Moderate Republicans

So while wandering around the internets today I came across this post at The Impolitic (via The Moderate Voice). It seems Jim M went off looking for Moderate Republicans using a Google search. It seems like a good idea. After all, we do hear, or at least used to hear about moderate Republicans. There have been times when it seemed that these folks could be very important to the fate of the nation. Read the whole post on his effort (and the rest of the blog), but I was struck by this list of what makes up a moderate Republican that Jim M found here. So the list is

• A passion for civil liberties;
• A disdain for conformity and suspicion of authority;
• A belief that the Constitution is a living, breathing document with timeless values that must be made relevant in a modern age;
• A commitment to protect the environment and not engage in mindless exploitation of the nation's natural beauty. A spirited case must be made for reusable energy sources like solar power. Modern technology provides many options before the earth is harshly, brutally, and needlessly pillaged.
• A strong belief that diversity -- gender, racial, social, sexual, ethnic, and religious -- should be celebrated because it gives the United States moral strength. Diversity -- in the long-term, encourages respect, understanding, and a greater sense of community;
• A commitment to fiscal prudence and limited government;
• A recognition that government does have a basic social responsibility to help those in need;
• A belief that the nation does have international responsibilities;
• A belief that God and religion have a very important place in America -- at the dinner table and in churches, temples, and mosques. But it should never be used by politicians to advance a narrow moral agenda;
• A belief that the national government should be used in a limited manner to advance the common good;
• A commitment never to put party above country; and
• A responsibility to publicly criticize those who call themselves Republican when the situation merits. Moderate/Progressives have a duty to vote against the party line when it doesn't serve the greater good. Doing so doesn't make them less Republican; it demonstrates that they have the honor, political courage, and intellectual honesty to put nation above party.

See the thing is, this seems to me to be a pretty good description of ... um ... a Democrat. That could explain the difficulty of finding them in the Republican party.