The Strident Centrist Blog

The Honorable Jim Ramstad
United States House of Representatives
Minnesota, Third District

Dear Mr. Ramstad:

I attended the first of the four Town Meetings you held last week, the one at the Minnetonka City Hall at noon on Wednesday, August 8. I was the second person you called on during the discussion period, the one whom you understood to say that you “blindly followed” the far right House Republican leadership, and that you were no longer a centrist Republican. You may recall that I objected to that characterization of my remarks, as did at least half a dozen others who were in attendance. I regret that I was not as clear as I might have been, so I thought it would be useful if I pass on in writing what I intended to say.

I opened by taking issue with your comment during the introductory remarks that the war in Iraq was the top priority issue of the day, and suggested that stopping the undermining of the pillars of Constitution government by the Bush-Cheney administration was even more urgent. I then said that that I had voted for Bill Frenzel and you continuously from the time I moved into the district in 1979 until the year 2000. I also said, as I recall, that I stopped voting for you in 2002 because I was alarmed that the Republican House leadership was not pushing back against the administration’s use of 9/11 to gut Constitutional protections, and its assertions of unitary executive power. To be sure, the Democrats did not acquit themselves well during those times either, but your party was in control and it abjectly failed to defend the traditional prerogatives of the Legislative Branch, a failure that if left to stand will set ominous precedents for the future. I then said that I had concluded that any good you might accomplish in Washington in the policy arena would be negated many times over by the fact that, as a member of the Republican caucus, you were bound to support its far-right, sycophantic nominees for the House leadership in the event that your party won a general election. If I used the term “blindly following” in any of the remarks I’m summarizing from memory here, it was not in reference to you personally but rather to the slavish acquiescence of your caucus’s leaders to the marching orders from the White House.

I support many of the positions you take on the issues of the day, as well as your eagerness to work with all members of the House, regardless of party, toward effective and achievable compromises. But frankly, Mr. Ramstad, your chances of getting your legislation enacted through your party have steadily diminished as the far right has taken it over during the past thirty plus years. Those leaders have been playing you and the diminishing handful of centrist Republicans for suckers. They’re happy to have your votes to organize the House come January of each odd-numbered year, but they blow you off on your policy issues and your efforts to govern effectively through compromise. This is especially the case when those issues have substantial bipartisan support, because the far right doesn’t view it as being to its advantage to pass any legislation that the Democrats might claim as an accomplishment, regardless of its worthiness or the urgency of the nation’s needs. You inadvertently confirmed this in your responses to several of the questions of other listeners. In one instance someone praised your commendable advocacy of mental health issues, and especially your authorship of the Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act. You responded that this widely and bi-partisanly supported bill was finally, after twelve years, going to get to the House floor. You neglected to mention, however, that it was your party’s leaders during those years who had refused to let it come to a vote.

There’s a legend that says if you drop a live frog into a pot of boiling water she’ll immediately realize she’s in lethal peril and jump out, scalded a bit, but not much worse off for the experience. However if you put the same frog in a pot of cool water and gradually turn up the heat, she won’t realize she’s in mortal danger until it’s too late. Many Republicans old enough to remember the party of the days before Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich are like the frogs in that once cool but now dangerously hot water. The change has been so gradual they haven’t noticed it. But some do, and many of the most shrill denunciations of the Bush-Cheney cabal’s assaults on the Constitution and appallingly bad governance are from people with impeccable Republican credentials: Paul Craig Roberts, a supply-side economist and an Assistant Treasury Secretary in the 1980s; Bruce Fein, a Constitutional scholar who served in the Reagan Justice Department; Paul O’Neill, George W. Bush’s first Secretary of the Treasury and also a figure in the Nixon and Ford eras; and even former Republican Congressman Bob Barr of Georgia, a leader of the effort to impeach President Clinton.

Another one is John Dean, who as White House Counsel to President Nixon pled guilty to a felony for his actions in that capacity, and who thus knows malfeasance when he sees it. His 2006 book Conservatives Without Conscience began in the mid-1990s as a joint project with his mentor since childhood, former Senator Barry Goldwater, who even back then was concerned about what the Republican Party was becoming. Dean put the effort on the back burner when the late Senator’s health began what proved to be its final decline, but revived it as it became apparent that the disturbing trends that originally led to the project were on steroids in the Bush 43 era.

Mr. Ramstad, the Republican Party has strayed far from the path on which it began under the guidance of President Lincoln, and continued under the likes of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. Under the influence of the elements that now dominate it, your party has become a lethal threat to the future existence of the United States as a democratically governed nation. Some of those elements may genuinely mean well, but either misread the history of our earlier years, or believe that the threats we face in the 21^st century justify policies that of necessity the surrender of many of our freedoms and privacy rights. Others, however, are not so well-intentioned, and are driven by thirsts for power that cannot be slaked within a functioning democracy.

These elements have penetrated the Republican Party apparatus to a depth and breadth that makes it unlikely that the diminishing number of activists and office-holders who represent the best of what the party used to be, such as yourself, can rescue it in any near-term time frame. Its descent to its present state took almost two generations, and rescuing it, if possible at all, will take decades as well. Therefore I, and many other Americans who once supported the Republican Party to greater or lesser degrees, can no longer vote for any candidate who runs for any local, state or federal office under its banner.

Mr. Ramstad, the most patriotic thing a traditional Republican member of the House of Representatives can do now is to resign from the that party but remain active in politics and run for reelection either as an independent, or as a candidate of another party. If you and several of your compatriots in the House and Senate do this simultaneously, you could set in motion the political realignment that ultimately sends those who perverted the Republican Party into the insidious institution it is today to their well-deserved place on the ash heap of history.