Richard Viguerie: Conservatives Don't Need a Litmus Test for RINOs
[Viguerie's op-eds have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsday, USA Today, the Scripps-Howard newspapers, and literally hundreds of other publications.
The Washington Post called him “the Conservatives’ Voice of America.”]
In an interview with the Baltimore Sun today, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele publicly rejected the candidate “litmus test” proposed by a group of national conservatives. The concept behind the proposal is to force a certain “conservative ideological purity” on to candidates and elected officials in the Republican Party so that Republicans don’t end up supporting socialist-statist policies. The RNC will vote on the proposal next month when it holds its annual meeting.
While well intentioned, the litmus test proposal would do little to solve the two fundamental problems within the Republican Party: bad leadership and conservative acquiescence to bad leadership...
... The Bush supported Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003 was the largest Federal Government give-away program in decades. Former Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay broke a few arms in the party to make sure this legislative travesty passed, and former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert cheered him on. At the time of its passage, Karl Rove mistakenly crowed that the legislation meant that the Republican Party had wrapped up electoral dominance for years to come.
In the fall of 2008, both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Boehner voted in favor of President Bush’s now infamous Troubled Asset Relief Program legislation, a $700 billion bailout of large financial institutions which merely transferred large piles of money from average taxpayers to Wall Street fat cats who had run their businesses into the ground, based in part on requirements forced on them by Congress.
During both of these disasters, as well as many others, most of the national conservative leadership maintained its silence as the “pragmatists” destroyed free markets and conservative principles...
Read entire article at Conservative HQ
The Washington Post called him “the Conservatives’ Voice of America.”]
In an interview with the Baltimore Sun today, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele publicly rejected the candidate “litmus test” proposed by a group of national conservatives. The concept behind the proposal is to force a certain “conservative ideological purity” on to candidates and elected officials in the Republican Party so that Republicans don’t end up supporting socialist-statist policies. The RNC will vote on the proposal next month when it holds its annual meeting.
While well intentioned, the litmus test proposal would do little to solve the two fundamental problems within the Republican Party: bad leadership and conservative acquiescence to bad leadership...
... The Bush supported Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003 was the largest Federal Government give-away program in decades. Former Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay broke a few arms in the party to make sure this legislative travesty passed, and former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert cheered him on. At the time of its passage, Karl Rove mistakenly crowed that the legislation meant that the Republican Party had wrapped up electoral dominance for years to come.
In the fall of 2008, both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Boehner voted in favor of President Bush’s now infamous Troubled Asset Relief Program legislation, a $700 billion bailout of large financial institutions which merely transferred large piles of money from average taxpayers to Wall Street fat cats who had run their businesses into the ground, based in part on requirements forced on them by Congress.
During both of these disasters, as well as many others, most of the national conservative leadership maintained its silence as the “pragmatists” destroyed free markets and conservative principles...