In my last post, I painstakingly put together an analysis of the religious tradition that Harriet Miers has embraced, concluding that it doesn’t much provide definitive evidence of her probable views on issues like abortion. Imagine my chagrin when I picked up the newspaper the next day to discover that her sometimes boyfriend and fellow parishioner at Valley View Christian Church, the right-wing Texas Supreme Court Justice Nathan Hecht, has been running around telling anybody who would listen that there’s zero doubt about Miers’ views on abortion.In my own long discourse on Miers religious background, I concluded that the nexus between her religion and her judicial philosophy would probably remain a mystery so long as “she and her friends and associates decide to keep it that way.” Well, Hecht would certainly qualify as someone in that inner loop; after all, he’s the one who introduced Miers to Valley View about a quarter century ago, when she, a lapsed Catholic, was seeking a renewed spiritual life.And indeed, Hecht’s assertions seem to be having an effect in some circles. The influential conservative evangelical Marvin Olasky (best known as the coiner of the phrase “compassionate conservatism”) has placed great stock in Hecht’s assurances in his cautiously pro-Miers blog posts. More importantly, the ultimate Christian Right bigfoot, James Dobson, in his bizarre radio remarks yesterday defending his early support for Miers, mentions his friendship with “the man who brought her to the Lord” as one part of the “confidential” information persuading him. This is clearly a reference to Hecht.But is Hecht speaking for himself, for Miers, and for the White House? Well, it’s not like he’s some loose cannon with no insider connections. Karl Rove ran his first campaign for the Texas Supreme Court. He knows the president well enough that W. has bestowed him with one of his famous personal nicknames: “Hector.” It sure looks like he’s on a mission from the administration to help preempt any Christian Right revolt against this nomination.But the weird thing is: it may not be working that well. Yes, the latest C.W. among the chattering classes is that the intra-conservative fight over Miers is one of those Main Street/Country Club fights pitting the GOP’s Christian Right base against snobby elitists who care more about a prospective justice’s legal resume than about her willingness to overturn Roe v. Wade. Indeed, some point to the non-Christians prominent in the conservative opposition to Miers (e.g., David Frum, Bill Kristol) and luridly suggest a big-time Theocon/Neocon split.I don’t think so. Aside from Frum, most of the National Review luminaries (e.g., Rich Lowry, Ramesh Ponnuru) who are prominent in the revolt against Miers are serious Right-to-Life Catholics. Nobody can out-Main Street Phyllis Schlafly, another Miers skeptic. Nobody’s more focused on cultural issues like abortion than Paul Weyrich. Tony Perkins, Dobson’s comrade-in-arms in the Colorado Springs Empire, has been notably neutral on the nomination.And even Dobson himself is expressing doubts and fears on Miers and the abortion issue, noting in the radio address that he will have “the blood of all those babies” on his hands if he guesses wrong about her views.You have to figure at this point that the White House is playing a dangerous double game on Miers, trying to get the word out to the Cultural Right that she’s a sure vote to overturn Roe, without providing any evidence that could blow up on her during the confirmation hearings. The fact that the Cultural Right is split on Miers is an indication this preemptive strategy has failed, which means that conservatives as well as Democrats are going to press her and the White House for clearer answers to their questions.My guess is that “Hector” will now shut up, leaving Rove and company to come up with a new strategy for threading this particular needle. It won’t be easy.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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July 9: Musk’s “America Party” Is Just the Right Wing of the GOP
There’s been a lot of buzz about the world’s wealthiest man pledging to start a third party, so I addressed that dubious proposition at New York:
The feud between Donald Trump and his onetime deep pocket and henchman Elon Musk keeps bubbling up in unpredictable ways. But one fracture point that is potentially bigger than an exchange of insults and conspiracy theories is the Tech Bro’s musings about creating a third national political party. Not because there’s any real popular demand for another party but because Musk’s wealth could give even the dumbest idea wings.
This angle is interesting in part because Trump has himself flirted with third-party talk when it suited his purposes. But you wouldn’t know that from his categorical put-down of Musk’s fantasies over the weekend at Truth Social:
“I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely ‘off the rails,’ essentially becoming a TRAIN WRECK over the past five weeks. He even wants to start a Third Political Party, despite the fact that they have never succeeded in the United States – The System seems not designed for them. The one thing Third Parties are good for is the creation of Complete and Total DISRUPTION & CHAOS, and we have enough of that with the Radical Left Democrats, who have lost their confidence and their minds! Republicans, on the other hand, are a smooth running “machine,” that just passed the biggest Bill of its kind in the History of our Country.”
He went on to brag some more about his megabill and to spitball about why Musk might have opposed it, without mentioning Musk’s own argument that it is a debt and deficit nightmare.
The third-party threat was clearly weighing on the 47th president’s mind this weekend. When asked about it by a reporter earlier on Sunday, Trump said, “’I think it’s ridiculous to start a third party,” later noting, “He can have fun with it, but I think it’s ridiculous.”
Musk has fleshed out his fantasy a bit after getting the inevitable endorsement of his efforts from his personal echo chamber on X:
“One way to execute on this would be to laser-focus on just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts.
“Given the razor-thin legislative margins, that would be enough to serve as the deciding vote on contentious laws, ensuring that they serve the true will of the people.”
The idea, then, isn’t to launch a new party through some big, splashy presidential campaign that will capture what Musk has called the “80 percent in the middle” of voters alienated by the Democratic-Republican “uniparty.” That, as it happens, was the vision of the last real third-party builder, Ross Perot, who never made much of an effort to create an alternative ballot line at the state level. Perot failed in no small part because winning or even threatening to win elections in a first-past-the-post system requires the sort of regional voting base he never enjoyed. The more limited strategy Musk seems to be talking about doesn’t require displacing a national party but instead simply exploiting the close competitive balance of the existing two major parties and seizing the margin of control in Congress for leverage purposes. It’s a down-ballot version of what southern segregationists tried to do with regional tickets in the 1948 and 1968 presidential elections: prevent either major-party candidate from gaining a majority in the Electoral College and then shake the parties down for policy concessions. They didn’t fail by much.
So what would Musk’s new party, which he has dubbed the “America Party,” make its be-all-and-end-all demand? Best we can tell, he wants massive reductions in the size and cost of the federal government, along with the attendant public debt. That’s not only a slender reed for a disruptive third party but it’s at least rhetorically identified with the GOP despite that party’s own spotty fiscal record. From a practical point of view, why would some aspiring deficit hawk in any given state or congressional district want to take a flier on a candidacy under the America Party banner when they could just as easily run as a Rand Paul–Thomas Massie fiscal hard-liner in a Republican primary? The only answer I can think of is that it may be a way to gain access to Musk’s money. And it’s unclear at this point how much of his fortune Musk is willing to devote to this effort.
As Nate Silver points out, if Musk could lavishly finance a new party with a broader agenda than bringing back DOGE — say, developing a national AI strategy that could prevent rather than accelerate demolition of the workforce — it might gain some purchase, particularly with young voters who dislike both major parties. But it would require the sort of patience and political sophistication Musk has not in any way displayed up to this point in his career.
More likely, Musk is just the latest in a long list of political amateurs who look at unhappiness with the two-party system and make two major mistakes: (1) they don’t grasp that most self-identified independents are what Silver calls IINOs, independents in name only, who routinely vote for the same major party even when given alternatives; and (2) they assume all these people share the same grievances with the current party system.
The only demonstrated template for third parties in the U.S. is to address an entirely unmet demand. When Republicans broke through in the late 1850s, they were exploiting a situation in which one major party (the Whigs) had already died and the other could not stake out a national position on slavery. At this point, Musk isn’t offering anything voters can’t find in the right wing of the Republican Party or, barring that, in the Libertarian Party. So Trump is correct to argue that his frenemy has “gone off the rails.”