Why the Filibuster Deal was Good for Conservatives

RedState.org's Trevino has a very good post which looks at the filibuster deal from a conservative point of view and concludes it is in the end good for them, and ultimately saves them from themselves.

What's bad? What's bad is easy enough to see: the party and the Administration have lost their way in the second term. The pressing issues of the day -- the war, the deficit, the dollar -- have all been ignored in favor of bizarre voluntary fights on Social Security, the filibuster, and the rearguard actions to defend Tom DeLay. It is a stupefying squandering of political capital that speaks ill of the party leadership from the White House to the RNC to the Office of Senator Frist to the offices of activists from Main Street to K Street. I wish I could have faith that the internal bloodletting to come would bring some common sense to bear, but I do not. For the moment, all we can do is cross our fingers, thank God that the Senate Democrats have a pro-life leader to take the sting out of defeat, and hope that the much-reviled "moderates" can, on occasion, save us from ourselves.

He also comments on how the religious right was used to pursue a goal that ultimately would have proved destructive to the GOP:

We ought to turn for a moment to these people of faith, the "values voters" of November past, who presumably engage in politics because they want to defend traditional families, fight abortion, and establish a more just and humane social order by their lights. The foolishness of a Democratic party intent on alienating them notwithstanding, these people are not inherently Republican, nor are they all inherently conservative as conservative is commonly conceived. They are aligned with the GOP in this generation by reason of the American left's shortsightedness, canny GOP strategizing, and circumstances of history: but that alignment is, I think, less solid than is usually assumed. Recall, for example, Karl Rove's thesis that these persons stayed home in 2000, thus denying the President his popular vote victory. Having mobilized them in favor of eliminating the "judicial filibuster" -- in reality, the filibuster itself -- what were the possible outcomes? The problem here is that there would have been no good outcome from the party's point of view. Assuming a victory, they, and more accurately, their leadership, would have felt temporarily empowered. But in time, the win would turn to ashes in their mouth: having pushed through, say, Owens, Saad, et al., abortion would not have been outlawed, and the President would not suddenly have become more than the fair-weather defender of life and families that he presently is. (On this latter note, more has been written elsewhere by better persons than me -- suffice it to say that the Administration is notably lukewarm on these core moral issues when it's time for action.) In the end, the connection between this procedural fight and the moral issues that they care about would have been revealed for what it always was -- almost entirely illusory -- and they would have felt alienated and used.