After more than four decades, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Penn.) is officially going home. The once-GOP leader announced his re-affiliation with the Democratic Party yesterday after years of work as one of its greatest allies. Sen. Specter "moderate" agenda as a senator on life, spending, marriage, and judges often did more harm to the pro-family cause than good. When asked about the switch, the Pennsylvanian said frankly that he didn't believe he could win the Republican primary against a staunch conservative like Pat Toomey.
His departure officially puts the RINO's (Republicans In Name Only) on the endangered list. One of the few liberal senators left in the GOP, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), lamented Specter's passage in a New York Times editorial. "... It was when we began to emphasize social issues to the detriment of some of our basic tenets as a party that we encountered an electoral backlash." She aggressively tried to make this case to her colleagues yesterday as Republican senators met to discuss Specter's departure.
Of course, the fundamental problem with Snowe's theory is that in the last eight years, the GOP's emphasis on social issues has been as absent as its fiscal discipline. And that, not Snowe's "shrinking ideological confines," is what has banished Republicans to the political wilderness. Moderates like Specter and Snowe voted for the stimulus, the bailouts, legislation that takes innocent human life, and bills that harness free speech. With a track record like that, what exactly is the difference between the two parties if social issues don't distinguish them?
Source: FRC
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