Beto drags Democrats even further left

But rather than fade into also-ran obscurity, or return to Texas to run against Republican Sen. John Cornyn, O’Rourke has chosen to spend the few remaining weeks of his floundering presidential campaign saying what he really thinks out loud. The Left has now decided it’s time for the onetime progressive darling to pipe down — or, better yet, get lost before the next primary debate in November. This is not because they disagree with him, necessarily, although some do, but because like bread before supper, too much honesty in a primary can spoil voters’ appetite in the general.

At the Democratic primary debate in Houston on Sept. 12, O’Rourke proudly declared himself a gun-grabber. Asked by moderator David Muir whether critics were right that his plan involved gun “confiscation,” O’Rourke responded, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.” To loud applause, he shouted, “We’re not going to allow it to be used against our fellow Americans anymore.”

At CNN’s “Equality Town Hall” on Oct. 10, O’Rourke proudly declared himself in favor of punishing churches and religious institutions that aren’t on board with the Left’s sexual identity agenda. “Do you think religious institutions like colleges, churches, charities — should they lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage?” moderator Don Lemon asked O’Rourke. Rather than prevaricate on the question, as future also-ran Cory Booker had done earlier in the evening, O’Rourke blasted ahead with an immediate “yes.”

For us conservatives, the only thing surprising about these statements was their honesty. As the editors of National Review put it, O’Rourke’s newfound purpose seems to be “expressing the Democratic id.” It’s clear O’Rourke, at least, sees it this way, right down to his profanity-laden campaign T-shirts. He told the New York Times last month “he could give a damn about adhering to the niceties of campaigns.”

“I’ve just been focused on saying what’s on my mind,” he said. “Not really in the slightest being interested in polls, or how things poll, or what you’re supposed to say.”

The Left, in turn, has been quick to paint O’Rourke’s positions as nothing more than a floundering campaign’s last gasp at relevance. “I don’t know of any other Democrat who agrees with Beto O’Rourke” on mandatory gun buybacks, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer told reporters. Others have lambasted him for giving credence to longstanding right-wing fears that anti-religious Democrats are coming for them and their guns. O’Rourke, wrote Slate’s Jordan Weissmann, was turning into “a human straw man for conservatives … the embodiment of every seemingly irrational conservative fear about what the left really wants.” New York magazine’s Eric Levitz offered that it seemed “almost plausible” that O’Rourke was “a GOP sleeper agent — or else a Tucker Carlson caricature of elite liberalism come to life.”

“For some on the right, even while O’Rourke is seemingly flailing in the polls, he is newly representative of the ‘quiet part of the progressive agenda’ — what every Democrat believes but never says out loud,” wrote Jane Coaston of Vox in an article titled “How Beto O’Rourke Became a Conservative Boogeyman.”

For Coaston and the others, O’Rourke isn’t representative of anything real on the Left — a “boogeyman” is an imagined terror, a myth for the young and naïve. Yet this framing is itself a straw man. After all, not “every Democrat” has to believe something for it to have outsize influence within the Democratic Party or be popular with leading Democratic politicians.

Just how popular is an open question. But despite what many on the Left would have you believe, O’Rourke is far from alone on his newly clarified positions.

Take his gun proposal, for example. Schumer’s claim that he doesn’t “know of any other Democrat who agrees with O’Rourke” is, to put it charitably, flatly false. As Senate minority leader, he cannot plausibly claim unfamiliarity with Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, both of whom have openly supported mandatory gun confiscation. “We have to work out the details — there are a lot of details — but I do” support a forced buyback, Harris told reporters in September. “We have to take those guns off the streets.” Indeed, Schumer need look no further than his own state of New York to find Democrats who agree with O’Rourke’s confiscation position. Both New York’s junior senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Worst Mayor in America, Bill de Blasio, support mandatory confiscatory purchases.

Even among those Democrats who haven’t come out in favor, you’re hard pressed to find principled opposition to the underlying idea itself. Much was made of South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s pushback to O’Rourke on the confiscation issue during the Oct. 14 debate. But Mayor Pete’s complaints were logistical, not fundamental. “The problem isn’t the polls, the problem is the policy,” said Buttigieg. “You just made it clear that you don’t know how this is going to take weapons off the streets. If you can develop the plan further, we can have a debate.” This is an invitation for future consideration, not a dismissal of a blatantly unconstitutional act of government overreach.

Other putative “opposition” to O’Rourke’s “hell yes, we’re going to take your guns” outburst focused on poor political optics. Connecticut Sen. Chris Coons said O’Rourke’s statement was not a “wise policy or political move” and predicted “that clip will be played for years at Second Amendment rallies with organizations that try to scare people by saying that Democrats are coming for your guns … We need to focus on what we can get done.”

While true, such “process“ objections are rich coming from this crop of Democrats. The primary candidates are already promising to end the filibuster for a whole slate of other fantasies — why not gun confiscation? O’Rourke’s response to Mayor Pete was to dream big and worry about the technicalities later, which is more or less the motto of the 2020 Democratic primary. Compared to implementing government-run healthcare and zeroing-out carbon emissions within a decade and ending bovine flatulence in our time, going door to door rounding up a measly 16 million AR-15s and AK-47s from law-abiding Americans sounds almost easy. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren chided a hapless John Delaney back in July, “I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for the president of the United States to talk about what we really can’t do.”

This logic around guns is spreading on the Left. “Mayor Pete and Beto O’Rourke Fought Over Gun Strategy. History Shows Beto Might Be Right,” read a headline at Mother Jones. “Gun control advocates no longer want to start with compromise,” wrote Kara Voght, noting that veterans of the 2013 Senate negotiations on gun control “blame their tepid strategy and eagerness to compromise on guns as the reason for its failure.” “Did Beto O’Rourke Just Change the Democratic Conversation on Guns at the Debate?” asked the New Yorker’s Michael Luo. Pointing to other candidates’ emerging openness to the idea of confiscation, Luo concluded happily, “Finally, the Democratic conversation on guns is getting bolder.”

O’Rourke may be pushing the Democratic herd to the left, but they weren’t far behind to begin with. Twelve of the remaining candidates, including the top four, support a “voluntary gun buyback program.” Amy Klobuchar, a supposed moderate, said in a Sept. 13 primary debate, “I personally think we should start with a voluntary buyback program” (emphasis mine).

All 19 remaining Democratic candidates support a ban on so-called “assault weapons”; as recently as 2013, nearly 30% of Democrats in the Senate voted against such a ban. Thirteen, including nine of the 10 highest polling candidates, support a federal gun licensing program, according to the New York Times; 11 support federal gun registration and thus universal background checks and a federal database of gun owners. A federal gun registry, the Times notes, was “an idea that many Democrats used to dismiss exasperatedly as gun-lobby scaremongering.”

O’Rourke is therefore less a conservative boogeyman than a canary in the progressive coal mine. He’s simply a little ahead of the curve on the Democrats’ gun control trajectory. Sadly, the same can be said for his attacks on religious institutions.

As Matthew Schmitz noted last week in the Catholic Herald, that CNN would even ask presidential primary candidates whether they support removing tax exemptions from churches is itself remarkable. Quoting from O’Rourke’s LGBTQ plan, CNN host Don Lemon pressed the candidate, “This is what you write, ‘Freedom of religion is a fundamental right, but it should not be used to discriminate.’ Do you think religious institutions like colleges, churches, charities, should they lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage?” To which, “yes” was the immediate answer. O’Rourke went on, “There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for anyone or any institution, any organization in America that denies the full human rights and the full civil rights of every single one of us.”

It’s hard to decide whether this is more galling morally or logically. The Left has been playing Calvinball with the concept of “rights” for some time now. Just last month, O’Rourke declared “living close to work” to be a fundamental “right.” So what, exactly, would constitute “denying the full human rights of every single one of us” is anyone’s guess. One presumes religious believers and their rights would fall under the protected category of “every single one of us,” but this seemed lost on O’Rourke.

It was clear, however, that he had said another no-no. But yet again, most left-wing critics were more upset by O’Rourke offering up another unworkable idea with bad political optics than that he had begun from a blatantly unconstitutional and anti-religious premise. “O’Rourke’s remarks got swift pushback,” wrote Vox’s Coaston, “namely because the idea of using the government to punish people of faith who don’t support same-sex marriage is almost a parody of what Democratic or left-leaning voters want, a parody that many commentators argue plays directly into the hands of Donald Trump.” (The New Republic’s Matt Ford, to his credit, called out the “illiberalism” of O’Rourke’s statement, writing “This idea should be quickly excommunicated.”)

Democrats again attempted to distance themselves from O’Rourke. “I’m not sure he understood the implications of what he was saying,” Buttigieg told CNN’s Jake Tapper. Going after the tax exemption of religious organizations, “I think that’s just going to deepen the divisions that we’re already experiencing.” Buttigieg, however, agreed that “anti-discrimination law ought to be applied to all institutions,” which is exactly where O’Rourke’s position started.

Warren, the current progressive-lane frontrunner and serial fabulist, exhibited her own share of disdain for religious believers during the “Equality” town hall, at one point openly mocking defenders of traditional marriage. In a statement, she later said she also rejected O’Rourke’s tax threat. But dig a little deeper and O’Rourke’s stance on punishing churches for adhering to their doctrines differs from the rest of the 2020 field only in that he was straightforward about it. Vox’s Dylan Matthews wrote on Twitter, “We all support some versions of this we just disagree on where the line is. Beto’s strikes me as a reasonable place to set it.”

Following the debate, O’Rourke issued a “clarification” of his position on religious tax exemptions, which somehow managed to be even more contradictory and wide-ranging. “A religious organization that declines to conduct same-sex marriages would not see its tax-exempt status challenged. A church would put its tax-exempt status at risk for practices found to be discriminatory when delivering public services, such as adoption services, based on sexual orientation or gender identity, and for engaging in unequal treatment based on sexual orientation or gender identity.” Is refusing to marry a same-sex couple because of their sexual orientation not “engaging in unequal treatment,” and thus punishable? Who knows? But apparently this construction was good enough for the Left.

As the New Republic’s Ford pointed out, O’Rourke’s “re-articulation more closely resembles the Equality Act, a proposed LGBT civil-rights bill that has broad Democratic support,” including every 2020 candidate. The Equality Act, which passed the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives in May, would add “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Under the guise of nondiscrimination, this bill explicitly undermines the Religious Freedom Restoration Act by denying religious exemptions on claims of discrimination and forcing federal regulations into even more avenues of religious and public life. “Religious schools would be heavily regulated with respect to sexual orientation and gender identity,” Douglas Laycock, a liberal law professor at the University of Virginia, explained earlier this year. “This is not a good-faith attempt to reconcile competing interests. It is an attempt by one side to grab all the disputed territory and to crush the other side.”

Along with the Equality Act, every 2020 candidate is in favor of reinstating the Obama administration’s radical, top-down guidance on transgender bathrooms in public schools and universities, and nearly every candidate supports ending religious exemptions for adoption agencies and community shelters.

Harris, who as California attorney general refused to defend the state’s Proposition 8 law in court, promises to “immediately reinstate President Obama’s LGBTQ+ equality executive actions to protect federal workers and prohibit discrimination by federal contractors, in federally funded housing programs, and by hospitals participating in Medicaid and Medicare,” which would include religiously affiliated hospitals and institutions. Harris further pledges to “roll back Trump Administration rules that allow individuals to use their religious beliefs as a justification to discriminate against LGBTQ+ Americans.” Bernie Sanders’ plan proudly declares that, if elected, the septuagenarian socialist will “strongly oppose any legislation that purports to ‘protect’ religious liberty at the expense of others’ rights.”

Warren, for her part, goes even further, promising that within “my first 100 days as president,” she will “restore and strengthen” the Obama administration’s diktats on transgender bathrooms and require taxpayers to subsidize gender-reassignment surgeries. Among her many “plans” is one to “tak[e] on overly broad religious exemptions to non-discrimination” and “make LGBTQ+ non-discrimination a condition of federal grants,” meaning in practice no federal money to faith-based community organizations, churches, or religious schools.

Perhaps most worryingly, Warren states that she will “expand affirmative civil rights testing for anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination.” According to her campaign website, Warren believes the federal government should adopt transgender activists’ practice of having “civil rights testers call homeless shelters to investigate discrimination.” “The federal government should be doing the same, affirmative testing investigations to identify public services, businesses, workplaces, and more that discriminate against LGBTQ+ people. And when robust testing programs uncover discrimination, we should hold bad actors accountable by collecting civil penalties.”

So, rather than remove churches’ tax-exempt status, a President Warren would just initiate a regime of proactive fines. And O’Rourke is supposed to be the one out over his skis.

Liberals attempting to paint O’Rourke’s moments of leftist honesty as baseless caricatures seem to have forgotten the Obama administration’s dalliance with anti-religious crusading. The Right has not. The Obama administration went after not just for-profit employers such as Hobby Lobby but also literal nuns in the Little Sisters of the Poor over his Obamacare contraception mandate that required all non-church employers to cover contraceptives. After repeatedly pledging the law, rammed through Congress on a party-line vote, would not be used to violate religious liberty, Obama did just that.

During the oral arguments in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, Obama’s solicitor general told Justice Samuel Alito that in the face of a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, the tax-exempt status of religious colleges and churches “is certainly going to be an issue. I don’t deny that.” In Hosanna-Tabor Church v. EEOC in 2012, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the Obama administration’s blatant attempt to interfere with churches’ hiring decisions for ministers and teachers at religious schools. As Walter Olson wrote at the time, the Obama administration “had taken the disturbing position that there should be no ministerial exception at all to stand between churches and the full panoply of official employment regulation.”

And yet, here we are again.

If the Democrats’ 2016 primary proved anything, it’s that the outré ideas of today become the party line tomorrow. Bernie Sanders so successfully moved a party he wasn’t even a member of to his socialist-lite agenda that he began his 2020 campaign openly bragging about it (well, bragging and grousing; they tend to be the same with Bernie).

“Those ideas that we talked about here in Iowa four years ago that seemed so radical at the time, remember that?” Sanders preened in his first campaign stop in Iowa. “Shock of all shocks, those very same ideas are now supported not only by Democratic candidates for president but by Democratic candidates all across the board, from school board on up.”

“Who wins an election is often less important than who sets the agenda,” Peter Beinart observed in the Atlantic last December. “In 2016, Hillary Clinton said a single-payer health-care system ‘will never, ever come to pass.’ In 2017, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, by some measures the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, said the idea ‘should be explored.’” By the time the official 2016 Democratic Party platform was adopted, it bore a far greater resemblance to Sanders’ socialist hobbyhorses than to Obama’s Democratic policy vision in 2012.

Robert Francis O’Rourke is not Bernard Sanders. O’Rourke will almost certainly not head a party-shifting movement after losing the nomination. Up to this point, his greatest political “achievement” is narrowly losing to a man so widely disliked that a Republican colleague once joked of him, “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.”

But a great deal of what Sanders did last cycle was to stand up on stage, rumpled and wild-pated, saying plainly in his gruff, Larry David-tone what a great deal of the Left already thought anyway. More were pulled in once they realized his was the next logical step down the Democratic Party’s line.

In this respect, the last-gasp honesty of O’Rourke’s failing campaign is playing a similar role. Whether they know it or not, the failed punk rock musician-cum-travel writer is moving the Democrats yet further to their left. It’s looking unlikely (though not impossible) that O’Rourke will qualify for next month’s debate, and I have no doubt the rest of the Democratic field will be happy to see the back of him. But once he’s out to pasture, sooner or later the Left’s contenders will quietly follow his path to the leftward positions and rhetoric they halfheartedly labeled radical. And yet another conservative boogeyman will become reality.

J. Grant Addison is deputy editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.