I really didn’t intend to write a long series of posts on the question of “ending the culture wars,” or specifically on abortion policy. But my friend Damon Linker at TNR has responded in some detail to my arguments against a strategic retreat on the “constitutionalization of abortion” as a way to detoxify the subject, so I’ll go one more round, and also note some comments made by other folks during this discussion.
First of all, in his latest post Damon makes a rather crucial clarification of his “deconstitutionalize abortion” argument: this isn’t, he says, a practical proposal, but rather a “hypothetical thought-experiment” to convince pro-choice progressives that anything short of such a radical step would not succeed in making the abortion battle anything less than “intractable.” I certainly don’t need convincing on this point; I despair of any end to this particular front in the “culture wars,” but strongly think the “thought-experiment” might make the abortion wars even worse, while providing the people on the other side of the barricades from me and other pro-choice Americans with the opportunity to actually put their convictions into practice backed by the power of the state–not an inestimable factor.
Second of all, shifting to the arguments against his “thought-experiment,” Damon distinguishes between the “conservative side of the culture war” from the “pro-life movement,” and suggests that it’s the former, not the latter, who might be “convinced to stand down from the culture war if the identity-politics provocation of Roe were removed.” Now I’m afraid this reasonable-sounding distinction drifts into all sorts of treacherous territory, not least among them the exceptional slipperiness of trying to measure nuances in terms of public opinion on abortion. By Damon’s math, a quarter of the American electorate wants to outlaw “most” abortions, but isn’t “pro-life” because it recognizes exceptions. But those exceptions can get pretty large: sizable majorities of Americans favor a “health of the mother” exception even to a ban on the very unpopular and rare “partial-birth abortion” procedure–as John McCain learned when he mocked the exception in a presidential debate last October, reflecting the common right-to-life view that it makes any abortion restrictions meaningless. So it’s not that easy to divide people into neat categories like “anti-abortion but not prolife,” much less make the categorization the linchpin of an argument for ending culture wars.
More importantly, Damon offers no evidence that this “non-RTL cultural conservative” grouping is really “provoked” by Roe. Perhaps some conservative intellectuals like Ross Douthat are duly provoked, but it’s significant that the “judicial tyranny” argument that is at the heart of Damon’s case is almost exclusively aimed by Republican politicians at serious RTL activists, often in very targeted settings like John McCain’s“dog-whistle” speech to Christian conservatives last May. Participation in the annual protests against Roe doesn’t seem to extend beyond the organized RTL ranks. But this gets to the real problem with Damon’s “thought-experiment”: if a large segment of “culture-war” conservatives are motivated by mere cultural conservatism, and oppose abortion for traditionalist, or anti-feminist, or anti-sexual-freedom reasons, and not because they believe a fetus is a full human being deserving the same rights as any other human being, then their anti-abortion opinions are as malleable as their opposition to gay marriage or church-state separation. Since these are issues on which Damon agrees that time and generational change will heal most wounds, the same should be true of abortion for those outside the serious RTL ranks. This is particularly true if the status quo is legalized abortion rather than the endless, daily warfare about abortion policy we’d see if Roe is ever reversed (BTW, if anything, I may have understated the havoc that would ensue in a post-Roe abortion polity; see Linda Hirshman’s fascinating Washington Post article last September about the strong probability that states with abortion bans would seek to prevent out-of-state abortions).
Third of all, I probably invited one rejoinder from Damon by suggesting unhappily that the only real comity that pro-choice Americans can offer their RTL brethren was the cold comfort of the slogan: “Oppose abortion? Don’t have one!” Damon took that to mean I was arguing that legal abortion represents “moral neutrality” on the issue. Of course not. But it’s actually the closest to neutrality that the state can get, since after all, nobody in the Roe era is being forced to have an abortion, while in a post-Roe situation–much less the constitutional abortion ban that RTLers favor–some women would certainly be forced to carry pregnancies to term against their will. And I don’t think it’s a very good idea to bring up the slavery analogy as part of an argument for a “states’ rights” position on abortion.
Speaking of “states’ rights,” Jack Whalen of After the Future wrote one of the most cogent of many blog posts agreeing with Damon:

The Dems on the national level should not take sides on abortion. The culture war might rage on, but let it be fought out in the state legislatures rather than in Washington. This should be perceived as neither a Dem nor a Republican issue. If abortion policy was determined on a state-by-state basis, it would make it easier for Democrats on the Federal level to elect legislators whose positions on the economic and civil liberties issues are more in line with Main Steet aspirations without abortion or other divisive cultural issues being a wedge issue or distraction.

His full argument reflects a very common belief among Democrats, which I’ve battled for years, that “cultural” issues are somehow not legitimate, and if we can find a way to consign them to the sidelines, Democrats will win on economic and other issues.
And that brings me to Kay Steiger’s argument (as a guest blogger on Matt Yglesias’ site) that the habit of referring to issues like abortion or same-sex marriage as “cultural issues” trivializes them. I disagree, because “culture” is as important a fulcrum for public policy as any other aspect of human society. Indeed, a nation that can’t figure out how to reflect in public policy a fixed notion of what represents “homicide” or “a family” isn’t likely to do very well in figuring out how to prevent “homicides” or give “families” economic opportunity. And that’s why after decades of agonizing over the subject, I’ve arrived at Linda Hirshman’s position that pro-choice Americans–or more properly, pro-abortion-rights Americans–need to be willing and able to defend the morality of abortion. If we don’t, then we deserve the contempt of the Right-to-Life movement, and are rightly condemned to the self-doubt and guilty consciences that so regularly produce offers of unilateral compromise in the vain hope of peace.

It’s not normally a signal for wild celebration when a political party caucus loses on the largest and most significant piece of legislation in a given year. But it’s definitely party-time for the House GOP, according to a report from the House GOP retreat at the Homestead resort by Politico’s Patrick O’Conner. These Republicans are beside themselves with joy that they managed to engineer a unanimous vote against the economic stimulus package.

“Look at these faces,” said California Rep. Kevin O. McCarthy, pointing to a roomful of Republicans and their families during a dinner in one of the resort’s expansive ballrooms. “They’re all smiling. You’d think these people are still in the majority.”

Aside from the fact that just being employed is a pretty nice thing these days, the GOP solons appear to be thoroughly enjoying the liberty to return to the pre-1994 Republican modus operandi of pure, truculent obstruction. National Republican Congressional Committeee chairman Pete Sessions told the assembled members of Congress “that they need to get over the idea that they’re participating in legislation and ought to start thinking of themselves as ‘an insurgency’ instead.” And right on cue, the big guest speaker was Newt Gingrich, who rose to power by inculcating the ethos of juvenile delinquency into his torpid GOP colleagues, before becoming a national pariah once he had some responsibility for governing.
Another star at the retreat was newly elected RNC chairman Michael Steele, who “offered a partisan rallying call in praise of the vote against the stimulus”:

“I thought it was very important to send a signal, and you sent it loudly, very clearly, that this party, the leadership of this caucus, would stand first and foremost with the American people. You made it very clear that in order to grow through this recession that you not redistribute the wealth of the people of this nation.”
His remarks were in line with the core message most speakers offered over the weekend: The party should return to a back-to-basics fiscal conservatism.
“I know all of you are pumped about the vote the other day,” [House GOP Whip Eric] Cantor told lawmakers Friday night, eliciting loud cheers. “We’ll have more to come.”

In another article at Politico, Ann Schroeder Mullins offered this matched pair of recent missives from the House Republican campaign committee:

“This is an opportunity for us to promote bold, positive and substantive reforms rooted in our core principles; and opportunity to be more than the party of ‘no.’”— NRCC e-mail from John A. Boehner, Jan 20
And: “Last night Nancy Pelosi asked Republicans to join her in maxing out the country’s credit card — Republicans said ‘NO!’”— Pete Sessions in an NRCC e-mail Friday

The other day I did a fairly elaborate post discussing the proposition that Barack Obama and his progressive supporters may be able to achieve an end to–or at least a suspension of–the “culture wars” that have characterized American politics off and on over the last few decades.
Today at TNR Damon Linker, an authoritative progressive voice on this subject, responded to me and also to Tim Fernholz of TAPPED, who asked Damon whether there was any way to really “end” the culture wars.
If you’re interested in this subject, you should read all three posts. Damon agreed with my contention that there are grounds for progressive optimism on church-state separation and LGBT issues, but that abortion policy will continue to be a big problem. But his point of departure from my point of view and from Tim’s, is his suggestion that abortion policy can lose its toxic potency if, and only if, “liberals become willing to de-constitutionalize the issue of abortion.”
For the remainder of this post, I will set aside the obvious objection that pro-choice progressives most definitely aren’t about to take Damon’s advice and surrender the constitutional right to choose, and also the question of how, exactly, they would execute that surrender if they were willing to make it. Damon’s argument is germane anyway since a future Supreme Court could reverse Roe v. Wade and make his preferred state of affairs a painful necessity.
And indeed, Damon’s not the first progressive to argue that pro-choice views are compatible with a post-Roe abortion polity. Jeffrey Rosen made that argument in considerable detail in a much-discussed article in The Atlantic in 2006 (TDS Co-Editor William Galston made a parallel argument in the broader context of progressive dependence on judicial rulings).
Like Professor Rosen (whom I’ve debated on the subject), Damon makes some assumptions about what states would do if they were suddenly the decision-makers on abortion that I consider very questionably sunny from a pro-choice point of view. But the most distinctive feature of Damon’s case is his focus on the psychology of the Right-to-Life movement. He seems completely convinced that the usurpation of state governments’ control of abortion policy by the Supreme Court in Roe is the primary source of the strength and passion of the anti-abortion cause:

Roe “settled” the question of abortion by saying that the pro-choice side wins 100 percent of the time, now and forever: America is a pro-choice nation and those who don’t like it can (respectfully) go to hell. No wonder we’ll still fighting these battles 36 years later.

I have to just say that I respectfully disagree. The source of the strength and passion of the anti-abortion cause is the conviction that every abortion is a homicide, and that legalized abortion has represented (to use a term you hear a lot in RTL circles) a Holocaust. Along with this conviction has come the predictable attittude that pro-choice Americans are at best “good Germans” complicit in a monstrous evil, and are at worst conscious and callous killers of human beings. The RTL movement, meanwhile, quite naturally views itself as analogous to the anti-Nazi resistance in Europe, or to the Allies, or to the German “Confessing Church.” To most sincere anti-abortionist activists, their cause is a matter of overriding moral and/or religious obligation, not an exercise in constitutional law or civic politics.
Sure, the RTL movement is exceedingly vexed that it must achieve its goals via the rocky road of overturning a Supreme Court decision, particularly now that its hopes for conservative court appointments to replace pro-Roe Justices Stevens and Ginsberg have been dashed for the present. And of course, anti-abortion activists routinely include the “anti-judicial-tyranny” argument in their political arsenal, just as they shout about the “barbarism” of late-term abortions despite holding an underlying position that doesn’t distinguish between “partial-birth abortions” and the use of “abortifacient” birth control methods or the destruction of embryos at fertility clinics. When you are fighting a Holocaust, you naturally pick up any weapon at hand that might win allies. But I see no merit to the idea that the RTL movement inherently cares a lot about “democratic” means of winning that fight. After all, the ultimate goal of that movement has always been to secure constitutional treatment of the fetus as a “person” benefitting from full due process and equal protection rights. And for all the talk about the sanctity of “federalism” or “respecting local differences of opinion” in anti-Roe arguments, serious anti-abortionists would jump at any opportunity to enact their own mirror version of the Freedom of Choice Act preempting state laws that were more permissive on abortion policy than whatever they could get through Congress. The Terry Schiavo case should have resolved any doubts about the easy disposability of “federalism” or “local control” arguments in the RTL movement.
So if somehow progressives did take Damon’s advice and found a way to “deconstitutionalize” abortion policy, RTLers would, as well they should if they believe what they believe, pocket the concession and demand more, not suddenly forget about the plight of the unborn. And to cut to the chase here, it’s more than a bit counterintuitive to suggest that it would “end” or even significantly tamp down the culture wars to engineer a situation in which abortion policy became a 24-7 preoccupation in most state legislatures and in Congress as well, world without end. Make no mistake, that is what it would become in a post-Roe environment. It’s not as though we could expect some grand, dignified debate on abortion and then a one-time resolution of the matter. With all the big and little issues related to abortion always subject to modification in one direction or the other, activists on both sides of the debate would never rest. Every bill in every legislature would be vulnerable to abortion policy “riders.”
Even if you think that’s an appropriately “democratic” way to deal with abortion policy, it’s certainly no prescription for turning down the temperature of, much less ending, the culture wars.
Ultimately, Damon himself offers perhaps the best reason for rejecting his argument for a “deconstitutionalization” of abortion policy:

Some Americans believe that an abortion is an act of lethal violence against an innocent human being whose rights (like everyone else’s) should be protected by the state. Other Americans believe that the only legally relevant moral considerations in an abortion are the wishes of the pregnant woman — which of course presumes that the fetus is not a human being in need of protection against lethal violence. These are contrary and incompatible metaphysical assumptions about matters of life and death and human dignity.

I couldn’t agree more, God help us all. But I would contend that such matters of fundamental rights are best decided, for better or worse, in the context of constitutions and courts rather than legislatures. Maybe you think that’s easy for me to say because “my side” has won in the courts, but the broader issue is that someone really does have to win on issues of fundamental rights where compromise is impossible. And I think any honest RTLer would agree with me on that point.
This leaves the residual question, which is implicit in Damon’s argument, that the status quo on abortion leaves RTLers dangerously tempted to become even more extreme in their tactics and strategies, or even resort to violence (which they have honorably and almost universally condemned). Maybe that’s true, but it’s not self-evidently true. Who’s more likely to become “extreme?” A RTL activist who’s facing a long uphill struggle to secure a Supreme Court majority to reverse Roe, or to make America a “pro-life nation” through a change in hearts and minds? Or the same activist who’s three votes short in the Missouri House from a statute that will actually prohibit abortion and “save thousands of lives?” I don’t think the answer is obvious enough to justify a real and tangible sacrifice of the rights of American women in order to appease those activists’ passions.
I remain hopeful that there are some avenues for cooperation between Americans on both sides of the abortion barricades, such as “abortion prevention” strategies, though even there the hostility of many anti-abortion activists to methods of contraception that they consider “abortifacients” is a big problem. But on the fundamental issue of the legality of abortion, there’s no compromise that makes much sense, or that would resolve the conflict. I am truly sorry that, as Damon rightly puts it, RTL activists would be insulted by the claim that Tim Fernholz or I “respect” them even as we reject their “right” to “have a say” over the rights of their fellow-citizens. Ultimately, and honestly, the most respect that can be paid to folks who believe that women who have abortions are murdering their own offspring, and that those who defend their rights are quasi-Nazis, can be summed up crudely but accurately in the old pro-choice bumper sticker that said: “Oppose abortion? Don’t have one!”

All around the chattering classes late this week, the big topic has been the unanimous House Republican vote against the economic stimulus package, and what that might mean for Obama’s much-discussed commitment to “bipartisanship,” and for the GOP.
To begin with, it’s important to clear away some misunderstandings on this subject.
First, there was never much of a prospect of significant House Republican support for any kind of stimulus package that Obama or Democrats might go along with. There are very, very few “moderates” left in the House GOP Caucus after their 2006 and 2008 bloodbaths. Grassroots conservative pressure to move in exactly the opposite direction from anything like a spending-heavy stimulus bill, and from anything like real cooperation with Obama and House Democrats, has been obvious and intense from the day after the November elections. And so long as most of the Blue Dogs were kept in line, there was never any need for Republican votes. That’s not the case in the Senate, where at least a couple of GOP votes are essential, and where the rules and folkways of the chamber, in sharp contrast to the House, encourage at least some bipartisan discussion.
Second, the widespread assumption that the design of the stimulus bill involved expansive and naive hopes from the White House for considerable GOP support has never been, in my opinion, at all accurate. Here’s Markos Moulitsas just today:

Republicans played this properly, unlike the constantly-capitulating Dems the past decade. It’s Obama’s chasing of the magic “bipartisan” pony that deserves scorn, because no number of concessions was going to get him a single Republican vote in the House.

I’ve followed the debate pretty carefully, and have never seen any real evidence that Obama thought he’d be able to get House Republican support; other than a couple of blind quotes from Obama aides in places like the Wall Street Journal, there’s never been any evidence of that at all. The idea that including tax cuts in the package indicated a lust for Republican support, or a concession to their views, ignores the rather important fact that the bulk of tax cuts were for implementation of Obama’s central campaign pledge of a tax cut benefitting low-to-moderate income workers. The small batch of business tax cuts in the package didn’t follow GOP ideology at all, and were likely aimed at securing (successfully) business-community support, not that of House Republicans. When House GOPers asked for real concessions, Obama turned them down.
Once you get past the flawed assumption that Obama made concessions in hopes of House GOP support, and failed, his “outreach” to Republicans and his continuation of bipartisan rhetoric must be viewed in an entirely different light. Who was the real audience for these efforts? House Republicans? Or the public? Rationally or not, and like it or not, large swaths of the American citizenry don’t like pavlovian partisanship, and appreciate politicans who make some effort to overcome it. Obama has obliged them, and offered Republicans the choice of cooperating or going into pavlovian opposition. House Republicans have chosen the latter route, and if they continue to do so, “bipartisanship” will become more and more associated with the President and his party, even if they never make a substantive concession to an opposition that refuses to negotiate on any terms other than their own.
There are plenty of metaphors that might apply to Obama’s strategy–which I’ve dubbed grassroots bipartisanship to distinguish it from the familiar split-the-differences beltway brand of bipartisanship–but the simplest is probably the military principle of putting yourself in a position where the enemy must decide to head off one of two likely lines of attack, exposing himself to outflanking once he has committed his forces. It’s the same principle that underlies the option attack in football, or the fast break in basketball. The GOP has committed itself to a course of action in dealing with the Obama administration and a Democratic Congress that gambles everything on frontal opposition, exposing its flanks from several directions.
So it’s entirely possible to support Obama’s “grassroots bipartisanship” while being pleased that the House GOP slapped his outstretched hand away. This development may well hasten the day when the Republican Party finally faces a choice of reconsidering its ideology, or consigning itself to a long-term minority status.

I couldn’t be happier that the very first congressional bill signed into law by President Barack Obama turned out to be the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act. In case you’re not familiar with Ledbetter’s saga, she was a long-time Goodyear employee in Alabama who successfully sued her employer for chronic wage discrimination against women, only to see her victory reversed in the US Supreme Court via an interepretation of federal statutues that required the filing of a complaint in a fixed period of time after the discrimination began, even though she and similar employees had no way of knowing about it.
The bill signed by Obama today, which modifies the equal pay laws to correct this obvious miscarriage of justice, passed the House in 2007, but was blocked from floor action by Senate Republicans. John McCain was among those opposing the bill on the usual specious “burden on businesses” grounds.
Back during the Democratic convention, I mentioned that Lilly was one of the speakers I got to work with in the rehearsal room. She is a woman of enormous decency, dignity and courage, and it’s fitting she joined Obama at the signing ceremony for the law that bears her name.

In a post yesterday about the anti-abortion movement, I made passing reference to an article by Peter Beinart arguing that Obama might be presiding over an end to–or at least a pause in–the culture wars of the last couple of decades.
This is actually a proposition that merits its own discussion. Has the Cultural Right begun to run out of steam? Will the economic crisis radically reduce the salience of issues like gay marriage or abortion or church-state separation? Is there something about Barack Obama’s style and substance that tends to calm the cultural waters? And what if any accomodations should Obama or progressives generally make to neutralized culture-based opposition?
The first three questions are rather speculative and also perhaps premature, but I’d answer them “some,” some,” and “a little.” The last question is the real kicker, and the key thing here is to define who, exactly, we are talking about neutralizing or persuading.
There are millions of Americans who think any form of legalized abortion is incredibly abhorrent, with some consciously comparing it to the Holocaust, which implies an active obligation for resistance. There is no imaginable accomodation, compromise, or gesture compatible with a basic pro-choice position that will ever, ever satisfy these people. Even if they were offered a “compromise” that eliminated what they are always screaming about as an outrageous extension of the original Roe v. Wade holding–the “health of the mother” exception to the general permissability of prohibitions on post-viability abortions–serious right-to-lifers don’t really care when an abortion is performed, after the moment of conception, so they’d pocket the concession and start moving the goal posts towards a total abortion ban of the sort that most Republican pols already support.
But millions of other Americans, however they choose to identify themselves on the abortion issue, are discomfitted by the idea of “abortion on demand,” particularly late in pregnancy, and these folks might well be assuaged by accomodations to “pro-life conscience” and to scruples about “partial-birth abortion,” or by “abortion reduction” strategies that involve expanded contraception availability and better health and economic options for women. Every progressive will have to decide for him or herself whether such accomodations or compromises are worth any sacrifice of pro-choice principles, but it’s equally clear that (a) they may well have a payoff in the mushy middle of abortion opinion, and (b) they won’t have any real effect on the hard-core Right-to-Life constituency, or its clerical leadership.
Let’s bring this sort of calculation to bear on an immediate decision that Obama and progressives will soon have to make: the perenially pending Freedom of Choice Act, which Obama has cosponsored, and has promised to sign if Congress passes it. As I noted yesterday, FOCA has become the central base-motivator for anti-abortionists who consider it the final, fatal step towards abortion-on-demand, with no wiggle room for late-term abortion restrictions or the sort of waiting-period or parental notification requirements or harrassment of abortion providers that have represented the small but symbolic trophies of the Right to Life movement in recent years. The very estimable Damon Linker, a mighty warrior against the theocons of America, suggested earlier this week that enactment of FOCA would produce a dangerous radicalization of the Cultural Right, and perpetuate the culture wars for another generation.
But as I noted yesterday, the odds that Congress will send Barack Obama a FOCA bill that abrogates existing law on late-term abortions or the most frequent state harrassing tactics are extremely slim. Much more likely, if FOCA advances at all (not a good bet) is a bill that really does just codify Roe v. Wade and ensure that in the remote event it is ever overturned, there will be a federal law in place that preempts state efforts to actually ban pre-viability abortions. Would such a FOCA anger the hard-core right-to-lifers? Sure, but they will be angry at anything other than a radical restriction of abortion rights. Would it galvanize the mushy middle on abortion? Hardly, since big majorities of Americans favor a basic policy of legalized abortion prior to fetal viability with a health exception for abortions after that stage of pregnancy–the fundamental thrust of any FOCA likely to ever become law in the foreseeable future.
Shifting from abortion policy to same-sex marriage and GLBT rights, you might initially think that this is the strongest ground for the Cultural Right, and certainly a tempting issue to “take off the table” for progressives who want to tamp down the culture wars, particularly in the South, the Midwest, and the Interior West. After all, every poll shows (in sharp contrast to the data on abortion) unmistakable demographic trends that virtually guarantee a future defeat for the Cultural Right on every issue related to this subject. But that’s in the future, and the single biggest difference between the abortion and same-sex-marriage issues is that the status quo, and thus inaction, is basically benign on the former and malign on the latter from a progressive point of view.
And that in turn is why the passage of Proposition 8 in California last year was such a big and tragically avoidable disaster. For the first time in the recent history of anti-gay-marriage ballot initiatives, Prop 8 overturned established same-sex marriage rights, however brief. Reversing that setback in California or elsewhere is important not just for the people directly affected, but in terms of the dynamics of the issue. Unlike abortion, same-sex marriage does not command active and perpetual resistance from those who strongly disapprove of it on religious grounds. Even if you think same-sex marriage represents the triumphal return of Sodom and Gomorrah, that’s fundamentally different from the Holocaust that Right-to-Lifers see in legalized abortion. Once same-sex-marriage proponents learn how to decisively refute the specious but potent arguments that letting gay folk enjoy equal rights will impinge on the free-speech rights or religious prerogatives of traditionalists, and once same-sex marriage becomes–as legalized abortion has become–part of the landscape, this issue should rapidly lose political salience.
The third big culture-war issue, church-state separation, is one on which Barack Obama can probably make the most direct and immediate progress. Remember that this is the same man who has strongly supported a continuation of federal “faith-based organization” policies, has reached out to all sorts of religious folk in his campaign and his inaugural events, and who also gave a shout-out to “nonbelievers” in his inaugural address. He’s a pretty good validator–as Bill Clinton might have been if not for the furor over his sexual behavior–of the very old and once invincible idea that believers can and should be comfortable with a continuation of the ancient American tradition of church-state separation as a protection of, not a threat to, religious liberty.
The bottom line on this vast and complicated subject is that the “culture wars” will never die in the fever swamps of the Right where they were nourished if not conceived, particularly on the abortion issues; that protecting the cultural status quo is a vastly more powerful position that progressives should aspire to occupy; and that the critical plurality of Americans are happy to declare a truce in the culture wars so long as progressives don’t behave like conquering secularist radicals.
I’m basically with TAPPED’s Tim Frenholz:

Unlike some liberals, I think people who feel differently deserve a certain amount of respect. But they don’t deserve to have a veto over other people’s rights. If that makes the religious right angry, well, that’s what happens in a liberal democracy.

To use two biblical metaphors, it’s time for cultural progressives to separate the wheat from the chaff, and the sheep from the goats. The Cultural Right as we know it has to be defeated, even as its troops are offered consolation in the form of convincing refutations of their more lurid assumptions about the motives that we, their enemies, actually harbor. But the vast cultural middle of the American electorate, which is neither fish nor foul, nor is hot nor cold, on hot-button issues can be convinced that Barack Obama and the progressive coalition he represents are faithful to the American values they embrace.

Today the House is scheduled to vote on the economic stimulus package. It is almost universally expected to pass, though yesterday’s vote on the rule for its consideration was a little dicey, with 27 Democrats (including 24 of the 52 Blue Dogs) voting against their leadership and the administration. The unanimous GOP vote against the rule wasn’t that unusual, but the number of Republicans voting for final passage may not be much higher.
According to Jared Allen of The Hill, a larger defection of Blue Dogs on the rules vote was headed off by a letter from the President to House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey supporting a return to pay-as-you-go budget rules for future legislation once the stimulus package is enacted. That pledge wasn’t a big surprise, but its timing indicated nervousness about the earlier indications from Blue Dogs that they’d give Obama a pass on the usual budget hawkery for purposes of enacting the stimulus package.
It’s pretty clear by now that the GOP case against the stimulus package is going to be less about its overall size or its necessity, and probably less about spending-versus-tax-cuts than earlier propaganda hinted, and more about “frivolous spending” or “expansion of big government” or “pork.” The idea is that this isn’t an economic stimulus package at all, but decades worth of pent-up “liberal” policy changes. And that’s why GOPers are focusing on family planning money and “welfare” and reseeding the National Mall. It’s an effort to do the same number on Obama as Republicans did on Bill Clinton in 1993 with his “stimulus bill,” which may or may not have funded a municipal swimming pool somewhere in Texas, and in 1994 on the Omnibus Crime Bill, with its famous “midnight basketball” provisions.
It’s anybody’s guess whether these attack lines will get any serious traction with the public, or sway any moderate-to-conservative Democrats in the Senate. The Senate will almost certainly conduct some surgery to remove spending categories that are particularly subject to parody (as happened in the House at the last minute, when “reseeding the Mall,” and, more controversially, Medicaid contraceptive services were deleted). But the odds that something pretty close to Obama’s original proposal will be enacted remain very high.
Progressives need to remind the consumers of Republican attacks on the stimulus package that including popular policy changes that also boost the economy is both efficient and desirable–a huge “two-fer.” It’s also worth remembering that the closest thing structurally to this bill in recent American history was the gigantic Reagan budget and tax packages of 1981, which included a vast array of conservative-oriented policy changes in the guise of boosting the economy while reducing the budget deficit (both of which it failed to do). The budget portion of the Reagan legislative offensive was enacted via a floor substitute in the House that virtually no member of Congress had read. Compared to that vast and hastily-drafted hodge-podge, the Obama stimulus package is a paragon of clarity and transparency.

It drew considerable attention last week when President Barack Obama waited until a day after the annual anti-abortion March for Life in Washington to reverse the so-called “Mexico City” or “gag-rule” executive order that banned U.S. funding for any groups that promote or provide abortion services overseas. Even among intense right-to-lifers, this was regarded as a shrewd move by Obama that denied to the January 22 marchers a much-needed focal point for their protests.
I think they’d better get used to it. While there’s no reason to think that Obama has or will changed his strongly pro-choice views, he’s also made it clear that he doesn’t want his presidency, and particularly the first phases of his presidency, to become overshadowed by culture-war issues like abortion. Indeed, some observers, like Peter Beinart, believe the Obama presidency will signal the end of this latest, sexuality-centered phase of the culture wars.
Whether or not that happy development materalizes, the Cultural Right has some real problems. On the gay rights/gay marriage front, generational change virtually guarantees an eventual defeat for the Right. And on abortion, serious right-to-lifers know their window of opportunity to overturn abortion rights via the Supreme Court closed, perhaps for a long time, with Obama’s election.
Given the impossibility of a constitutional amendment to restrict abortion, that leaves them with the bleak prospect of going back to the long-term drawing board, and gnawing away at the right to choose through narrow and symbolic statutes and/or harrassment (legislative and otherwise) of abortion providers.
Not surprisingly, anti-abortionists are trying to keep morale up by rattling hobgoblins–conjuring up threats of radical “pro-abortion” activity that must be fought immediately, which is more satisfying than the thankless and almost certainly futile task of trying to convince a majority of Americans that abortions should be outlawed. (It’s the same impulse that leads conservatives generally to manufacture the bizarre “fairness doctrine” conspiracy theory.) The preferred hobgoblin of the right-to-life movement is the Freedom of Choice Act, a bill that President Obama cosponsored as a senator, and that doesn’t appear to be very high on the administration’s list of initatives.
The basic idea of FOCA has always been to codify Roe v. Wade as a federal statute, so that if Roe is ever overturned there will be a national pro-choice policy instead of a crazy-quilt of 50 state laws, some of them highly restrictive or even prohibitory. Activists on both side of the abortion barricades, of course, naturally tend to dramatize more immediate, short-term developments, so FOCA has gradually come to be viewed through the prism of its possible impact on non-fundamental but symbolic issues like so-called “partial-birth” abortion bans, and the variety of harrassing techniques states have devised over the years, such as waiting periods and parental or spousal notification laws. (Any FOCA provisions that actually conflict with current law would, of course, almost certainly be eliminated before it could pass both Houses of Congress). Accordingly, anti-abortion leaders disengenously talk about FOCA as though it represented a vast expansion of abortion rights, and use Obama’s cosponsorship of the bill as Exhibit A in their scare-the-troops case that the new President wakes up every morning wondering what more he can do to promote what the National Right To Life Committee calls “Obama’s Abortion Agenda.”
The latest skirmish in the abortion cold war involves the inclusion of language in the House version of the economic stimulus package that allows states to provide contraceptive services to Medicaid beneficiaries. Republicans are complaining that it illustrates Democratic efforts to toss stuff into the package that has nothing to do with the economy, but there’s no question they are also trying to get the Cultural Right (some of whose shock troops oppose contraception generally, while others think many contraceptives are actually abortifacients) engaged in the stimulus battle.
But like Lucy removing the football each year as Charlie Brown approaches it, it looks like Obama will deny conservatives a clear target, by urging House Democrats to remove the family planning language from the stimulus bill and moving it as separate legislation.
In the absence of an realistic strategy for achieving their real goals, anti-abortionists can be expected to continue efforts to paint Obama, Democrats, and pro-choice Americans as aggressive radicals who won’t stop til infanticide and euthanasia are legal and widely practiced. But it’s beginning to look like Barack Obama won’t be an easy president to invidiously stereotype.

There was a little incident late last week that’s been bugging me, because it nicely illustrates the problem folks have with the very different contexts in which the word “bipartisanship” is used. You may well have seen the story in Politico in which President Obama, after listening to congressional Republicans complain about the size and structure of the economic stimulus package, seemed to have tartly put them in their place by reminding them that “I won” the election.
Before you could say “Aha,” observers from both left and right drew attention to this alleged slip-of-the-mask that some hoped or feared showed Obama’s real attitude towards bipartisanship.
Said Chris Bowers at OpenLeft:

Good. This is the sort of language that disarms Republicans, and there won’t ever be a better time to adopt it. I would perfer if he talked like this in the open, but President Obama still deserves credit for this. Here’s to hoping that this signals the end of watering down the stimulus in order to appease Republicans for aesthetic purposes, and the start to a new era where we just don’t give a damn what Republican leaders think.

You can read a similar take at the influential conservative site Red State:

Bipartisanship under unified Democratic rule means this: Congress writes the bill, and Democrats ask Barack Obama to rope in some Republicans without having to make any changes. And why should they back a bill that they had no hand in writing? Because he won.
And this from the people who accused Bush of refusing to take Democratic input and compromise!

Well, maybe that’s where the partisan debate is ultimately heading. But for the sake of accuracy, it’s worth noting that the context of Obama’s “I won” remark wasn’t a general call for GOP input, but a specific Republican demand that Obama replace the refundable tax credits of his “Make Work Pay” plan with across-the-board and unrefundable income tax rate cuts, as an account in the New York Times of the meeting in question makes clearer:

At issue is Mr. Obama’s proposal that his tax breaks for low- and middle-income workers, including his centerpiece “Making Work Pay” tax credit, be refundable — that is, that the benefits also go to workers who earn too little to pay income taxes but who pay Social Security and Medicare taxes. Republicans generally oppose giving such refunds to people who pay no income taxes.
“We just have a difference here, and I’m president,” Mr. Obama said to Mr. [Eric] Cantor, according to Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, who was at the meeting.
Mr. Emanuel said that Mr. Obama was being lighthearted and that lawmakers of both parties had laughed.
Mr. Cantor, in an interview later, had a similar recollection. He said the president had told him, “You’re correct, there’s a philosophical difference, but I won, so we’re going to prevail on that.”

In other words, congressional Republicans were trying to revive a debate that was fully litigated during the presidential campaign. The “Make Work Pay” credit was the centerpiece of Obama’s tax plan, and the argument that refundable income tax credits for working Americans who pay high and regressive payroll taxes is actually “welfare” became a shrill and frequent talking point for the McCain-Palin campaign, not to mention every right-wing gabber on the planet. It should also be remembered that the same tired argument against refundable tax credits was once repudiated by both George W. Bush and John McCain when it was advanced by Tom DeLay.
So of course the President wasn’t going to consider for a moment going along with this Republican “suggestion,” which reflected not only a “philosophical difference” between progressives and conservatives, but a subject that has truly been resolved after extended public debate and an election.
The idea that this represented some sort of crossing of the Rubicon by Obama, who has finally recognized (or revealed, depending on your point of view) the futility of bipartisanship in every sense of the word, just isn’t supported by what actually happened.
If, on the other hand, congressional Republicans persist in making their primary “input” a series of recommendations that Obama and Democrats admit the folly of their thinking and turn their backs on everything they were elected to do, then they should be allowed to howl in the political wildnerness at a safe distance, and “bipartisanship” should be limited to such rank-and-file Republicans out across the country as might be convinced to leave them behind.

While Democrats have been celebrating the Obama inaurguration this week, Republicans are entering the final home stretch of the campaign for chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, which will be decided next week.
Stu Rothenberg breaks down the race for RealClearPolitics today, and says it’s too close to call, though incumbent Mike Duncan remains the front-runner. Reading between the lines of this and other analyses, it’s pretty clear that Duncan would win in a walk if it weren’t for the realization that re-electing an incumbent party chair after the 2008 fiasco might send a sign of bizarre complacency.
Another problem for Republicans is that of the five candidates for the post, the only two with any sort of public profile outside GOP circles–Michael Steele and Ken Blackwell–both happen to be African-Americans. At a time when Republicans desparately want to signal an openness to new constituencies–without, however, changing their ideology–rejecting Steele and Blackwell in favor of a failed incumbent, or of Southern White Guys like Katon Dawson (who recently had to resign from an all-white country club) or Chip Saltsman (he of “Barack the Magic Negro” fame) wouldn’t look real good.