Pat Toomey of the Club for Growth has a piece in the Wall Street Journal today defending the honorable practice of RINO hunting.
The column explains why some Republicans don't care much for the Club for Growth, and what RINO hunting is:
Elect as many Republicans as possible, regardless of how they will vote once in office.
It is for this reason that challenges to incumbents are deemed sacrilegious, no matter how far the incumbent has strayed from conservative principles. And it is for this reason that party leaders defend some of the most liberal incumbents, also known as RINOs (Republicans in Name Only), and assail the Club PAC for helping to elect true conservatives.
I've considered myself a Republican since before I could vote, going back to the early Ronald Reagan days.
But a political party is ultimately only as good as the philosophy which drives it. If it stops advancing the ideology which ostensibly comprises its core values, it's useless beyond a simple apparatus of power for a certain group.
Boys and girls, power for the sake of power has never been a conservative value, and it's never been a true Republican value.
Those who believe it is the utmost value of the Republican Party got their party sacked into the minority in 2006. Have they learned from that mistake? I don't think so.
Toomey tells it like it is, and makes a prediction:
A Republican majority is only as useful as the policies that majority produces. When those policies look a lot like Democratic ones, the base rightly questions why it should keep Republicans in power. As the party gears up for elections in the fall, it ought to look closely at the losses suffered under a political strategy devoid of principle. Otherwise, it can look forward to a bad case of déjà vu.
The Republican Party always has been and should remain a vehicle for conservative ideas.
If the vehicle isn't going in the direction conservatives want to go, it may be time to get off and find another vehicle. After all, what good is a car that won't go where you need it to?
