Unintended Consequences

Christine O'Donnell's win is reverberating around the world of Republican-dom, or so we're told. It makes sense. We had already seen that the Tea Party didn't particularly require an incumbent to be genuinely, you know, to the left of George W. Bush to run a primary challenge against them; the likes of Bob Bennett in Utah took care of that. But while Mike Castle was a genuine moderate, and thus didn't strengthen that case, his defeat did show that the Tea Partier need not be an even remotely decent candidate: O'Donnell is something of a tax cheat, and is one of these perennial loser type candidates. So now the conventional wisdom is, NO Republican incumbent is safe. Ever. From anything or anyone.

This is supposed to make Republican Senators more inclined to toe the party line. After all, even the slightest deviation might result in their being, for lack of a better word, teabagged (actually, no, there are plenty of better words, but it's the one the loonies use themselves, so whatever). But I'm wondering if there might be some unintended consequences at work here, and whether the looming spectre of the Tea Party might not loosen Republican discipline in the next Congress.

I've heard a report that Olympia Snowe will not seek re-election. I'm also hearing that Snowe, Voinovich, Collins, Lugar, and maybe more look to support the Defense Authorization Act, which includes a repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell and a piece of immigration reform called the DREAM Act. If the idea is that the DelaWTF? affair will have Tea Partified incumbent Senators, how is this possible? Maybe it's because they've overreached. The Tea Party had started behaving so irrationally that maybe some Republicans with reasonable tendencies are starting to figure that they can't placate them rationally. Something like 60% of Maine Republicans want to oust Snowe. She'd be better off electorally pulling the full Specter and becoming Sen. Snowe (D-ME). Will she get primaried? Yes. Is there anything she can do to avoid the challenge or placate her state's Tea Party? I don't think so. Does it, therefore, make sense for her to tack hard right? Nope. If she ever wants to be re-elected, what makes sense is to abandon the charade of taking the GOP whip and tack left, or at least back to the good ol' center. Maybe become an Independent, like Jeffords (and if any state could elect an independent Senator, it's Maine, and the Senator would be Ms. Snowe). Maybe become a Democrat: I'd say, let's make her a committee chair! But her future does not lie with a Republican primary electorate, and it never will, so she has zero incentive to toe the party line.

The same goes for some other Republicans with a genuinely moderate record, though to be fair the only other one is really Collins. But there might be others who, at this point, might not be favored to win a primary; I doubt Voinovich could at this point, and maybe not Scott Brown either. So if you start seeing the Republican discipline shatter, especially if they have a disappointing midterm, this might be one explanation for why.