Stopping Specter

Bill Berkowitz

November 12, 2004

Conservative Christian activists, anxious that their social agenda be adopted in full by the Bush administration, are trying to deny Sen. Arlen Specter the top spot on the Senate Judiciary Committee. To sample their tactics, click here . Writer Bill Berkowitz says this battle is just a sign of things to come as moderates and the Christian right struggle for control of the Republican party's domestic agenda.

Bill Berkowitz is a longtime political observer and columnist.

The first post-election "culture war" battle is underway and it isn’t being fought out on the floor of the House or the Senate and it isn’t about same-sex marriage, abortion rights or embryonic stem cell research. For the Christian right it’s all about Stopping Specter; mobilizing fax-blasters, Internet activists and phone bankers to call Republican senators—particularly those in leadership positions and on the Judiciary Committee—and prevent Sen. Arlen Specter from replacing Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah and taking the helm of the powerful committee come January.

While the now five-term incumbent senator from Pennsylvania weathered a series of political storms this year, the squall hurtling his way may prove to be his undoing: Earlier this year, with the support of the Bush administration—and against the wishes of a number of Christian right leaders—Sen. Specter survived a bitter primary challenge from the right by defeating conservative Congressman Pat Toomey.

On Election Day, while Sen. John Kerry was triumphing over President Bush in the state, Sen. Specter was handily defeating his opponent, Democratic Congressman Joe Hoeffel.

Specter has had his eye on the big prize—becoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the committee that reviews and votes on federal judicial nominees—for quite some time. For years, however, the senator has been barely tolerable to Christian right organizations like the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family and the American Family Association. On their most cherished issues he is way too liberal: He’s pro-choice, favors increased government funding for stem cell research—his recent campaign featured a commercial with actor Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease—and he doesn’t cotton to the full panoply of the party’s anti-gay agenda.

Centering The GOP

During his tough primary fight, Specter did what most politicians do when they're threatened with defeat; according to the (Harrisburg) Patriot-News , Specter “courted conservative voters by saying he would confirm only ‘strict constructionist’ judges, a term used by conservatives to denote judges they favor." During the fall campaign, Specter said that he "favored ‘centrist judges.’"

The senator was in a feisty mood after his victory: He called his election a “victory for moderate Republicans,” an increasingly endangered breed of Republican. “[W]e have a narrowly divided country, and that’s not a traditional mandate,” he told the Associated Press. “The number-one item on my agenda is to try to move the party to the center.”

Later, the senator appeared to issue a warning to the Bush administration not to send up judges for confirmation that would try to overturn Roe v. Wade—the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion: "When you talk about judges who would change the right of a woman to choose, overturn Roe v. Wade , I think that is unlikely." 

Over the past four years, Democrats have had some success blocking the confirmation of a number of Bush’s conservative judicial picks, and Sen. Specter was picking up on that theme: “The president is well aware of what happened, when a bunch of his nominees were sent up, with the filibuster," Specter added. “And I would expect the president to be mindful of the considerations which I am mentioning."

Sen. Specter’s remarks went over like a lead balloon. 

On the heels of an Election Day that saw the Christian right flexing its collective electoral muscles through its ability to turn out the so-called values voters, the big conservative Christian groups were not about to let Specter’s good deed go unpunished.

Dr. James Dobson, the head of Focus on the Family, one of the most powerful Christian ministries and organizations in America, told ABC’s “This Week” that Specter "is a problem, and he must be derailed." Dr. Dobson issued his own warning to the Bush administration: They must implement the broad conservative agenda “or I believe they'll pay a price in the next election." Bush "has strongly stated that he is pro-life, that he wants to protect life, not only unborn life but the culture of life, to protect the institution of marriage," Dobson said. "We want to see the president implement the things that he ran on," he added. "And especially, especially putting conservative judges on the judiciary," which he described as "the key to everything," Dobson said.

In line with Dr. Dobson’s personal comments, CitizenLink, “a policy and culture information service of Focus on the Family,” issued an “Action Alert” on Monday, Nov. 8, calling on its constituents to bombard their Republican senators with phone calls and e-mail in order “to prevent Specter from taking over the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee in January.” 

Backpedaling

Although Sen. Specter has repeatedly tried “to distance himself” from his post-election remarks, CitizenLink maintains that the senator’s “unfitness for the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee” goes deeper than his recent remarks. “He has a long history of dismissing pro-lifers as ‘extremists’ and has gone so far as to advocate stripping his party's platform of its formal opposition to abortion,” said the CitizenLink Action Alert.

“And, nearly 20 years ago, he helped his Democratic colleagues achieve what is still considered the greatest injustice in the history of judicial nomination battles— the defeat of Judge Robert Bork's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Tony Perkin’s Washington Update , the daily online newsletter of the Washington, D.C.-based Family Research Council, headlined Monday’s issue “Stop Specter.” Under the headline “Let the Battle Begin,” the FRC’s website advocated dumping Sen. Specter because his “troubling” comments “come on the heels of an election that overwhelmingly affirmed pro-life candidates, and Pres. Bush has also repeatedly affirmed his commitment to a culture of life.” 

At MichNews.com, Mary Ann Kreitzer, president of Les Femmes, a far-right activist Virginia-based Catholic group, echoed these sentiments. Kreitzer claimed that the idea of Sen. Specter heading the Judiciary Committee was a “nightmare” for “values voters.” Kreitzer reported that the Rev. Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association had collected more than 90,000 signatures on a petition opposing Sen. Specter’s chairmanship. In addition, a website called NotSpecter.com has been created. 

The Coming Storm

The battle over Sen. Specter is the GOP's first intramural engagement since President Bush’s victory last week, but it is only one of a long list of potential squabbles that may come to the fore in the coming months.

With a twinkle in his eye, and refusing to paper over vast differences within the right wing movement, Richards Viguerie—the man who helped usher in the conservative revolution 25 years ago by harnessing direct mail to right wing causes and candidates—recently told PBS’ Bill Moyers that a civil war within the Republican Party was inevitable. Regardless of which candidate wins the presidential election, Viguerie predicted that the battle for control of the GOP will begin the day after Election Day.

Using the same “civil war” metaphor, longtime conservative economist Bruce Bartlett expressed a similar view in an interview with reporter Ron Suskind. In Suskind’s Oct. 17 piece for the New York Times Magazine , Bartlett said that “If Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' According to Suskind, it will be “essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.”

And Judie Brown, the president of the anti-abortion group the American Life League, recently spelled out her organization’s concerns in a press release: “Many pro-life groups are gleefully declaring victory following George W. Bush's apparent re-election, but I cannot share in their enthusiasm. It is true that Mr. Bush defeated one of the most solidly pro-abortion candidates to ever seek the White House. However, the Bush administration's first term has been less than sterling in terms of total commitment to the pro-life effort.”

Brown pointed out that the “killing [by abortion] continued unabated” during Bush’s first term, “and indications are that abortion on demand will remain decriminalized during the coming years.” 

Sen. Specter showed up Nov. 10, on Fox News Channel’s "The Big Story" to answer questions from host John Gibson about the controversy. When asked what he would say to his colleagues who were meeting to discuss his fate, Sen. Specter professed his loyalty to the president and the party and cited a laundry list of votes attesting to that loyalty: he voted to confirm William Rehnquist as chief justice; he actively supported the nomination of Clarence Thomas; he’s supported every one of President Bush’s anti-choice judicial appointments.

As we go to press, it is unclear whether Sen. Specter will survive the Christian right’s onslaught. Regardless of the outcome of this battle, count on seeing factions of the GOP squaring off against each other: Paleoconservatives of the Pat Buchanan stripe will be taking the measure of the neoconservatives running President Bush’s foreign policy agenda, while Christian conservatives will be battling moderate Republicans for control over the party’s domestic agenda.