Crash Test

There are two basic ways to think about President Bush's relationship with the religious right. The first is that Bush is a genuine ally of social conservatives who, while often cagey in public, takes every opportunity to advance their agenda. As liberals would phrase this interpretation, Bush is a tool of the religious right. The second--utterly diametrical--theory is that Bush is mainly interested in harvesting votes from religious conservatives in order to implement an agenda dominated by his economic backers. In liberal-ese: Social conservatives are hapless GOP dupes. At this point, five years and two Supreme Court nominations into the Bush presidency, we can arrive at a definitive answer. And the verdict is: hapless dupes.The nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court is, of course, the catalyzing event. Pat Buchanan, typifying the conservative response, wrote, "Bush may have tossed away his and our last chance to roll back the social revolution imposed upon us by our judicial dictatorship since the days of Earl Warren." And conservatives are certainly right to be upset. Miers may be personally conservative, but there is a long history of "stealth" nominees whom Republican presidents have passed off as true believers: John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter. Some of those assurances centered around the nominees' personal religiosity. (Conservative activist Paul Weyrich bitterly recalled "the White House conference call with Anthony M. Kennedy's priest, who assured the Reagan White House that Kennedy's strong Catholic upbringing would cause him to vote right on social issues.") Bush's betrayal of the social conservative cause did not begin with Miers. His previous high court appointment, John Roberts, ought to have been taken as such. Bush all but explicitly promised to nominate justices like Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia, but Roberts is not in that mold. He has not displayed a passion for overturning precedents that enrage the right, and he has disavowed the tendency, favored by conservatives like Thomas, to use the Court to smother liberal legislation. As Jeffrey Rosen wrote in these pages last month, "Roberts's nomination as chief justice was a peace offering from Bush to Democrats." And, indeed, Roberts sailed through the Senate with 78 votes precisely because many liberals and moderates believe he will not be a Scalia. Conservatives, of course, didn't want a justice who would get 78 votes. They wanted a maximally conservative justice. The point of the "nuclear option" showdown was to lay the groundwork for the Senate to confirm a Supreme Court justice with just 51 votes. Conservatives anticipated that Bush might nominate a justice so conservative that the entire Democratic Party--and even three or four moderate Republicans--would reject him. And they succeeded, using the threat of annulling the judicial filibuster to force Democrats to accept a compromise in which they could filibuster only in "extraordinary circumstances. " Republican senators who signed on to that agreement said that it essentially banned Democrats from filibustering judges they had previously allowed to be appointed to the appellate courts, including radicals like Edith Clement and Janice Rogers Brown. If Bush so desired, he could have easily secured a seat for a militant conservative. He made no attempt to do so. Miers, obviously, is even worse than Roberts from a conservative standpoint. Her most unwavering opponents come from the right. To the extent that Democrats oppose her, they cite her qualifications rather than her ideology. She may well be confirmed only because of Democratic votes, a spectacle nobody has contemplated. This is in striking contrast to how Bush conducts his economic agenda. There, 78-vote coronations are rare. When it comes to tax cuts, regulation, or other controversial budget changes, Bush's Republicans usually muscle their legislation through both houses of Congress without any votes to spare. (Last week's House vote to ease oil refinement restrictions--during which the GOP leadership extended a five-minute vote to 45 minutes while they twisted enough arms to prevail 212 to 210--is a typical display.) The goal is always to win as many benefits as possible for the party's business and donor base. If it's a tax cut, to take a common example, Bush will hold out for the biggest, most regressive one he can get. (It's true that twelve Senate Democrats ultimately voted for Bush's 2001 tax cut, but only because they wanted to take credit for the goodies after passage was inevitable. The truly decisive vote--the one making room in the budget for the tax cut--happened earlier, and it passed with only two votes to spare.) Maybe the most telling contrast is between the way Bush handled Social Security privatization and gay marriage. Polls this year and last showed that voters were roughly split on a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. But those polls also showed that voters roundly rejected gay marriage--all eleven state anti-gay marriage ballot measures passed easily last November-- which suggests that, if they could be persuaded that changing the Constitution was necessary to prevent gay marriage, they might support an amendment. Meanwhile, the public wildly approves of Social Security, and it has long opposed any change that would reduce guaranteed benefits. At the beginning of the year, neither a gay marriage amendment nor Social Security privatization had anywhere close to enough support to pass. When The Washington Post asked Bush earlier this year about the marriage amendment, he shrugged, "Senators have made it clear that, so long as [the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act] is deemed constitutional, nothing will happen. I'd take their admonition seriously." He has done nothing to move public opinion since. In the face of opposition to Social Security privatization, on the other hand, Bush launched a campaign of unprecedented scale to win over the public and Congress. When his media blitz caused support for privatization to drop, he simply continued, persevering until long after even his staunchest allies had given up the ghost. When Bush does advance the conservative social agenda, he almost always does so in ways that do not deplete his store of political capital. On stem cells, Bush tried to forge a compromise rather than battle for undiluted conservative principle. When polls showed his intervention for Terri Schiavo was unpopular, he dropped the issue like a stone. Bush is far from the first Republican president to enjoy unrequited support from the Christian right. Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush appointed moderate Supreme Court justices and declined to press hard for constitutional amendments on issues like abortion and school prayer. Instead, those presidents, like the current one, give social conservatives symbolism and imagery but little in the way of actual policy change. Affluent conservative investors, on the other hand, get massive policy changes that they like. Why do social conservatives keep accepting this rotten deal? It's not because there are fewer of them than there are economic conservatives. A detailed Pew survey last spring found that "enterprisers," who favor smaller government, comprise slightly less than a third of the GOP voting base. The other two groups, "pro-government conservatives" and "social conservatives," tilt right on cultural values but have moderate or even liberal economic views and outnumber the enterprisers by more than two to one. Surely the answer has something to do with the fact that the religious right's political vanguard is complicit in its own subordination. For years, economic conservatives have learned that they can enlist social conservative groups to back their agenda on the flimsiest of pretexts. When business groups were fighting fuel economy standards, GOP activist Grover Norquist convinced Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum to oppose them as well, according to a 1995 Washington Post story, "because the mileage goals could be portrayed as threatening such mainstays of the family as the station wagon and the mini-van. " According to its website, the top two legislative items on the Christian Coalition's legislative agenda are "Passing President Bush's Social Security reform" and "Making permanent President Bush's 2001 federal tax cuts." Probably the most comic example of how Republicans use social conservatives came out of the Jack Abramoff scandal. Abramoff, you'll recall, is a GOP lobbyist who represented Indian casinos. At one point, he was hired to help shut down a rival casino. Ingeniously, he hired former Christian Coalition Director Ralph Reed, who in turn recruited Focus on the Family Chairman James Dobson to go on the radio and incite his followers to register their opposition to legalized gambling. The episode shows how GOP leaders view social conservative organizations as "rent-a-mobs" that can be manipulated into nearly any cause. It's hard not to suspect that a good number of social conservatives have simply been co-opted by the Republican establishment. That would explain why, while social conservative intellectuals and commentators have almost unanimously rejected Miers, social conservative organizations have had a far more mixed reaction. While some criticized Miers, Dobson praised her, and she won unqualified endorsements from Jerry Falwell and groups like the Christian Coalition and the American Center for Law and Justice. With allies like these, Bush doesn't have much incentive to work harder to reward his social conservative base. No wonder the poor, nutty bastards got hosed again.