Word: gop
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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WASHINGTON: Call it the Arlen Specter solution. As the impeachment process begins to collapse for want of GOP support, the Republican senator (and former prosecutor) from Pennsylvania is trying to convince his colleagues that presidential punishment, like revenge, is a dish best served cold. Specter's plan: Wait until Bill Clinton leaves office in 2001, then prosecute him as a regular citizen for perjury and obstruction of justice -? presuming, of course, that Clinton's successor does not pardon him first. If the GOP can just cool its heels, Specter says, a jail sentence for the President is "a distinct possibility...
...parade of legal scholars and historians bore witness to. And what did luminaries such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Watergate veteran Rev. Robert Drinan largely agree on? That you can?t, or shouldn?t, censure the President. It?s impeachment or nothing. And that puts the rabidly pro-impeachment GOP majority on the committee on a crash course with public opinion...
Neither is as uncompromising or confrontational as Gingrich was, and this is good news for the GOP: it was Gingrich's intransigence on the budget that paralyzed the government in 1995 and cost the party seats in the 1996 elections, and it was the Speaker who approved the last-minute onslaught of recent Clinton-directed attack ads that many point to as a cause of Republican losses last Tuesday...
Still, both Cox and Livingston are staunch conservatives, and it appears the GOP will miss this opportunity to change the ideology of its leadership. If the midterm elections showed anything, they showed a polarized Republican party: moderate Republicans like Gov. A. Paul Cellucci and Texas Gov. George W. Bush were successful, while the more conservative wing suffered losses in gubernatorial and senate races from Alabama to California...
...GOP is in the midst of an identity crisis, and the races for Speaker and Majority Leader are a rare chance for Republican leaders to hold a referendum on their party's future. Returning social conservatives to these positions will only reaffirm the current leadership's increasingly extremist stance on gay rights and abortion, to name a few issues. The party would be better off heeding the message voters sent Tuesday and finding a more moderate leader...