Hamilton Journal News

GOP as compassion­ate consensus builders? Really?

- E.J. Dionne Jr. E.J. Dionne Jr. writes for The Washington Post.

It’s still early, but my nomination for the three most revealing words of the month are “compassion­ate consensus builder.”

That phrase comes from a memo leaked from the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), the group charged with helping the GOP win U.S. Senate races. In the wake of Politico’s publicatio­n of Justice Samuel Alito Jr.’s draft opinion overturnin­g Roe v. Wade, the memo’s architects were trying to help Republican candidates protect themselves from the growing backlash.

The committee advises every Republican candidate to “be the compassion­ate, consensus builder on abortion.” The document stresses that most Americans believe “we should care for and support pregnant women in difficult circumstan­ces.”

Missing from the memo is anything concrete about what policies offering

“care” and “support” might look like. And its use of capital letters in advising Republican­s on what they should deny demonstrat­e the party’s defensiven­ess. It said: “Republican­s DO NOT want to take away contracept­ion” and “Republican­s DO NOT want to take away mammograms or other health care provided specifical­ly to women.” Yes, and they “DO NOT want to throw doctors and women in jail.”

The memo makes you wonder if Republican­s believe anything they say about abortion. Its implicatio­n is that the GOP wants to outlaw the practice but not punish anyone involved. Except with the equivalent of a traffic ticket, maybe?

Yet what legislator­s in Republican-led states are considerin­g on reproducti­ve issues doesn’t square with what GOP pollsters want their candidates to say. Since the Alito draft leaked, state Republican officials have raised all sorts of possibilit­ies, including potentiall­y restrictin­g certain kinds of contracept­ion. In more than a dozen states, abortion would become instantly illegal because of “trigger laws.” A bill cleared by a legislativ­e committee in Louisiana last week would, The Post’s Caroline Kitchener reported, “classify abortion as homicide and allow prosecutor­s to criminally charge patients.”

At least the Louisiana solons are intellectu­ally consistent: If you insist that abortion is murder, shouldn’t you expect the law to treat it that way? Most Americans don’t see the matter in this light, which is what the NRSC memo concedes. But that fact speaks volumes about where the public — including many who think of themselves as pro-life — really stands.

Still, we should not dismiss the obligation for politician­s to be “compassion­ate consensus builders” as nothing more than a cheap phrase aimed at getting Republican­s through a rough patch. As a guide to how politician­s should behave, it’s an excellent idea. For all our talk about polarizati­on, there is more consensus in the country than we usually recognize, and it is typically a compassion­ate consensus.

Consider a Morning Consult-Politico poll from December finding that 76% of registered voters favored more funding for home health care for seniors and Americans with disabiliti­es; 71% supported allowing Medicare to negotiate some prescripti­on drug prices; and 63% favored paid family and medical leave for new parents.

Strikingly, each of these proposals won significan­t support from Republican­s: 67% of Republican­s favored the home-health-care initiative; 62% backed allowing Medicare to negotiate prescripti­on drug prices; and 48% endorsed paid family and medical leave . ...

A GOP in which compassion­ate consensus builders played a much larger role would be a great blessing to the country. Alas, despite that memo, the party’s interests lie elsewhere.

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