The Election of 2008 will probably continue a precipitous turn away from the Republican Party, which began with the election cycle two years before.  The irony is that while Republicans lost in 2006, their ideas did not.  The cumulative effect of the past eight years has been to profoundly prejudice the American people against the GOP, but for policies its conservative base never did propound.  Instead of vouchers and parental choice, Republican legislative initiative in 2001 amounted to the federal takeover of education.  No Child Left Behind is a massive federal program with testing mandates, which by the way has failed to raise test scores and at any rate is unconstitutional.  The solution was borrowed from Democrats and is now an albatross around the Republican Party’s neck. 

Medicare Part D is another example of Republicans cross-dressing as Democrats.  The Christian Science Monitor called it a ‘political stroke worthy of Bill Clinton!’  The move to expand prescription drug coverage under Medicare cost hundreds of billions of dollars and could easily have targeted a very small sector of the seniors who may have needed it.  Instead the Republican plan amounted to a vast federal entitlement program.  It moved 3.8 million seniors with workable private prescription drug plans to the government’s plan and into bureaucratic nightmare.  Republicans abandoned market solutions to confront the health care challenge, so Democrats built on the argument and are calling for more government spending because Republicans did not go far enough. 

In August 2005 President Bush signed a $286 billion transportation bill with 6,371 pork projects in it, which added $24 billion to the cost.  Moreover, the transportation bill is just the most notable—all thirteen appropriations bills have brimmed with pet pig for a while.  Republican congressmen, most of whom are pledged to smaller government, supported 15 times the number of earmarks in 2005 than they did in 1996!  Congress was so inept it couldn’t summon the political will to transfer funds from a Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska to rebuild bridges damaged by Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. 

Then Bush teamed up with Ted Kennedy and John McCain to produce the McCain-Kennedy illegal alien amnesty bill.  Call it what you like, “comprehensive immigration reform” or whatever.  A combined Republican-Democrat conservative grassroots effort defeated the bill last summer.  Republican presidential front-runner, John McCain says he heard the people loud and clear, i.e., people want border security first.  Okay, but if he thinks all he needs is a border fence before he legalizes twelve million newcomers he’s got another think coming.  More than six years after 9/11 the Republican president and Congress have failed on national security to this extent: they failed to secure the borders.  Instead, they dicker with half measures to transfer jobs from working class Americans to illegal aliens; and to overburden local and state level health, welfare, education and protection services—mandating unconstitutionally that Americans provide these services to people who have no legitimate claim on anything paid for with taxpayers’ money. 

With the arguable exception of immigration, on the face of it the Republican Party has lost its way by not being true to itself—i.e., not being true to its core set of principles and conservative beliefs that have defined the party since 1980.  Moreover, Reagan’s Attorney General, Ed Meese oversaw the 1986 amnesty plan.  He states that an explicit lesson learned from the attempt made then, is that amnesty does not work.  Further, if you remember, NAFTA was supposed to foster economic development in Mexico thus removing an incentive or “push factor” that caused emigration.  The argument proved to be pure horse hockey.  We’re ‘globalized’ now more than ever and Mexico is more developed, but the problem with illegal immigration is worse.  Meese is convinced that Ronald Reagan would never in the present day context repeat the same mistake!  The Republican Party has goose-stepped to the tune of Aye Macarena for eight years and seems surprised that the conservative base is fed up with it. 

Wes Riddle is a retired military officer with degrees and honors from West Point and Oxford.  Widely published in the academic and opinion press, he ran for U.S. Congress (TX-District 31) in the 2004 Republican Primary.  Article loosely based on chpt. 10 of Steve Laffey’s book, Primary Mistake (2007). 

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