The amazing thing about the Schiavo case

[Snowe08]

The truly amazing thing is how quickly its creating a new faultline within the GOP. The vast majority of Republicans believe in small government, federalism and the sanctity of life. Unfortunately, Republicans who do not live in Florida are now discovering that they cannot choose all three in this case: we can choose small government and states rights, or we can choose the sanctity of life. But not both.

You'd be amazed just how quickly a large number of people in this party have suddenly become outspoken advocates of a huge, unconstitutional expansion of the Federal Government's rights and perogatives. The idea that power should be concentrated in Washington and as far from the people who it affects is precisely what the other party has spent the last seventy-odd years fighting tooth and nail for, the Gingrich Congress finally began to roll it back, and now some in the GOP want to declare surrender just because they don't agree with something that the Florida courts did? And people call me a RINO!

The problem, I think, may be that Republicans in Washington have gotten drunk on the same federal spending and federal authority that the Democrats imbibed during their long hold of Congress, and now those leaders find that big spending, big government and federal power are actually kind of neat when pressed into service of their own ideals. This is why Lord Acton did not write "power tends to purify".

Those Republicans who support these moves - thankfully a minority - simply can't seem to  get past the idea that we aren't always going to control all three branches of the Federal government. They simply don't remember that until ten years ago, we spent four decades without controlling the House of Representatives. These are generally people who are ex-liberals who press the same modus operandi into the service of new goals, and they're in danger of turning a simmering dispute in the party into an outright faultline.