The question these days around Washington is: How can the Bush Administration recover from such a multitudinous barrage of so much bad news, compounded by even worse coverage of these troubles by an old and agenda-driven media?

That may be what the New York Times is lavishing its ink upon, and what George Stephanopoulos and Chris Matthews are politically--who knows, maybe literally-- salivating over, but bedrock conservatives are concerned about something else entirely.

Principally--and that is the optimum word here--conservatives wonder what has happened to the bedrock principles of conservatism that were founded and nurtured during the 1950s through the 1990s, have gone?

Has the pioneering work of such conservative icons as Buckley, Reagan, and Gingrich gone for naught, in this, the beginning of what was supposed to be GOP dominance for decades to come? Right now, the political reality would seem to say exactly that.

Reinforcing this belief--or head-shaking disbelief--among conservatives and Republicans in general recently were two of its most astute and prolific members, Robert Bork and Bruce Bartlett.

Barely a week ago, former Judge Robert Bork, who has one of the most fertile legal minds in the country, penned a scathing critic against President Bush’s choice for the Supreme Court, Harriet Miers.
(www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007424)

In his article, Bork not only pans Harriet Miers as having no redeeming qualities for the highest court of the land, but Bork also speaks to the larger issue for conservatives--and I would include myself in this--that being the fracturing of the conservative movement.

Says Bork: “With a single stroke…the president has…widened the fissures within the conservative movement. That's not a bad day's work--for liberals. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq aside, George W. Bush has not governed as a conservative (amnesty for illegal immigrants, reckless spending that will ultimately undo his tax cuts, signing a campaign finance bill even while maintaining its unconstitutionality). This George Bush, like his father, is showing himself to be indifferent, if not actively hostile, to conservative values.”

In the article written by former Reaganite and Heritage Foundation fellow Bruce Bartlett, the reader was greeted with this singular item that went directly to the heart of the argument: “The truth that is now dawning on many movement conservatives is that George W. Bush is not one of them and never has been.”
(www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-10_18_05_BB.htm)

Bartlett then goes on to list what can only be described as a litany of offenses against conservatives perpetrated by Bush, and the foundation and ideals of conservatism, and its principles.

The apex of the offense to conservatives is without question the elevating of Harriet Miers as a nominee to the Supreme Court. If Bush persists in pushing Miers, or if Miers does not have the clear sense to withdraw her nomination, it is a pulsating and strengthening reality that the inconsolable fragments of the Conservative and Republican Party will simply stay home come Election Day.

In this, I would agree. The possibility of Republicans staying home in 2006 and 2008 grows larger everyday. President Bush has been praised for his absolute loyalty to his friends, and more specifically, his White House staff.

But where is his loyalty to the millions who were willing to forgive such “unconservative” governance like Campaign Finance Reform, and the Medicare Drug benefit bill, or letting the liberal lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy, author the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001?

The GOP electorate was willing to forgive and overlook such liberal-like behavior, because the domestic issue of our lives has been--and will be--the courts that hold such sway over our lives through its activism.

In regard to Miers, electing to opt for loyalty and stealth over originalism and judicial breadth has shown that President Bush has not seriously considered the wishes of his party.

Even with Judge Roberts, conservatives were asked to trust Bush, and so they did. Now, they are asked to do so again, only with a nominee so vacant and bare in the confines of judicial philosophy and constitutional law that some GOP senators are actually asking the White House for more paperwork on Miers, and citing her answers to written Senate questions as “inadequate”
(news.yahoo.com/s/krwashbureau/20051019/ts_krwashbureau/_scotus_miers)

If President Bush will not withdraw Miers as a nominee, or Miers will not or does not have the grace and sense to know that she stands at a crossroad of conservatism, then the GOP en masse must persuade Bush to act, and the persuasion must be swift, and definitive.

But the “persuasive act” may be one of severe consequences. If conservatives opt to stay home next November, then Democrats--who even now openly gloat over their electoral prospects--will capture seats in both chambers of Congress.

More importantly, Democrats will unquestionably seize the momentum going into the 2008 presidential election.

The only way I see around this scenario is to tell the president, and the Republican elite in Washington in no uncertain terms, that staying home is exactly what will happen…by design. If the Republican majority in Washington cannot unite around true conservative values and principles--the Supreme Court being the most obvious and pressing--then perhaps the GOP needs to spend another few decades wondering the political wilderness in order to rediscover it’s roots all over again.

It took over 40 years to regain the House of Representatives, and now Republicans may lose it along with the Senate chamber, and ultimately the presidency. While Bush has been stellar in his foreign policy endeavors, he has been well less than that in regard to domestic issues.

The Supreme Court is the one issue that casts a large and politically supranational authority into the future, and it is here that conservatives recognize that the real ideals of conservatism must begin; for when you here the words “traditionalism,” or “originalists,” or even “constitutionalist,” associated with a prospective jurist, they are just code for conservatism.

If the conservative mandate to govern into the foreseeable future falters, the Miers nomination will be the watershed moment in this current history that will be looked upon as the beginning of the great conservative unraveling.

Vincent Fiore is a freelance political writer who lives in New York City. He receives e-mail at: Anwar004@aol.com