small government, the Republicans are perfectly capable of spending billions to subsidize their constituencies-not just in Corporate America, but also in the U.S. farm belt (i.e., farm subsidies) and in the suburban South and West (i.e., road construction). Studies have demonstrated a long-term shift of federal spending from Democratic-dominated congressional districts to more Republican dominated districts. Even their attempt to channel social program funds through “faith-based” agencies or obvious sops to the Christian Right, like the millions appropriated to promote “abstinence education” in schools, helps to reward their supporters and voters, while undermining their opponents. These policies, linking the GOP base to its patrons in Washington, can be put at risk if future GOP Congress members are asked to choose between increased military spending, raising taxes, and cutting programs.

Nevertheless, U.S. political parties are not membership organizations whose rank-and-file members (voters) determine what they do or how they operate. They are more than anything instruments by which their main funders-corporations-can shape government policies at all levels so that they are favorable to big business. The modern GOP, which openly proclaims its allegiance to the priorities of neoliberalized big business, can't simply win with the votes of CEOs or the richest 1 percent of the population. For that reason, it needs to cultivate a mass voting base by appealing to elements of popular conservatism, like religious traditionalism, patriotism, and nationalism-cum-xenophobia, to mobilize constituencies that aren't motivated by (nor benefit from) the latest corporate tax dodge buried in some 1,000-page piece of legislation. But the key point to remember is this: big business calls the tune in both major corporate parties.

On this score, the GOP is not doing so poorly. By virtue of the fact that the Republicans control every lever of government, the GOP is leading in the money race for its congressional candidates.¹⁹ In fact, according to the data available now, it appears that the Republicans are slightly ahead in the two-party split in contributions from where the 2004 election cycle ended-following an unprecedented Democratic fundraising effort during the presidential election. Normally, this would be enough to assure continued GOP dominance in Congress. But business-despite its generally Republican tilt-is still bipartisan in its giving. And more than anything, it gives to the winner. If further scandal or public discontent suggests a greater possibility of a Democratic Senate or House in November, look for a business shift of money to the Democrats. Such a shift would be more suggestive than predictive of results in November, and it should be recalled that Democrats hauled in more PAC money than Republicans when the GOP won Congress in 1994.²⁰ But, should it take place, it would represent a vote of no confidence in the current Republican leadership.

The Republican agenda without the Republicans?

To their ruthless control of the congressional power and electioneering skills must be added one more factor to explain how the GOP has managed to pursue an unpopular agenda: the lack of any sustained opposition from the official opposition party, the Democrats. This was not simply a case of intimidated Democrats falling in line behind the “war president” in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Key Democratic support enabled Bush to pass the No Child Left Behind Act and the bulk of his tax cuts in 2001-before the attacks. Since, Democratic fecklessness has either blunted opposition or, worse, given cover to some of the worst laws Bush and the congressional Republicans have passed-from the Patriot Act to the 2005 “bankruptcy reform” bill. Without an opposition, not only is a lot of bad legislation passed, but it also reinforces ideological pressure on large sectors of the population to shift rightwards. A good example of how this works took place in the 2004 presidential campaign, when the percentage of those saying the U.S. should stay in Iraq until the situation stabilized almost doubled to 70 percent. “That's what happens when two pro-war candidates debate who can best fight the war to 'stabilize' Iraq and the peace movement supports one of them. Peace movement support for the pro-war lesser evil helped turn a pro-war minority into a pro-war majority.”²¹ A more positive counterexample was the fate of Bush's attempt to privatize Social Security in early 2005. In one of the few times in which the bulk of Democrats held firm against a Bush initiative, it became increasingly unpopular-then untenable, for Bush to push it.

Now with Bush and the Republicans at their lowest level of support ever, the Democrats have been hesitant to advance an agenda that might raise expectations that a Democratic Congress will make a sharp break from the disastrous rule of the GOP. Instead, much of the Democratic strategy appears to concentrate on convincing voters (and, more importantly, big business) that they can be trusted to fight the “war on terrorism” more effectively, to stabilize Iraq, and to “ensure border security” while providing employers with a guest-worker program. Instead of associating themselves with the seven in ten Americans who want out of Iraq, leading Democratic spokespeople continue to proclaim their commitment to “victory” there in terms that sound little different than Bush's. It was precisely this adoption of Republican-lite politics in the 2004 election that proved so useless to Kerry-Edwards.

True, the situation today-with Bush and the GOP having lost so much credibility-is different from the environment in 2004. This unique set of circumstances may make the Democratic strategy of standing aside while the Republicans implode appear as the way to win. But experience suggests that this non-strategy is as likely to give the GOP a second chance as it is to generate a tsunami.

If such a tsunami does end the GOP majority in Congress, the new Democratic majority will be a loyal supporter of the priorities of Corporate America-as it was in the four consecutive decades it ran Congress before 1994. For instance, in today's immigration debate, the Democrats as a party are more in tune with the demands of business-support for a temporary worker program and an “earned path to citizenship” than are the divided Republicans. But this Democratic position on immigration is at odds with the demands and aspirations of the millions who took to the streets earlier this year to demand real immigration reform.

That fact should be a warning to the immigrant rights movement-as well as any trade union, social movement, or antiwar activist, or individual who wants to see the end of Republican misrule in Washington. The two-party system depends on the ability of one party to serve the corporate agenda when the other one is too discredited to do it. Our side can only hope to win what we want when it refuses to tie its demands or to tailor its activities to either of the twin parties of big business.

1. Robert Novak, “Inside report: Mehlman's warning,” Real Clear Politics, May 6, 2006, at http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/05/inside_report_mehlmans_warning.html.
2. Harold Meyerson, “A coming tsunami: The Republicans' bankruptcy of ideas,” Providence [R.I.] Journal, May 14, 2006, reproduced on Commondreams.org at http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0514-29.htm. Unfortunately, Meyerson's record of predicting political tsunamis-like the one that was supposed to sweep George Bush out of the White House in 2004-is suspect. See his “The tsunami” in LA Weekly, October 28, 2004, at http://www.laweekly.com/news/powerlines/the-tsunami/8938/.
3. Nevertheless, I tend to doubt that a Democratic Congress would launch impeachment proceedings against Bush (however richly he deserves it). And a lot of promises of congressional investigations of whatever sort being used today to motivate Democratic voters are likely to be forgotten if the Democrats win at least one house of Congress.
4. Richard Morin and Dan Balz, “Republican leadership approval hits all-time low,” Washington Post, May 16, 2006.
5. See Joshua Michael Marshall's comment to this affect on November 5, 2004, at http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_10_31.php#003943.
6. These figures are reported in Brendan Murray, “Rove may find 'it's the economy, stupid' won't work,” Bloomberg News, May 30, 2006.
7. See Larry M. Bartels, “What's the matter with What's the Matter with Kansas?” at http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/kansas.pdf.
8. This is the key contention of Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005).
9. See, for example, Hacker and Pierson or Andrew J. Taylor, Elephant's Edge: The Republicans as a Ruling Party (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005).
10. Jonathan Weisman and Shailagh Murray, “After Abramoff, a GOP scramble,” Washington Post, January 6, 2006.
11. Massie Ritch and Courtney Mabeus, “Casting off Abramoff,” Center for Responsive Politics, April 6, 2006, at http://capitaleye.org/inside.asp?ID=210.
12. See Bob Moser, “The devil inside,” Nation, April 17, 2006.
13. Murray Waas, “Insulating Bush,” National Journal, March 30, 2006, at http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0330nj1.htm.
14. A good book to read on Watergate is Jonathan Schell, A Time of Illusion (New York: Knopf, 1976).
15. Sidney Blumenthal, “Killing the CIA,” Salon.com, May 11, 2006.
16. Richard Morin and Dan Balz, “Republican leadership approval hits all-time low,” Washington Post, May 16, 2006.
17. Jeffrey A. Jones, “Liberal, moderate Republicans show large drop in support for Bush,” Gallup, May 26, 2006, at http://poll.gallup.com/content/default.aspx?ci=22954.
18. Taylor, 250-51.
19. The Center for Responsive Politics codes individual contributions according to their employers reported to the Federal Election Commission. “Ideological” groups are those committed to political causes such as women's rights or restrictions on abortion.
20. The Democrats got 52 percent of business money in 1994, the year of the “Republican revolution.” See Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein, Washington Babylon (New York: Verso, 1996), 67.
21. Howie Hawkins, “Political independence is the lesson of 2004 for progressives” in Howie Hawkins, ed., Independent Politics: The Green Party Strategy Debate (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006), 234.