A Sad Day for Me, A Sad Day for Minnesota Republicans

I had been planning to write an article laying out what Bush could do to win my vote back, now that I've decided to vote for Kerry. After all, there's still half a year before the election, and a lot can change.

Then I read an article in today's Minneapolis Star Tribune, which is basically a roundup of activity at the state capitol yesterday. Our state legislators are spending taxpayer dollars arguing about basically two issues: state-funded construction projects (aka The Bonding Bill), and gay marriage. But the thing which struck me was the part about Sen. Sheila Kiscaden of Rochester being kicked out of the Republican caucus.

First a little history. Kiscaden had been a Republican state senator for ten years, until she failed to get the Republican nomination for re-election in 2002. So, she switched to the Independence party, and was re-elected. Despite being no longer a Republican, she chose to caucus with the Republicans (which basically means that she was counted as a Republican for purposes of choosing leadership, committee seats, and office assignments). This despite the fact that the Republicans are the minority in the state senate, and Kiscaden probably could have gotten better committee assignments by caucusing with the Democrats.

This is a really sad day for me, personally, and I think a sad day for anyone who believes in a robust two-party system. Apparently independent thinking is no longer welcome in the Republican party, to the extent that they don't even want a centrist-former-Republican-and-still-not-Democrat to sit on their side of the aisle.

I spent much of the 90's thinking of myself as a moderate Republican. I grew up believing that there was room to be a Republican even if you were pro-choice and believed in compromise. The moderate wing of the Republicans was always, to me, where the grown-ups hung out, the people who worried about solving real problems faced by the state and the country, not abstract ideological issues which affect only a handful of actual people. My mother spent 12 years as a moderate Republican in the state legislature (she retired in 2002), and even though I don't agree with her on every issue, she's very practical and gets stuff done.

At some point, moderate Republicans began to disappear. This was most dramatic with Arne Carlson, who was twice elected the Republican Governor of Minnesota without actually being nominated by the Republican party either time. How bizarre is that? Arne was evidently too moderate for the religious right which had come to dominate the nominating convention, even though he was the clear choice of actual voters. The Republican party began to care more about ideological purity than having a big tent and winning elections.

Okay, back to Kiscaden.

The major practical implication of which party an independent chooses to caucus with is in determining which party is the majority and which party is the minority. The majority party gets to pick the senate leaders, gets better committee assignments, gets better parking spaces, and so forth.

Kiscaden had already been booted out of the Republican party for not being ideologically pure enough. She won the election anyway, which suggests that kicking her out of the party might not have been the smartest move. Being a nice person (and a Republican at heart), she chose to caucus with the Republicans--even though the other party might have been more advantageous--and give them an extra vote towards becoming the majority in the state senate.

But now, by forcing her to caucus with the Democrats, the senate Republicans are effectively saying "Not only are we not going to vote for you, we're not going to allow you to vote for us!"

And this brings me full circle.

As a former moderate Republican, now pox-on-both-your-houses Independent who has decided to vote for the Democrat this fall, I had been planning to write an article about what Bush could do to win my vote back.

But apparently, the Republicans no longer want people like me to vote for them.

So perhaps I'll write that article some other day.