CPAC Again, Alas

The American Conservative Union’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C., reminds us why we are not conservatives but pro-liberty, pro-free market libertarians (for want of a better word).

This year, again, at the behest of the Heritage Foundation and others, CPAC has refused to allow participation by GOProud, the gay conservative group. But that bigotry is just one point of contention we have with the CPAC crowd, which claims to be for limited government, an aggressive foreign policy and traditional values. Points two (often) and three (almost always) work against point one. And with point three, in particular, the CPAC crowd wants activist big government to impose traditional values on the states and on individuals, by forbidding states from recognizing gay unions, for instance, and by making gay people second-class citizens who are denied spousal inheritance and barred from military service and, until recently, treated as criminals.

As this blog has often noted, Republicans seem to delight in driving socially tolerant and fair-minded voters who otherwise favor fiscal sanity into the arms of those who support Obama’s spending frenzy and grotesque budgetary fear-mongering. And without a fiscally conservative, socially liberal center, that pain is just going to keep getting worse.

More. Fortunately, all Republicans don’t march in lockstep. And some represent the future.

Furthermore. Jon Huntsman’s advice to conservatives:

“I believe the American people will vote for free markets under equal rules of the game—because there is no opportunity or job growth any other way. But the American people will not hear us out if we stand against their friends, family, and individual liberty.”

Will it fall on deaf ears?

More still. Another good sign, Republicans Supporting Gay Marriage Write Supreme Court Amicus Brief, although most of those signing are not in office. Still, hurrah for current Congressmembers Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida and Richard Hanna of New York.

And more. Roger Simon weighs in: CPAC Deflates the ‘Big Tent’ over GOProud.

And so does the conservative National Review:

[GOProud’s] participation in past CPACs caused only mild disquiet (indeed, much of the scattered criticism of GOProud’s inclusion at the conference was shouted down by other attendees) and was probably salubrious on net. Conservative opinion on the intersection of homosexuality and politics is not monolithic, especially among the college-aged set that makes up the better part of CPAC attendees. And a gathering that hopes to speak for the conservative movement will be better equipped to do so if it represents the overlapping gamut of views included in it.

Yet still more. From Jennifer Rubin: 10 lessons from CPAC’s debacle.

29 Comments for “CPAC Again, Alas”

  1. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    … CPAC crowd,which claims to be for limited government, an aggressive foreign policy and traditional values.

    Uh huh. CPAC is in the center of the Republican Party these days, as far as I can tell.

    Points two (often) and three (almost always) work against point one. And with point three, in particular, the CPAC crowd wants activist big government to impose traditional values on the states and on individuals …

    Yup. That’s why I contend that the Republican Party has abandoned conservative principles of small government, fiscal responsibility and individual freedom.

    Fortunately, all Republicans don’t march in lockstep. And some [referring to Minnesota State Senator Brenden Peterson] represent the future.

    I’m glad that you mentioned Peterson’s change of heart on equality. Given that he voted to put Minnesota’s anti-marriage amendment on the November 2012 ballot, his switch is a sign that Republicans may be beginning to see the handwriting on the wall. In fact, I think that it might be the single most hopeful sign I’ve seen so far this year.

  2. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    … Obama’s spending frenzy …

    Stephen, get out of the fact-free zone. I know that you don’t like President Obama, but this is ridiculous.

    Even the Wall Street Journal (“Obama spending binge never happened”, WSJ, Market Watch, May 22, 2012) is finding itself having to become Snopes when it comes to Republican talking points about the President’s “spending frenzy”. Not that Republicans pay any attention to either the Wall Street Journal or the facts.

    The simple fact is this: Under President Obama — so far, anyway — federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s. Think about that …

    • posted by Houndentenor on

      Meanwhile not one Republican president in my lifetime (and I’m not all that young!) has reduced the size of government. Republicans need to stop saying they’re for smaller government. They rather obviously aren’t.

  3. posted by Jorge on

    Maybe if we reward CPAC’s actions by ignoring them, they will go away.

    But that bigotry is just one point of contention we have with the CPAC crowd, which claims to be for limited government, an aggressive foreign policy and traditional values. Points two (often) and three (almost always) work against point one.

    They do, but that’s the result of too much intermarriage between conservative ideology and Republican politics. The Republican party has no difficulty being for all three (when it suits them), because they have no obligation to be moral purists. Here, however, we see conservatives rejecting people who strongly favor small government, clearly align with aggressive foreign policy, and are mildly supportive of traditional values. It’s destroying good in pursuit of the perfect.

    Which they’re entitled to do, but to the extent the conservative movement is interchangeable with the Republican party, this is what is making some right-leaning pundits nervous.

  4. posted by Doug on

    I guess the Iraq War which cost at least $1 trillion does not count as a spending frenzy, huh Stephen? And what about the unfunded Medicare Part D? Guess that doesn’t count either.

    • posted by Mike in Houston on

      IOKIYAR.

      I’ve never really understood the whole “tax and spend” attack either. If you are going to do something, then you have to have the revenue to do it. Taxation is how the government gets the money to do the things that the people want to have done (as reflected by their representatives).

      It really comes down to the question of what the money is being spent on — guns or butter.

      President Obama has laid it out fairly well: you have to do the math if you want to reduce the deficit and pay for all the things that you want to do.

      But when you have a party that is fervently anti-science, anti-math and believes that Adam & Eve rode with dinosaurs…

      • posted by Houndentenor on

        I always thought “tax and spend” was an odd claim to be made by the “borrow and spend” Republicans. Republicans want to spend just as much as Democrats. They want to spend on different things, but they spend as much, usually more. They just don’t want to pay for it.

  5. posted by Tom L. on

    CPAC… obviously funded by communists who are trying to destroy the GOP!

  6. posted by Don on

    Inciting a mob to do away with your enemies is effective. But the mob will eventually turn on you. Republican pols unleashed fear for two decades. They have whipped it up at every turn in every arena of our public discourse. It bought them several elections and lots of war. Now, they want to put the genie back in the bottle (mixed metaphor alert).

    This is why there is no principled conservatism right now. It is a mob whipped into a frenzy with fear to turn out elections. This is why they are shocked and outraged at everything. Just a couple of weeks ago, the sequester was the end of the world. And as long as they thought they had a gun to the president’s head, it was. Now, not so much. What changed? Obama showed he wasn’t afraid of them pulling the trigger. Because he was confident the gun would blow up in their hands.

    I hope Obama keeps it up. The United States shouldn’t negotiate with terrorists.

    • posted by Houndentenor on

      Today in fake outrage: The wingnuts are freaking out because FLOTUS appeared on the Oscars. (She was great, btw, making a good case for the arts!) Of course they don’t remember (mostly because none of them ever watch the Oscars) that Laura Bush also appeared on the Oscars in 2002. But then there’s no point in letting mere facts get in the way of your batshit crazy hysteria.

      • posted by Jorge on

        I thought the whole “wow” factor behind it is that she gave Ben Affleck his Argo Oscar and scored one for traditional values patriotism after he was snubbed by the liberal Hollywood elite.

        Right wing fake outrage doesn’t happen very often. Wish there were some people who could call them out on it.

        • posted by Houndentenor on

          Really, I see right wing fake outrage every day on my Facebook feed.

          No one seems sure what happened with Affleck not being nominated for Best Director and then winning the DGA award. Pretty much all the directors who vote in DGA are the same voters for the Best Director nomination/award. Since nominations and awards are voted on with secret ballots by mail, “snubs” tend to be more oversight than intentional neglect.

          But all of that is irrelevant to FLOTUS. She had no input into who won and couldn’t have known who the winner was until she opened the envelope. (Yes, I know it was the frontrunner but upsets occasionally happen.)

  7. posted by Houndentenor on

    “Will it fall on deaf ears?”

    Of course it will. A Romney campaign adviser just said that he thinks the losing issues for Romney were marriage equality and contraception. Not that he talked that much about either but the crazy wing of the party said stupid things about reproductive rights and made anti-gay comments. The GOP used to be better at hiding the crazy wing of the party (The John Birch Society, et al.) in the back when they were on camera. No more. Yes, this will fall on deaf ears. They’re screaming too loud about their birther nonsense to hear.

  8. posted by Jimmy on

    “The American Conservative Union’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C., reminds us why we are not conservatives but pro-liberty, pro-free market libertarians .”

    Who is this “we”? Or, is it a royal “we”?

  9. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    As another indicator of how quickly things are beginning to move on marriage equality, 75 “prominent” Republicans will file a brief in the Prop 8 case supporting marriage equality. Among them are Meg Whitman, who supported Prop 8 in her run for California Governor.

    Almost all of the signatories are retired Republican politicians or former staffers, and the New York Times notes that “… the presence of so many well-known former officials suggests that once Republicans are out of public life they feel freer to speak out against the party’s official platform …”

    But that reality aside — social conservatives and Tea Party voters control the Republican primary system, making it almost impossible for a sitting politician to support equality — the brief is yet another sign that the Republican Party, which clings to anti-equality like a leech to a host, had better wake up and look at the writing on the wall.

    • posted by Doug on

      There is also a brief being prepared and signed by upwards of 100 leading corporations in support of marriage equality.

      I do not see how the Supreme Court could possibly NOT overturn DOMA. Justice Roberts does not want to be on the wrong side of history on this fight.

      • posted by Tom Scharbach on

        Section 3 of DOMA (federal non-recognition of valid state marriages) is almost certainly dead meat. I can’t think of a likely constitutional path to finding it valid, and, as you point out, Justice Roberts is unlikely to want to overturn 225+ years of settled constitutional law to rule on the wrong side of history. My guess is that the vote will be 6-3 or 7-2, depending on where Alito comes down. I wouldn’t fall off my chair if Scalia joined the majority on this narrow issue, too, although I’m not anticipating that outcome.

        The Prop 8 decision will be more interesting, because the court has more options. In my view, the most probable decision would be to affirm the 9th Circuit decision, which was limited in scope and follows Romer. The Court would open the door to future cases, but put off the broad, national decision for 5-6 years, if it took that route, letting the train roll down the track for a few years, gaining momentum, before the Court has to rule. If the Court rules to affirm the 9th Circuit, but doesn’t go beyond that, I think that the vote will be 6-3 or possibly 7-2, with Roberts writing. But there are lots of other options, and the Prop 8 case is much more fluid, legally, than the DOMA case. Any number of rulings are possible.

        I’d be surprised, but I hope that Ted Olsen and David Boies were right all along, and this is the case, the case that will be our Loving decision.

        I’ll be ringinh the farm bell it if it happens, because Michael and I are going to have to wait until SCOTUS throws out the state anti-marriage amendments before we can marry, and I’d like to hear some wedding bells before I end up under the grass. Ten years doesn’t amount to much in the sweep of things, but ten years is about what I have left to go.

    • posted by Jim Michaud on

      Meh. Tom, color me unimpressed. Most of those people are no longer in office and have nothing to lose taking a stand now. Sorry, but the bar is set higher for me. Don’t get me wrong: I’m really grateful that ANY GOP officials are now waking up and smelling the coffee. What would really impress me is more and more Republicans CURRENTLY holding office and are up for reelection taking a pro-marriage equality stand. Something is telling me the gay conservative crowd hasn’t done the legwork to make that happen. Their loss.

      • posted by Tom Scharbach on

        What would really impress me is more and more Republicans CURRENTLY holding office and are up for reelection taking a pro-marriage equality stand.

        I agree.

        But the brief is a sign that the dam is beginning to crack in the Republican Party. I don’t think that the dam will break for another 3-4 election cycles — the hard-core religious conservatives and the Tea Party have too strong a hold on the Republican primary process right now — but I am beginning to think that the change in the electorate, which has been moving very quickly, is beginning to have an effect on the Republican Party.

        Something is telling me the gay conservative crowd hasn’t done the legwork to make that happen.

        Well, hell, if you haven’t noticed that, you’ve had your eyes wide shut. I’ve been harping on supposedly pro-equality conservatives for years now to get off their behinds and do what gays and lesbians in the Democratic Party have been doing for thirty-odd years, working at the county, state and federal level to change the Republican Party, as we have done in the Democratic Party.

        So far, I can’t see any signs that supposedly pro-equality Republicans have been doing that, at least in Wisconsin, where I live, or nationally.

        LCR (of “seat at the table” fame) has been remarkably passive, and GOProud finally got around to stating its support for marriage equality ( kind of) after the November election. Mostly, supposedly pro-equality conservatives have been making excuses for anti-equality Republicans and bemoaning the “fact” that those of us who have been at work in the Democratic Party haven’t been doing enough, fast enough, to suit them. These guys are going to be still hunting around for “signs of hope” on the railroad track when the marriage equality train runs them over.

        Their loss.-

        No, we all lose.

        If the Republican Party hadn’t made a Faustian bargain with the social conservatives, we wouldn’t have 30-odd anti-marriage amendments to overcome. If the supposedly pro-equality conservatives (including Miller) had fought the Faustian bargain instead of buying into it, and been at work in the Republican Party instead of sitting on their hands, the Republican Party might not locked in the stranglehood in which it is now locked, and the Republican Party would already be half-way to common sense, instead of being in a situation where current office holders looking for re-election are afraid to voice whatever support they might have for equality.

        Actions have consequences, and I think we should hold the supposedly pro-equality conservatives to account every bit as much as we hold the maniacs like Michele Bachman and Rick Santorum accountable.

  10. posted by Throbert McGee on

    And with point three, in particular, the CPAC crowd wants activist big government to impose traditional values on the states and on individuals, by forbidding states from recognizing gay unions, for instance

    Really? The entire CPAC crowd wants a federal ban on same-sex domestic partnerships or civil unions in individual states? I know some conservatives are in fact against any and all theoretical forms of legal recognition for homosexual partnerships, but I’m not sure if the overwhelming majority of CPAC participants are totally against the recognition of “gay unions.”

    I’d be more confident in saying that most of them are against the recognition of “gay marriage”. And I’d say that perhaps CPAC is justified in being suspicious of GOProud, which labels itself as “conservative,” but marches in lockstep with the gay left under the “marriage equality” banner.

    To put it another way, some conservatives accuse gays of “bait and switch” tactics — in my own lifetime, we went from “If you support locking up consensual gay couples, you’re a homophobic bigot” to “If you oppose domestic partnership laws, you’re a homophobic bigot” to “If you oppose full marriage equality, you’re a homophobic bigot.”

    And, in my view, the “bait and switch” accusation is not entirely unfounded.

    • posted by JohnInCA on

      … “lockstep”? Really? Supporting Mitt Romney, saying that marriage is a state issue and not even saying they think it’s a pretty nifty thing until relatively recently is “lockstep”? Hell, when they were kicked from CPAC last year they didn’t even have that much, not mentioning gay marriage as part of their platform at all while fully supporting conservative canidates who were completely against it.

      That’s not “lockstep”.

    • posted by Houndentenor on

      Is this supposed to be a joke? GOProud walking “lockstep” with the liberal gays? Really?

      As for bait and switch, that’s insulting. Yes, gay people at one time considered “please don’t subject us to shock treatments for being gay” as progress. That’s not bait and switch. It’s an acknowledgement that you don’t get full equality in one fell swoop. No group ever has. And I should note that for the most part the people against marriage also bemoan the Lawrence v. Texas decision, so that complaint is just as absurd as the “lockstep” one.

  11. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    The Washington Post has an interesting article which suggests why sitting Republican office holders are not likely to be signing on to marriage equality any time soon.

    The take home?

    In other words, a majority of the GOP is firmly entrenched in the anti-gay marriage camp and won’t be budging any time soon. And the party’s base feels very strongly about this issue. … The fact is that any Republican officeholder who supports gay marriage is basically begging for a primary challenge, and that’s why very few have.

  12. posted by Don on

    which was precisely my point when saying those republican pols who oppose us are doing so not because they agree, but because they have to do so to keep their jobs. Kudos to my rep. Ros Lehtinen for being the only sitting rep to say “gays should marry, full stop”

    I see this as a necessary bridge. Former pols come out saying “I don’t believe this (anymore)” and giving notice to social conservatives that their viewpoints are too extreme. Especially when they cannot see it at all.

    What i have no stomach for are the GOProud crowd who shriek “gay marriage is bad for america” to get low taxes. if they said they were for full gay marriage from the outset, no one would be surprised. pathetic.

    • posted by Tom Scharbach on

      Well, what’s to say, Don?

      Politicians who speak and vote anti-equality are speaking and voting against equality, whatever their personal beliefs about the matter. A vote against marriage equality coming from a “pro-equality” politician who is too frightened to vote his conscience counts exactly the same as a vote against marriage equality coming from a rabidly anti-gay politician.

      Look, I live in the real world, so I know you are right. At least a few Republican politicians are privately pro-equality, but talk and walk anti-equality to stay in power. I guess that is a distinction. But I don’t understand what difference it makes to us, either (a) in terms of the past, current and future practical results, or (b) the stranglehold that anti-equality forces within the “base” have over the party in the primary process.

      Unless and until pro-equality conservatives get off their behinds and get as active in the party as the anti-equality conservatives, nothing is going to change.

    • posted by Doug on

      In my mind a politician who may personally believe one thing, marriage equality, but votes against that belief is totally untrustworthy and has no personal integrity. Such a politician who holds is finger to the wind is far worse because you never know for sure where they are coming from. And don’t give me the ‘they will lose their job’ routine. They sought the job and wanted the job. If they essentially have to lie to voters to get the job, they don’t deserve the job in the first place.

      At least with a politician who is personally against marriage equality and votes accordingly you know where they stand.

      • posted by Houndentenor on

        Why should I care what someone “personally believes”? If you claim to be my friend but are happy to stab me in the back, is that supposed to make the dagger less deadly? If you feel bad about doing it, does that change anything? That whole line of thinking is revolting. I don’t care what politicians “really believe”. It’s what they do that matters. As far as personal integrity goes, these are politicians. I’d be reluctant to attribute “personal integrity” to any of them.

  13. posted by Jorge on

    Still, hurrah for current Congressmembers Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida and Richard Hanna of New York.

    Oh, dear. It’s the same people over and over again–minus the ones who got voted out. But at least the same people are going forward.

  14. posted by Rob on

    Shouldn’t they rename themselves RPAC (Reactionary Political Action Conference)? They’ve lost the conservative cred a long time ago.

Comments are closed.