Tangled web - transcripts of Republican viewpoints reveal inconsistencies

Reason, April, 1996 by John J. Pitney, Jr.

Some hard-liners in the pro-life movement do have the intellectual courage to acknowledge and accept this consequence. For the most part, however, those who support the current language have preferred to avert their eyes from its real meaning. Even Pat Buchanan has blinked. His Web site (http://www.buchanan.org/) includes the full text of a speech titled "A Contract With the Unborn." If you download it and conduct a word search, you will not find the words jail, prison, or penalty. The speech does mention the word punish - but only in the context of punishing anti-abortion violence.

To see how Buchanan deals with the penalty issue, one must go to the University of New Hampshire's special site for the state's presidential primary (http:// unhinfo.unh.edu:70/unh/acad/libarts/ comm/nhprimary/nhprim.html), which has a fine directory of candidate statements on various issues. The directory includes a transcript of a talk radio appearance in which Buchanan said: "I think the woman's a victim in an abortion. I don't believe any of them should be put in jail or punished or chased around or get in their face or anything. My goal is very simple - don't do it, save lives." Fine - but he has specifically pledged his support to the current platform language.

Republican leaders prefer to change the subject when abortion comes up. Sooner or later, they will have to pay attention to what their party has been saying on the issue.

Federalism: Republicans like to recite the 10th Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." They really mean it - except when they don't.

The 1993 Senate debate on the crime bill is especially revealing. The Congressional Record transcript of Senate action is available on Thomas (http://thomas.loc.gov), a not-so-user-friendly site run by the Library of Congress. (Leave a good deal of time for scrolling through extraneous material.) During this debate, Senate Republicans supported crime-bill amendments that amounted to a drive-by assault on federalism. With Sen. Al D'Amato (N.Y.), Phil Gramm sponsored an amendment that would have federalized virtually all firearms crimes, and Gramm is still taking credit for the proposal on his Web site (http://www.gramm96.org/). Dole himself sponsored the most excessive provision. The Dole amendment, later scratched in a House-Senate conference, would have made it a federal crime "to participate in, or to conspire to participate in, a criminal street gang, and to induce others to join the gang." In the Dole version of West Side Story, the role of Officer Krupke would have gone to Janet Reno.

Leave aside the silly proposition that the FBI and DEA are better equipped to handle street crime than local police. The more important point is that, if the 10th Amendment means anything, then the federal government has no business even trying. That concern, however, has not stopped Dole from including a 10th Amendment section on his Web site.