Politics Tuesday: What's the Value of a Republican?

Posted by Jack Sterne, jack@oceanchampions.org

While many in the blogosphere celebrated the announced retirement last week of Rep. Jim Saxton (R-NJ), we had the opposite reaction. Ocean Champions has built a fantastic relationship with Saxton over the last few years, and he has been a staunch advocate for ocean conservation.

Indeed, we consider Rep. Saxton as one of the true success stories of Ocean Champions. For years, Mr. Saxton had been extremely responsive to a highly vocal, but not very conservation-oriented, group of recreational fishermen in his district. We knew Mr. Saxton to be a true conservationist, but we also recognized that he had to be politically responsive to a well-organized constituency in his home district.

In our first cycle, in 2004, we decided we would support Mr. Saxton regardless of his relationship with this other group. Having already served nine terms in Congress, he was the third-ranking Republican on the House Resources Committee, the most important for fisheries and oceans, and the reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act was coming up. By supporting him electorally, we thought we might be able to develop a better relationship that could pay dividends during the reauthorization.

And that's how it turned out. As this other group grew increasingly strident in its rhetoric, we seemed pretty reasonable in comparison, and Rep. Saxton increasingly turned to us. He ended up being the strongest conservation-oriented Republican voice in the House during the reauthorization, and it is safe to say that the bill would have been much weaker had he not been there.

Which (finally) brings me to my point: What's the value of a moderate Republican? When the Republicans were in the majority, that was clear: the moderates had significant influence over environmental policy, and were able to stop a lot of bad things from happening.

Now that the Democrats are in control, why do we still care about supporting Republicans? Well, the answer is that it's hard to get anything done on the oceans, or the environment more broadly, without a fair amount of Republican support. There are plenty of Republicans with districts where the constituents actually care about the oceans, and who are therefore responsive on our issues. And there are a few more who just have a personal interest, regardless of what their constituents think.

And then when you consider that there are plenty of Democrats (think Rep. Barney Frank) who consistently vote the wrong way on fisheries and other ocean issues, you realize that having broad, bipartisan support is really important in Congress, especially one as closely divided as this one. Try getting something done in the Senate without support from both parties.

The reality is that it still takes cooperation to get things done. If you don't believe that, look at what's happened with Iraq: the Democrats had a clear mandate from the voters to put an end to the war, and they've accomplished nothing, because they haven't had enough help from the other side of the aisle.

Ocean Champions is already looking for new Republicans who will champion (or at least support) pro ocean legislation. But with Rep. Clay Shaw (R-Fl) going down in last year's elections, Rep. Saxton retiring and Rep. Wayne Gilchrest (R-Md.), another long-time ocean leader, facing his most serious primary threat ever, we're getting a little nervous. We're really hoping that some new Republican leaders will emerge on our issues and that Ocean Champions will have the opportunity to support them. If not, we're going to have a tough time getting the votes we need on some key legislation. Anybody see it shaking out differently?