Wouldn’t it be cool if Specter, McCain and a handful of other centrist Republican senators got together with Lieberman and a couple of centrist Democrat senators to form a voting block that denied either the Democrats or Rebublicans a majority in the senate?
We could get campaign finance reform, a balanced budget, a moderate abortion policy, etc. McCain and Specter might just be pissed off enough by how they have been treated to go for it.
What would constitute a ‘moderate’ abortion policy exactly? Just asking.
Allowing partial birth abortion in case of risk to health of mother, relaxing parental notification law but having exception if child was molested by parent. There seems to be a majority of people in the US that support abortion being legal, but want some reasonable constraints. The ban altogether fringe and no restrictions crowd are in the minority.
Another thing would be to look for supreme court justices that have the best grasp of the law rather than a litmus test either way.
I think that part of the reason the partial birth ban got traction was that “moderates” were uncomfortable that the “health of the mother” claim was medically unjustified the vast majority of the time, and was essentially being used as ploy to perform late term abortions. You’re not describing the “moderate” postion at all if you’re throwing easier PBA’s into the mix.
I was just giving an example. Not being a moderate myself, I’m not the best one to come up with a position. The point is just that there is a middle ground between ban everything and allow everything. I think this applies to same-sex marriage, abortion, Janet Jackson’s breast, and a number of other things.
But if we did have this block of centrists, how would they achieve a balanced budget. Sure they might be able to trim the more outrageous spending increases a little bit, but there’s no way they would clear out the $400,000,000,000+ needed to bring the deficit down to zero. Too much of the budget at this point is locked in and is never even seriously brought up for debate. Neither party would be willing to touch Social Security, Medicare, or the Military just to make this central block happy.
According to this recent article, the opposite is predicted to happen: instead of a moderate Republican/centrist Democrat takeover, there is going to be a “civil war” within the Republican party to strip power from the moderates (such power as they’ve still got, at any rate).
The first step for conservative Republicans is apparently blocking the appointment of Arlen Specter to head the Senate Judiciary Committee, which votes on federal judicial nominees.
I don’t know how interested the moderate Republicans would be in forming a coalition with centrist Democrats in any case, but the Republican right wing is definitely against the idea, and appears poised to fight to keep it from happening.
Yes a government representative of what the majority of the country would want is clearly horrible for democracy.
I know that the Republicans are turning right, that’s why a few moderate Republicans may be persuaded to bolt. The same happened when the Democrats went too far left. Specter could use his leverage to retain his chaimanship. Right now, he is hostage to the more conservative members of the party.
Well they already blocked the pork laden energy bill, so there is some precedent for uniting to keep spending down.
They haven’t made the tax cuts permenent yet, have they? I realize that fiscally conservative Repubs would much rather cut spending then cancel tax cuts, but it might be thier best chance to actually fight the deficit in the next few years. Perhaps they could cut a deal with the dems to block some spending increases in return.