Can Republicans beat the fringe? Can they find the middle?

Yesterday I blogged about liberals and the Left’s goofy expectation that Barack Obama would do, well, everything in his first two years in office.

Today, I want to wrestle with conservatives and with the Right’s very credible expectation that Republicans will attempt to do some pretty dumb things if they win a majority.

By dumb I mean scary.  Like changing the US Constitution in order to satisfy some of the GOP’s loopiest, far-out supporters.

Case in point is the effort to amend or eliminate the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which guarantees full citizenship rights to anyone born on US soil.

Here’s Sen. John Kyl talking about the proposal:

The 14th Amendment was pushed through by Republicans in 1866, part of the party’s efforts to end the evil of slavery and the disenfranchisement of African Americans.

Now, some conservative are convinced that a lot of illegal foreign workers are using their American-born children as “anchor babies.”

The idea that we will solve the illegal immigration problem by turning infants into criminals, and by revoking one of the bedrock standard’s of American democracy, is wrong-headed.

(For the record, the GOP’s own website still brags about its passage of the measure, pointing out that “all votes in favor of the 14th Amendment were from Republicans, and all votes against it were from Democrats.”)

But rather than draw a bright line against this kind of wing-nuttery, flailing Republican leaders — hoping to appease an increasingly restless conservative base — have signed on.

Senators Lindsey Graham, John Kyl, Charles Grassley, and even John McCain have suggested that it’s a repeal worth considering.

George Washington is supposed to have said that the Senate would serve as the saucer to cool the tea.  But the tea party is serving up a brew that the GOP can’t seem to resist.

In recent months, we’ve seen top Republican leaders repudiate many of their own best ideas, because angry voices on the fringe-right — and on talk radio — gave them the flutters.

Cap-and-trade energy policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions?  It’s a Republican idea, developed in part by our own John McHugh.

John McCain and Sarah Palin campaigned in support of the policy in 2008.  Now the GOP is working to shred the proposal.

A requirement that all Americans with means pay for their own health insurance, so that the rest of us don’t have to pick up the tab?  It was developed by the GOP, and supported strongly by Sen. Charles Grassley.

Under pressure from the right, he now calls the idea “unconstitutional.”

A requirement that doctors do end-of-life planning and counseling?  It was a Republican proposal that Republicans later derided falsely as “death panels.”

Mainstream Republicans — including Ronald Reagan’s former budget director David Stockman — have ackowledged that cutting deficits will be impossible without boosting Federal revenues.

But the vast majority of GOP leaders won’t talk realistically about the damage being done by the Bush-era tax cuts.

Finally, and closer to home, Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio has signed on to the deeply un-American idea that a place of worship — yes, a mosque — shouldn’t be located near Ground Zero in New York City.

The mosque is supported by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who pointed out in a speech this week that the city’s Dutch administrators once rejected a proposal for a synagogue on Manhattan Island.

Here are the crux of Bloomberg’s comments:

“The simple fact is, this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship, and the government has no right whatsoever to deny that right. And if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

“Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here.”

The problem here isn’t — as Rachel Maddow and others have suggested — that Republicans are flip-floppers or panderers.

The deeper worry is that senior Republican leaders are apparently so rudderless, and so politically vulnerable, that they’re willing to adopt really bad ideas — and drop good ones — whenever Rush Limbaugh or his ilk wag their fingers.

Historically, one of the main purposes of our two big political parties is establishing a broad consensus, filtering out the kookiest ideas, and bringing the dialogue and debate toward the middle.

Right now, that crucial piece of the GOP’s machinery is badly broken.

Tags: election10