Religious Right vows payback on filibuster deal

Religious right vows payback for brokers of filibuster pact
By Eric Gorski
Denver Post Staff Writer
DenverPost.com

This week's compromise over Senate filibusters greatly disappointed Focus on the Family and its allies, who believed November election victories would help fulfill their long-held wish for a conservative makeover of the federal judiciary.

But representatives from conservative Christian groups who made the filibuster their signature issue suggest a severe price might be paid by the 14 Democrats and Republicans who brokered the last-minute deal.

"Any of them who have White House aspirations should get used to living in the doghouse," said Jan LaRue, chief counsel of Concerned Women for America.

James C. Dobson, founder of the Colorado Springs-based Focus, urged supporters to flood the Senate switchboard with calls to do away with the filibuster.

"We share the disappointment, outrage and sense of abandonment felt by millions of conservative Americans who helped put Republicans in power last November," Dobson said in a statement. "I am certain that these voters will remember both Democrats and Republicans who betrayed their trust."

For many evangelical Christians, the courts have become a battleground in the wake of rulings on school prayer, abortion and gay marriage. The desire to do away with the filibuster - a prolonged debate that prevents votes on nominees - was motivated by the likelihood of Supreme Court vacancies during President Bush's second term.

The fact that seven maverick Republicans crossed party lines to keep the filibuster alive angers social conservatives who for years supported GOP candidates, even those not strong on moral issues, said Mark Rozell, a public-policy professor at James Madison University.

"This is a real defeat for the religious conservative groups," said Rozell, who studies evangelical politics. "They went all out on this issue. They didn't frame it as procedural issue but as a moral-values one. They did a significant amount of work to rally their activists to press GOP senators not to compromise."

Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association in Tupelo, Miss., said social conservatives are indeed frustrated by the actions of breakaway Republican senators.

"You would think to the victors go the spoils," he said.

He said social conservatives would target the compromisers, but admitted it might not affect senators who are years away from campaigning again.

Three Republicans who brokered the compromise are up for re-election in 2006: Mike De Wine of Ohio, Olympia Snowe of Maine and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island. Three of the Democrats will run again next year: Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.

One member of the coalition not up for re-election until 2010 is Ken Salazar, the Colorado Democrat who has clashed with Focus over the filibuster.

Salazar agitated ministry leadership again Tuesday by saying Dobson and other Christian conservatives are pushing the country to become a "theocracy."

"I don't want us to become another Saudi Arabia or another Iraq, and I think that people who are part of that radical right would have our country go in that direction," Salazar said in an interview with MSNBC.

Focus said Salazar's comments went "way overboard."

"They're insulting to many thousands of Coloradans who are constituents of ours at Focus on the Family," said Tom Minnery, vice president for public policy.

Staff writer Eric Gorski can be reached at 303-820-1698 or egorski@denverpost.com.