Attorney General Erik Holder seems to get stuck with the trickiest challenges. Yes, the debt ceiling, economy, and budget are no walks in the park. But as we’ve seen in the past, the two parties are often willing to each take money and walk away. And money comes on a sliding scale, so opponents can…
Defining Moderation
The Impact of Polarization
A passionate moderate politics isn’t just about promoting moderate policy outcomes. It is more fundamentally about moving beyond the current polarized political environment so we can make productive changes for the benefit of our nation, whether those changes are liberal, conservative, or centrist. When the system itself is broken (or at least severely ailing), individual…
Semantics: Moderate v. Centrist
As you may have noticed already, my use of the term “moderate” is a bit different than what you’ll hear in ordinary political discourse. When someone is called a moderate that usually just means “less dedicated to liberal or conservative principles than other members of the person’s party.” It’s a policy scale that imagines U.S….
DOMA
Two key principles in passionate moderate politics are (1) a commitment to proper procedure and (2) a commitment to upholding and improving our best institutions. Some recent developments over the defense of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) caught my attention as examples of moderate and immoderate politics regarding these two principles. In particular, this…
Transparency: Not a Moderate Principle
Personally, I think the WikiLeaks furor should be sufficient evidence that unfettered transparency is not a moderate good. While transparency has often been equated with “good government,” that presumption usually comes from the left. To an extent, the liberals have a point. If every legislative meeting were held in secret and every decision reached without…
Rep. Amash: Tea Party Moderate
Lest the opening post on Romney give you the wrong impression, let me highlight a Tea Party conservative exercising some principles of moderate politics: Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI). The New York Times had a profile of him last week that caught my attention. The youngest member of the freshman class (he’s all of 30) is…
Romney’s Abandonment of Moderation
Anecdotally, Mitt Romney seems to get a lot of support among disillusioned former Obama supporters and others hoping for a reasonable Republican alternative. While I confess to having initially been intrigued by Romney in the 2008 race, I can’t really imagine supporting him now. Not so much because of his flip-flops on certain policies (though…