Right Election Lessons
by David Keene 

Republicans paid a heavy price in the 2006 election for their failure over the last few years to live up to the principles and standards that the American people believed they represented when they took the House of Representatives from the Democrats a decade ago.

This year’s election turned out to be just what many in the GOP leadership and those of us outside Congress had feared: a referendum on the performance of Republicans in the White House and the Congress, rather than a contest between competing ideological visions.

Indeed, this may have been the least ideological election in modern memory, with voters rejecting Republicans across the board not because they rejected where Republicans want to take the country so much as Republicans' performance in taking us there.

In recent years we have seen Republicans who have spent a lifetime professing a belief in a smaller, limited national government band together to spend more money on Washington solutions to state and local problems than their Democratic predecessors.

We have watched Republicans, who were elected by promising the highest standards of integrity, come to Washington to do good and stay to do well—for themselves, their families and their friends—and, in so doing so, demean the offices to which they were elected in the process.

We have stood by as Republicans have flaunted, twisted and ignored rules to achieve their own partisan rather than principled ends; leaders who have used earmarks to seduce reluctant members to vote for legislation they knew was wrong and kept votes open for hours while they and their White House allies bludgeoned their colleagues into line in support of such legislation.

With the results now counted, it is time for conservatives, Republicans and those who made them pay for their performance to demand better.

It is our hope that the new leadership that emerges will follow conservative principles and work with the White House when the President is right and even with the new Democratic congressional leadership when good ideas come from that quarter.

They should remember that many of those Democrats who were elected ran as moderate conservatives in districts that are traditionally conservative. Democratic candidates didn’t articulate much in the way of a concrete agenda, but they did make promises to those whose votes they sought. Many of them promised they won’t raise our taxes, demanded fiscal responsibility and attacked their GOP opponents for their participation in the spending binge that has characterized Washington in recent years. Many also disclaimed any intention to abridge traditional second amendment rights and declared themselves pro-life.

If these candidates were sincere—and we have to believe that they were—then Republicans should be able to work with them on substantive issues where there is agreement—and they should be prepared to do so.

At the same time, Republicans should go back to the principled stands that made America’s voters proud to vote for them and that brought millions of traditionally Democratic voters into the Republican fold—voters who deserted them simply because they believed they’d been had.

Nancy Pelosi has said that she wants to reform the way Congress does business and has in the past supported many of the same reforms that have been suggested by the Republican Study Committee and other conservative members.

In fact, she and 162 of her colleagues signed onto a package of procedural reforms before the election that included earmark reform, limits on the leadership’s power through the Rules Committee to alter legislation before it reaches the floor, a requirement that members have an actual day to read the legislation on which they are being asked to vote before the vote is called, and a limit on the amount of time a vote can be kept open.

These are needed reforms and if she and her colleagues were serious when they endorsed them, they should enact them as their first order of business in the next Congress.

Most conservatives in and out of Congress think of themselves as conservatives first and Republicans second, but most of us are Republicans because we believe most Republicans share the principles and values we wish to see reflected in public policy.

At the same time, however, we are and have always been willing to cross party and ideological lines to accomplish those goals and continue to be willing to do so.

We hope that the party in which most of us have invested our trust will learn the right lessons and work to redeem that trust, lest it be lost forever.