Not Part of the Club

The reaction to Sen. Arlen Specter's (D-Penn) announcement that he would leave the Republican Party a couple of weeks ago was predictable.

It's been clear for years that there's no room for RINO's (Republicans In Name Only) in Rush Limbaugh's Republican party, and Rush made his opinion very clear: "It's ultimately good. You're weeding out people who aren't really Republicans."

But while Rush was weeding his garden, other Republicans offered more thoughtful comments. In a written opinion the New York Times, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) gave voice to the frustration of moderate Republicans:

There is no plausible scenario under which Republicans can grow into a majority while shrinking our ideological confines and continuing to retract into a regional party. Ideological purity is not the ticket back to the promised land of governing majorities — indeed, it was when we began to emphasize social issues to the detriment of some of our basic tenets as a party that we encountered an electoral backlash.

Specter and Snowe recently received a great deal of publicity when they voted, along with Susan Collins (R-Maine), in favor of Obama's stimulus plan. So it's not surprising that Snowe would come to Specter's defense. But they have more in common than their vote on a single bill.

They are both on the hit list of the conservative "Club for Growth," an organization that targets moderate GOP incumbents who do not adhere to their narrow agenda. The group has a very specific method they use to control voter "choice." By funding the primary campaign of far-right Republican challengers, they make certain they get "true" Republicans on the ballot; even if it means the Republican party ultimately loses the election. It's kind of like "weeding the garden" with money...lots of money.

But the more interesting story is how Specter and Snowe came to be on the Club for Growth's "RINO Watch" in the first place. It wasn't because they betrayed the trust of Senate Republicans determined to defeat Obama's reckless stimulus spending, in a valiant effort to balance the budget. On the contrary.

More than eight years ago, when the first of the Bush tax cuts was under consideration. Olympia Snowe had the audacity to suggest something new: include a "trigger" that ties tax cuts to surpluses (For those of you that don't recall, "budget surplus" is an obsolete political term that goes back to the Clinton years).

The idea was simple: the "trigger" would have delayed spending for new government programs and "phased-in" tax cuts until the surplus reached specified levels. In other words, taxes would be cut only in proportion to spending, and only as long as the plan to reduce the national debt was on schedule.

By proposing the trigger (S. Con. Res. 21), Sen. Snowe was, in effect, "nominating herself as an early possible target" of the newly formed Club for Growth. Among the other 10 Senators supporting Snowe's bipartisan proposal: Sen. Specter and Sen. Collins.

Needless to say, Sen. Snowe's proposal to control government spending didn't make it into the Bush tax legislation (Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001). The "true" Republicans were in charge, and the era of big spending, big government, and big deficits was underway.