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Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President First Edition
In this smart, candid, and surprising political memoir, Lincoln Chafee offers a behind-the-scenes look at the first six years of the Bush Administration from the vantage point of one of the few Republican moderates in the Senate.
When Senator Chafee (R-RI) went to Washington, he encountered a Republican Party drifting so far to the right it no longer stood for the mainstream principles that united Americans. Instead, under the direction of George W. Bush, the Party had fallen victim to extremism. In the face of this trend, Chafee stood fast as one of the most liberal Republicans in the Senate, seeking to cut across partisan lines at the very time that they threatened to irrevocably divide the nation.
A political iconoclast, Chafee was the only Republican senator to have expressed support for same-sex marriage; the only Republican to vote in favor of reinstating the top federal tax rate on upper-income payers; the only Republican in the Senate to have voted against authorization of the use of force in Iraq; the only Republican to vote for the Levin-Reed amendment calling for a nonbinding timetable for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq; and the only Republican to vote against Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. Chafee favored increased federal funding for health care, supported affirmative action and gun control, supported women’s reproductive rights, and endorsed federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Sometimes referred to by conservatives as a RINO (Republican in Name Only), Chafee turns the tables on the right and asks why it has enabled Bush Jr. to pull the GOP and the nation away from traditional principles of fiscal conservatism, respect for our environment, and aversion to foreign entanglements.
Unabashedly frank, Chafee’s memoir recounts his political journey from small-town mayor to a voice crying from the congressional wilderness. He offers a forward-looking assessment of what comes next for the Republican and Democratic parties, and he also addresses the potential rise of a third party within the void created by bipartisan extremism. Most important, Chafee sounds a wake-up call to his Party, and to all Americans, by challenging our government to strive, as Abraham Lincoln once articulated, “to elevate the condition of men.”
- EditionFirst Edition
- PublisherThomas Dunne Books
- Publication dateApril 1, 2008
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions6.17 x 1 x 8.26 inches
- Print length272 pages
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About the Author
LINCOLN CHAFEE served in the United States Senate as the Republican senator from Rhode Island from 1999 to 2007. Currently, he is working as a distinguished visiting fellow at Brown University, and he has been mentioned as a candidate for governor of Rhode Island in 2010. He lives in Rhode Island with his wife and three children.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
In the decades before the seismic congressional elections of 1994, two dozen moderate Republican senators would meet for lunch in the U.S. Capitol every Wednesday to build camaraderie, enjoy one another’s company, and talk about how they would work together in the week to come. They represented states in every corner of America and believed in conserving natural resources, protecting individual liberties, confronting foreign nations only when it served the national interest, using the tools of government to help our most vulnerable citizens, and raising enough revenue to cover spending.
By 1999, when I became the Republican senator from Rhode Island, the party had drifted so far right that only five Republicans were willing to be seen at the moderates’ table on Wednesdays. We had no one there from, say, Wyoming or Kansas anymore. Our most senior member was Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. Like me, the rest were New Englanders: Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, and James Jeffords of Vermont, who would later quit the party to become an Independent.
The real action was at the Conservative Steering Committee, which had probably started out at a table for five and then grew to include almost the entire Republican caucus. The Senate delegation from the South was inexorably turning from conservative Democrat to conservative Republican, and the hard-liners solidified their gains when they took over the House and the Senate in 1994, two years into President Bill Clinton’s first term. The Republicans who came out of the House and were elected to the Senate that year had chafed under Democratic rule and were eager to flex their muscles as the new majority.
Early in December 2000, Senator Specter asked Richard Cheney, our Republican vice presidential candidate, to have lunch with us on Wednesday, December 13. The vote-counting fiasco in Florida was under way, and no one knew whether Texas governor George W. Bush or Vice President Al Gore had been elected the nation’s forty-third president. Then, the night before we were to meet with Mr. Cheney, the news broke: The U.S. Supreme Court had declared the Florida recount unconstitutional. The Court authorized Katherine Harris, Florida’s Republican secretary of state, to declare Bush and Cheney victorious.
We Republicans had won the presidency by a single vote in the Electoral College and a single vote in the Supreme Court. In the executive branch, winning by a whisker is as good as winning in a landslide, but not so in the Senate. For the first time in a century we had a Senate split down the middle, fifty-fifty, with a Republican vice president available to break a tie in our favor. That whisker-thin margin of victory had real consequences, to my way of thinking.
It meant that our small club of five moderate Republican votes would be vital to President-elect Bush if he had any hope of getting his legislative initiatives through.
Despite that happy turn of events—happy for us moderates, I thought—I was sure Richard Cheney would have more important things to do that following noon than keep his appointment with our lonely band of five.
I was wrong about that, and more.
I made my way through a rabbit warren of corridors to Senator Specter’s office, actually a satellite of his main office, and so well hidden in the Capitol we called it “the hideaway.” Hidden or not, I found a crowd of reporters and photographers and, in the middle of that crush, our new vice president-elect. I was surprised and delighted to see him there and felt I was a witness to history in the making. George Bush had promised to bring America together again, and here was his running mate holding out his hand to the key moderate votes the president-elect would need to keep that promise. What a humbling experience it must be for Mr. Cheney, I thought, as I watched him navigate the press gauntlet: to lose the popular vote but come to power with a one-vote margin in the Electoral College after a historic Supreme Court ruling.
President-elect Bush had made a solemn promise to be “a uniter, not a divider.” That resonated after six years of sniping and bickering between the White House and the Congress, led by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. In the Senate, Majority Leader Bob Dole had the unenviable task of trying to keep the new breed of fire-breathing Republicans in line. On June 12, 1996, after less than two years, the job went to Trent Lott of Mississippi, who relished partisan battle.
Soon the country would endure the seamy and embarrassing spectacle of the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton. It was a sickening discord that seemed to go on and on without end. The American people and many in Congress were thirsting for the different approach that George Bush had promised in 2000.
In my first year in the Senate, I dreaded going to the moderates’ Wednesday lunches because we never seemed to get past complaining about the insignificant role the Republican caucus allowed us to play in shaping legislation. I have never been big on moaning and whining. Oh, woe is us. We have no power. Our Republican leaders don’t listen. They just do what they want . . . If we had beer we would have cried in it, but this was lunch. I called it the weekly “crying in our soup.” But there would be no more of that with the Senate divided right down the middle, I thought. We were the five moderate voices that could tip a partisan vote one way or the other, which meant they would have to become less partisan. We could get control of the agenda and change the tone in Washington. It was clearly what the country needed and wanted, a move to the center and some measurable progress on some vital issues, particularly: the environment, health care, tax fairness. Three of us around the table, Jeffords, Snowe, and I, had a fresh mandate from the voters. We had been elected to new terms just a few weeks earlier. The voters had endorsed our occasional splits with the Republican leadership, times when we voted with President Clinton on health and workplace issues that affected their daily lives for the better. All three of us had won by comfortable margins. It was no fluke, because the opposite was true for conservative Republican incumbents and conservative challengers alike. The voters had battered them in race after race. Five incumbent Republican senators had gone down in defeat, all loyal to the right-wing agenda of our leadership team.
I had seen this sort of political dynamic before, at home in Rhode Island. In the late 1980s, a small group of Republican senators controlled all legislation that passed through the heavily Democratic State Senate. At the time, Democrats held forty-one of fifty seats in the Rhode Island Senate. They promptly split into subparties, as can happen when you have an overwhelming majority. People who think politically start to break up into cliques as they feud over how to gain control of the megaparty. Democratic loyalties in Rhode Island were split between Senator John Bevilacqua and Senator David Carlin. The Bevilacqua faction ran the Senate by one vote, as long as it could win over every Republican. No piece of legislation was adopted unless it addressed the concerns of Minority Leader Bob Goldberg and his tiny band of swing votes.
In 2001, I told this bit of Rhode Island lore to my fellow Republican moderates in the U.S. Senate. I argued that we could do the same in a Senate where the right and the left were split fifty-fifty. Nothing could pass without the moderates’ support if we stuck together.
The administration had a plan for making sure we did not stick together. That was why Richard Cheney came to our lunch that day: Not to say he needed us, but to tell us that he and George W. Bush were in charge and no one else.
The reporters were ushered out, the door was closed, and there sat the six of us, not a staff member in sight. We made a little small talk at first. The vice president recalled that he and my father, the late U.S. senator John H. Chafee, had gone on a pack trip in bear country in the 1980s when the federal government was hearing testimony on listing the grizzly bear as an endangered species. At the time, Mr. Cheney represented Wyoming in the House.
Soon we got down to business, and that was when Richard Cheney would shatter everything I had believed was true about our party, our campaign, our victory, and the four years ahead.
In steady, quiet tones, the vice president-elect laid out a shockingly divisive political agenda for the new Bush administration, glossing over nearly every pledge the Republican ticket had made to the American voter. We were going to get out of a host of international agreements, he said. We would disavow the United Nations’ Kyoto Protocol on global climate change, even if it were to be ratified by a sufficient number of nations to give it the force of international law. We would end our support for the establishment of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. We would cancel the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty ratified in 1972. We would slash taxes by $1.6 trillion and wipe out the budget surpluses generated in the Clinton era. John Ashcroft of Missouri, defeated in his Senate reelection bid weeks earlier because voters rejected his far-right politics, was being seriously discussed as our next attorney general. I like John Ashcroft. We were always on friendly terms, but he would be a polarizing choice for attorney general at this critical time when we had an opportunity, at last, to heal a fractured Congress.
President-elect Bush had promised that healing, but now we moderate Republicans were hearing Richard Cheney articulate the real agenda: a clashist approach on every issue, big and small, and any attempt at consensus would be a sign of weakness. We would seek confrontation on every fron...
Product details
- ASIN : B003A02SD4
- Publisher : Thomas Dunne Books; First Edition (April 1, 2008)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 272 pages
- Item Weight : 12 ounces
- Dimensions : 6.17 x 1 x 8.26 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #8,893,296 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,731 in U.S.Congresses, Senates & Legislative
- #7,820 in Government
- #8,964 in General Elections & Political Process
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About the author

I'm a proud Rhode Islander, born and raised. After graduating from Brown University, I worked for seven years as a blacksmith at harness racetracks throughout the United States and Canada. When I returned to Rhode Island, inspired by the path of my father John Chafee, I entered politics. I started in 1985 as a delegate to the Rhode Island Constitutional Convention, and have since served four years on the Warwick City Council, nearly four two-year terms as the Mayor of Warwick, and seven years as a United States Senator. Afterward, I became a Distinguished after which I became a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies, and was encouraged by Ruth J. Simmons, the president of Brown, to write "Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President." And now, I'm honored to run as an independent candidate for Governor of Rhode Island.
To participate in the campaign, please visit our website (http://www.chafeeforgovernor.com), fan us on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Lincoln-Chafee/322947205174?ref=ts), and follow me on Twitter (http://twitter.com/LincolnChafee).
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The Senator's disillusionment and disenchantment are thoroughly examined here. Although, as a son of the late Senator John Chafee, he was well acquainted with the realities of party politics in America, he went to Washington with idealistic notions about the possibilities of bi-partisan cooperation born of his experience in local government. Sadly, he was to find out exactly how regressive and obstinate both the national executive and legislative bodies have become.
This is an admirable effort from a man who has managed to retain his ideals despite the disappointing realities he encountered. This book is well worth your time and money, and I recommend it very highly. We need more people like Lincoln Chafee in public life.
