Concern remains over Cabinet

I just don’t understand these republicans. President Bush’s first weeks in office have been spent appeasing his conservative base. You would think conservatives would be elated with Bush’s opening moves.

Not quite.

According to an article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Monday, some of the GOP’s most extreme conservatives (from Bush’s own state, interestingly enough) are already worried that George W. might be wandering too close to the center.

This cracks me up.

George W. has bent over backwards to please the right-wing of his party. One of his first moves in office was to eliminate federal funding for overseas clinics that offer abortion counseling. He has pushed his Reaganesque tax cut with zeal, and it looks like he might get a few conservative democrats to go along with it. Whether or not the moderates who questioned the size of Bush’s tax cut (see: McCain, John) go along with it, is a different story.

Bush, to the wrath of democrats, kept his education plan, vouchers and all, intact.

But that isn’t enough for the fringe R’s.

The complaint by some conservatives in Monday’s article is that Bush’s Cabinet selections were not conservative enough. One conservative in the article was particularly upset with the selection of pro-choicer Christie Todd Whitman as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

What exactly does the EPA have to do with abortion? Nothing that I can think of.

Although most of Bush’s Cabinet appointees can’t be labeled as hard right, the most important ones are. John Ashcroft, everyone’s favorite future attorney general, is an outspoken critic of abortion, once opposed court ordered school desegregation in St. Louis, is against most gun laws and has already hinted he will not go after white collar criminals as much as the Clinton administration did.

Gale Norton, Bush’s pick for secretary of the interior, is as anti-environment as they come. Bush’s original pick for secretary of labor, Linda Chavez, is unabashedly anti-labor.

Bush has picked a very conservative cabinet. Those picks who do lean toward the center or to the left on certain issues, such as Colin Powell as secretary of state and Norman Mineta as secretary of transportation, are in posts where they affect policy very little on that issue.

The right-wingers are either as loony as I always thought they were, or this is a calculated move to make Bush appear to be in the center, allowing him to push his conservative agenda while under the pretense of leaning toward the center. As gripey as the conservatives are, it is probably the latter.

Does this mean that Bush’s base is going to abandon him? No. Only a handful are worried, at least publicly, that Bush is wavering too close to the center. But it is interesting that some republicans from his own state are already questioning Bush’s ideology.

Republicans balked when pundits and democrats said Bush was going to have trouble reigning in the conservative wing of his party. But if there are already voices of dissent (however small they may be) coming from his home state, the seeds of a showdown between the moderate and conservative wings of the Republican Party have already been planted.

Let’s see if they bloom.

Brandon Ortiz is a freshman news-editorial journalism major from Fort Worth.
He can be reached at (b.p.ortiz@student.tcu.edu)

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