Vote the party not the man

I know, you're not supposed to say that. But putting moderate Republicans back into the House and Senate will only cause the rightward gallop to accelerate. None of them have voted against the GOP when it counted - Arlen Specter even caved and voted to destroy Habeas Corpus, hoping that 'the courts' would 'fix it'.

Harold Meyerson sums it up nicely today:

"There is no one who has voted more often with the Democrats than Linc Chafee," Susan Collins, the Republican senator from Maine, told the New York Times of her Rhode Island colleague, who is trailing Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse in the polls. "Yet that didn't stop them from going after him with everything they had."

And we all remember how moderate Republicans stopped the conservatives who control their party from going after moderate Democrats in previous elections, right? How they pleaded with Tom DeLay not to push through his mid-decade reapportionment of Texas, which led to the ousting of such veteran conservative Democrats as Rep. Charles Stenholm? How they deplored the campaign that Republican Saxby Chambliss waged against Georgia Democratic Sen. Max Cleland, who'd lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam, for being soft on national security?

Indeed, it was precisely the Republicans' success at defeating the centrist and center-right Democrats in the South over the past two decades that has driven the GOP steadily rightward. And for all their protestations of moderation, the northern Republicans -- from Susan Collins to Lincoln Chafee to Rep. Chris Shays -- abetted that transformation. While some of them may have favored raising the minimum wage, all the Republican moderates in the House voted for rules that prohibited the Democrats from bringing a minimum-wage hike to the floor unless, as their Republican leaders dictated, it was linked to other provisions (such as a permanent repeal of the estate tax) that would doom it in the Senate. While they may have harbored doubts about the wisdom of the president's course in Iraq, their party conducted no oversight hearings.

So don't put someone like Chafee or Shays or Collins back into the government. They may talk moderate, but they back Hastert and his ilk down the line. It's time to take back the legislative branch; two more years of unfettered GOP rule is more than the country can stand.

Vote the party not the man - they do.