Independent Centrist Caucus

File:Joe manton.jpg

ICC Leader and conservative Liberal Democrat Senator Joe Manton (LD-Arkania).

The Independent Centrist Caucus (February 27th, 2005 - November 6th, 2008) was a fairly short-lived political faction of breakaway Liberal Democrats in the Belhavian Imperial Senate who broke away from the regular Liberal Democratic Party Senate caucus in the 107th and 108th sessions of the Senate and worked frequently to help the Tory majority pass legislation.

Introduction

In the late 1970s, Belhavian politics began to polarize between left and right. The so-called "Liberal Aberration" in the post-Galarian world was crumbling as the country's political preferences swung back to what many political scientists call "Belhavia's natural conservative nature."

The Belhavian right's revival came in the so-called "Settas Revolution" of 1980, when Conservative Senator Julian Settas won back the presidency and progressively dismantled the nascent welfare state and much-maligned "Big Government." President Settas' conservative agenda seemed to be proved successful with the country and voting public, as he won re-election in a landslide and his Vice-President, Naftali Katz, won what many called the "Settas third term" in 1988. After Katz's election, the Liberal Democratic Party had lost three straight elections in a row running fairly liberal candidates.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Garret Holleran, a so-called "conservative Lib Dem," rose to power within the party, triangulating the party towards the right on key issues to remain competitive. He was successful in keeping the Lib Dems a viable party, winning the presidency from Katz in 1992 and narrowly losing re-election in 1996 to Yehuda Fiedler. Holleran ran again in 2000, ousting Fiedler to recapture the Presidential Palace.

Both during and after the so-called "Holleran era" of the Liberal Democratic Party, the party gained new supporters and candidate recruits from right-leaning moderates who disavowed the Tories as too conservative but found the mainstay of the Lib Dem base too liberal. These conservative and moderate Lib Dems competed, many times successfully, in Tory strongholds, broadening the party to more centrist and rightist voters.

Lib Dems' Leftward Drift After 2005

In the aftermath of the failure of the Liberal Democrats to retain the presidency and hold their Senate majority in the 2004 elections, the left within the party began to assert themselves more forcefully. These figures called on the party to shift back towards the left and adopt more bold liberal policy positions.

This was reinforced by the failure of Lib Dem Governor Aaron Rappaport to defeat Conservative nominee Jeff Arnoth in the 2004 presidential election, despite Rappaport's efforts running a Holleran-style campaign of triangulation and running towards the right to pick up a winning coalition.

In the fall and winter of 2004, going into early 2005, the Lib Dem left began a public campaign to win control over the party and re-orient it towards unabashed liberalism. In the 2004 Senate elections, the Liberal Democrats' caucus fell from 35 to 30 members, with longtime Holleran ally and conservative Lib Dem Sen. Andrew Levan being defeated by a Tory challenger and longtime Provisa Senator Jonathon Hoffman's retirement, with his seat won by Conservative Ian Settas. Levan, an outspoken conservative within the party, was publicly rebuked by scores of liberal political groups and many embittered Lib Dem conservatives blamed a reduction in liberal Lib Dem voters staying home or voting third-party to Levan's narrow defeat to his Conservative opponent.

Liberal Coup of January 1st

As the 107th Senate was sworn in on January 1st, 2005, a routine vote in the party caucus to re-new Senate Minority Leader Sen. Joshua Blonnburg's re-election as the Liberal Democrats' caucus leader was hijacked by liberal members of the Senate caucus. In the 106th Senate session, the liberal and rightist wings of the party were fairly equally represented in the party's Senate membership. With Levan's defeat in November, the liberals and a few poached moderates had the numbers to depose Blonnburg and installed avowed liberal Senator Eric Nofkasky as the party's new caucus leader in a narrow 16-14 vote.

The right-leaning Lib Dems protested and sparked a media firestorm. But the parliamentary coup was overshadowed, in part, by a coordinated effort across Belhavia by liberal activists to oust Holleranists and centrists from key party positions in Provisa and provincial party chapters across the Empire.

Lib Dem Civil War and ICC

Throughout January and February of 2005, Nofkasky and his liberal compatriots installed in the party's caucus leadership shifted the Senate caucus's position on a range of issues to the left. From calling for a return to Keynesianism, to decriminalizing homosexuality, to amending the Imperial Constitution to bring back the income tax, Nofkasky alienated and ostracized the conservative-to-moderate wing of the party's Senate caucus in a public and deliberate media campaign.

By mid-February, the media had called the power struggle over the "heart and soul" of the Liberal Democratic Party the "Lib Dem Civil War."

Sen. Joe Manton (LD-Arkania), ranked with the most conservative voting record in the Lib Dem caucus by numerous political organizations, met with a trio of his most right-leaning Liberal Democratic colleagues: Senators David Ruthson (Joshualand), Drew Long (Shelvoy), and Rebecca Blackman (Raffen). All four Lib Dems represented mostly rural, Tory provincial bastions.

President Arnoth, keenly away of the effects of the intraparty battle in the opposition party, reached out to Manton and encouraged the frustrated senators to defect and become Tories, or to become independents. Several Holleranist party elders quietly reached out, suggesting the quartet leave the ever-leftward regular party caucus for an independent status. After several weeks of quiet, informal meetings, the idea of the "ICC" was created.

ICC Forms

On February 27th, 2005, Manton, Ruthson, Long, and Black held a joint press conference to announce the creation of the "Independent Centrist Caucus" in protest of Nofkasky's reign as Minority Leader and aggressive leftward shift in the party's positions.

Tory Allies (2005 - 2008)

ICC and Its Backlash

Freed from the pressures to toe the party line, the quartet - ideologically and temperamentally aligned with the Conservatives - began to vote in alignment with the Tory majority on most fiscal, trade, and social issues. Labeled "turncoats" and "traitors" by the liberal-led regular Lib Dem caucus, the breakaway LD conservatives, along with Libertarians and moderate Lib Dems, provided the Conservatives with the 42 votes (60% of the chamber) needed to defeat filibusters and pass Arnoth's conservative reform agenda of slashing the National Retail Sales Tax's flat rate from 32.4% to 26%, gutting fracking regulations in the Far South, abolishing the 2.5% inheritance tax created in the 1993 Budget Compromise, and lowering tariffs on Ulthrannic imports.

2006 Midterms

In the first few months, the ICC quartet faced strident criticism from liberal media personalities and Lib Dem party activists. Primary challenges were declared, but by early 2006, the only ICC member up for re-election, Rebecca Blackman, was in solid shape to win the party's nomination in early summer of the same year. She coasted to re-election, winning her primary 60%-37% and raising over $3 million dollars, quietly supported by major Provisa Tory donors and Conservative political action committees (PACs).

Lib Dem Civil War, Part 2

Blackman's easy ride to victory in her primary, and later landslide victory in the general election (in Raffen, one of the most conservative, rural, and Tory provinces in the Empire) infuriated liberals in the party. The "Lib Dem Civil War" had been ongoing, a fairly low-key war of political attrition by both liberal insurgent activists and candidates and more moderate and right-leaning mainstream Lib Dems since early 2006, when the left largely failed in their hostile takeover attempts in the Liberal Democratic Party organizations throughout the provinces.

By the fall of 2006, Senator John Fellan (LD-Merrina), an outspoken figure in the liberal wing, sought to use the ICC as a convenient political foil to advance his career and snag the party's Senate caucus leader spot from Nofkasky. Nofkasky had blundered the party's prime opportunities for picking up seats in several swing provinces going into the 2006 midterms, with the regular Lib Dem caucus seeing only net gain of one seat overall.

In addition, the Libertarians had a strong wave election, winning 4 seats (3 from Tory provinces, one from a Lib Dem-leaning swing province), bringing their small caucus to its high of 7 members. In Fellan's estimation, this was enough of a swing bloc to form a coalition, assuming the ICC stayed separate from the Tories, to bring about a tied Senate and potentially give the Lib Dems a workable governing majority, the first time since 2005. Nofkasky, a rather rigid and inflexible liberal stalwart, refused to even consider a coalition with the Libertarians over their economic policies; an oversight Fellan regarded as disastrous.

2008 Midterms

Second Liberal Coup

On January 1st, 2007, after a quiet three-month campaign within the caucus, Fellan ousted Nofkasky and won the Senate Minority Leader post by a 18-9 vote, creating an unorthodox coalition of liberals irritated at the former Minority Leader's electoral incompetence and most of the remaining moderates in the caucus, who wanted the outspoken liberal leadership of their caucus removed and their party's leaders to move back towards the mainstream.

Targeted: ICC

Recognizing the danger of sidelining the increasingly important Libertarian Party Senate caucus, Conservative President Arnoth pursued a more restrained foreign policy and abolished the longstanding Export Import Bank, two key Libertarian priorities. For much of the first six months of the 108th Senate, the Tories, ICC, and Libertarians worked together to pass market-oriented fiscal reforms.

However, an impasse over defense spending created a wedge between the Tories and ICC on the right as defense hawks and Libertarians on the left, who favored military cuts. The Libertarians and liberal wing of the Lib Dems joined forces in an effort to cut military appropriations, though they were defeated when enough moderate Lib Dems joined the Tories and ICC to pass the appropriations.

This camaraderie strengthened Fellan's ultimate goal of having a Lib Dem-Libertarian coalition, and to isolate the ICC members.

ICC Collapse

In August 2007, a scandal emerged about ICC Senator Drew Long's financial irregularities. Called the "Long Night" Scandal, Long resigned in October 2007. Because Shelvoy province's election laws on Senate vacancies mandated a special election to occur at the next regularly scheduled Imperial election cycle to fill the remainder of Long's term, the seat remained empty. Regular-line Liberal Democrat Lisa Caseman won the seat in the November 2008 midterms, delivering a win to Fellan.

Galvanized by several victories and close-victories under Fellan's leadership, liberals in the party were energized. All three remaining Independent Democrats in the ICC would be challenged in their party primaries in mid-2008 by liberal candidates. From mid-2007 and for most of 2008, the Senate was too divided and gridlocked to pass legislation, more focused on symbolic votes to excite their party bases ahead of the upcoming midterms.

On February 16th, 2008, Rebecca Blackman switched parties and registered as a Tory. For months prior, public polling showed her disapproval among Lib Dem voters rising and her 2010 re-election efforts faltering with a likely challenge in the primary to her left by self-funder millionaire Jack Markell.

On May 16th, 2008, David Ruthson narrowly lost his primary to his more liberal challenger by a 48% - 52% margin. Manton, however, cruised to victory in his primary, defeating a perennial liberal gadfly candidate by forty-points, 65.5% - 23.6%.

With the ICC's dissolution, Manton remained a self-affiliated Independent Democrat loosely-aligned with the Conservatives.

Post-Dissolution Influence

The now-defunct ICC has been noted as an important influence for the creation of the Conservative-Libertarian Caucus within the Conservative Party.

Senator Joe Manton (I-Arkania) declined to seek re-election in 2012 and retired at the end of his term in January 2013. However, his influence as both head of the ICC and as a swing vote in the chamber post-ICC was a contributory factor in the rise of neo-Holleranist, conservative Lib Dems emerging as candidates and party activists within the Liberal Democratic Party.

In 2014, several Lib Dem Senate candidates, such as Karen Merkel in Raffen and Frank Logasky in Rustonia, have publicly waxed nostalgic about the ICC and claim to be the ICC's ideological heirs, though committed to reforming their party as regular-line Liberal Democrats instead of forming an independent caucus. In the 2014 midterms, both won their elections and form the right-flank of the Lib Dem Senate caucus.

See also

• Dobrescu's Faction