No Bush Veto
The Shays-Meehan bill has passed the House, and it's likely the Incumbent Protection Act is on the way to the President.
Rich Lowry and NRO are hopeful the President will veto the noxious legislation, as are Paul Gigot and the WSJ editorial board. The bill's restrictions on issue advocacy are noxious, as are numerous loopholes intended to confer the greatest possible advantage on incumbents (making one wonder if the result won't be another surge in term-limits legislation). Various restrictions will be overturned by federal courts on First Amendment grounds in short order if the legislation is not vetoed. And, as Gigot, et al., note, the bill will weaken political parties, further dampening any possibility of the model of responsible party government (which was revived momentarily in the form of the Contract with America, only to crash when Gingrich proved less responsible than one might have hoped).
I hope to be surprised, but I don't think Bush will veto the bill. For one thing, his pattern in Texas suggests otherwise. As governor, Bush would often stake out positions on issues he knew were popular, frequently co-opting Democrats on those issues, and then move as much as necessary to ensure that he would get credit for engineering bipartisan reform and breaking gridlock. It's fair enough to say that Texas Democrats are fairly conservative, and that Bush didn't have to move that far on principle, but he's shown the same tendency in D.C. in the form of Ted Kennedy's education package, which is short on conservative reform and heavy on liberal spending.
Now, it may very well be that Bush thinks he needs to co-opt some Democratic issues (McCain hasn't been a Republican in a while, in my view) and claim success, taking a page from the Clinton playbook, in order to build goodwill and public support for the war on terror. That may be true. But I recall his father thinking that he needed to go along with Democrats on a tax increase in order to build support for his effort against Iraq. That didn't work out so well for elder Bush. As much as I would like to see Bush veto this bill, I think he's going to claim victory on this one and let the courts eliminate the most noxious provisions.
[Posted at 23:27 CST on 02/14/02] [Link]
