Punishing the Innocent

Thomas Sowell:

How did the Republicans manage to bring themselves to this dire condition, just two years after winning both Houses of Congress, the White House, and most of the state governorships?

It wasn’t easy — and it wasn’t new. It was the same thing that caused the first President Bush to lose his bid for reelection in 1992, after having had sky-high approval ratings in 1991. It was betraying the trust of supporters.

Back then it was the betrayal of the “No new taxes” pledge. More recently, it was the even worse betrayal of trying to legislate amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants, combined with insulting our intelligence by saying that it was not amnesty.

Add to this the Republicans’ runaway spending and the fact that the war in Iraq has been going badly, and you have all the ingredients of a political debacle.

One of the ironies of this election is that it is the Republicans in the House of Representatives who seem most likely to pay the biggest price for the disaffection of Republican voters — when in fact it was the House Republicans who stopped both the Senate Republicans and the White House from making mass amnesty the law of the land.

Senate Republican leaders deserve whatever happens to them. If this election were about the fate of one political party rather than another, it would hardly be worth thinking about.

Sowell's point is that this election won't just affect a couple of dozen GOP leaders, but 300 million Americans and untold millions of foreigners.

It would be nice, of course, if the Arlen Specters, Liddy Doles, Denny Hasterts, and Lindsay Grahams of the world felt a similar sense of duty as Sowell expects of American voters.