by Matt Kibbe
The fact is that government control has become a narcotic for D.C. power mongers. One hit, and most get hooked, scrambling for more, lashing out at those who would deny them another. Legislators and executive branch kleptocrats lack the will to act because they simply can’t make it without their next fix. Even when the desire for change is there, the compulsion to spend is simply too overpowering to resist. Lawmakers can’t break the habit on their own. They mindlessly consume new tax dollars, and fake printed dollars and even dollars borrowed from China, like zombies on the hunt for fresh brains.
They need help. It’s time for you to intervene.
This twelve-step program is designed to wean the government off the empty promises of new entitlements, excessive spending, and unchecked executive power. It seems utterly crazy to keep doing what we did before, to follow the old rules of bipartisan collusion, if doing so does not solve problems. We need to scrap the tax code, and balance the budget and restore respect for the simple rules embodied in our Constitution that treat everyone just like everyone else.
We can do all these things if and when America beats Washington. That’s the key. The perfectly constructed constitutional amendment or the best patient-centered health-care reform goes exactly nowhere if Washington is left to its own devices. You will have to act.
CHAPTER 9
NOT A ONE-NIGHT STAND
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.
—H. L. MENCKEN1
DO YOU EVER FEEL like politicians want just one thing from you? That maybe, just maybe, they don’t really care about you, your dignity, or your freedoms at all?
To be sure, the political courtship can be awesome. There’s always lots of sweet talk. Politicos know all the right buttons to push, always telling you exactly what you want to hear. They call you. They write to you. They send you notes in the mail. They “friend” you on Facebook. Sometimes you get a personal text message on your cell phone, or even an invite to hang out with George Clooney. How cool is that?
Democrats seem more comfortable courting you online, or at your front door. Republicans typically prefer expensive grand gestures, like a national, thousand-point-saturation television ad buy. The GOP is old-school that way.
They promise you a transparent, honest government. Would you like to see a simple flat tax that doesn’t have all of the carve-outs and special deals for others in it? How about a balanced budget that stops stealing from future generations of your family? Do you want more choice and control for your own retirement, or the freedom to determine your own child’s education, or even to defend your right, as a patient, to choose your own doctor?
They even pledge to keep their promises, and to stay faithful the day after.
It might be worth taking a chance, you think.
You know they only want one thing, one time, on the first Tuesday in November. You know they are not looking for a long-term relationship, that their fidelity to principle will suddenly disappear when they get back to Washington, D.C. But the charm offensive wears down your defenses. The letters and the calls and the posts and tweets and the thirty-second spots and the big promises are just too tempting. You want to believe it, because the future of your country, and your children’s future, is at stake. Sooner or later, you cast aside your inhibitions, and you do it.
You vote for the same guys that let you down last time.
And it never works out.
DUMPED, AGAIN
I’m not judging here. I’ve done it, too. I stand in line to vote (in the District of Columbia, no less). I have written checks to candidates for public office. I have hoped for the best. I have even walked precincts, door to door, for someone else’s preferred candidate, who’s running on someone else’s bad ideas, all because they promised me they would do the right thing.
I always wake up, the day after the election, feeling used. Used again. It never works out. They never call the next day. They don’t write. They don’t text. And they never, ever keep their long-term commitments.
That’s the problem with political parties. The relationship always turns out to be a one-night stand that leaves you feeling used, ignored, and then dumped for someone or something that’s far more attractive, someone or something waiting back in Washington, D.C.
Consider the sorry state of President Obama’s signature health-care legislation circa January 2010. It was jammed through Congress using parliamentary trickery because the people of the very blue Massachusetts decided to send a clear political message in the special election of Republican Scott Brown. “We don’t want this,” Bay Staters said at the ballot box. “We don’t trust Washington to oversee a massively complex redesign of our health-care system.” No matter the will of the people. Nancy Pelosi used “deem and pass” procedures so that the Senate would not have to provide the sixty votes that Senate majority leader Harry Reid no longer had.
Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who had switched from Republican to Democrat in hopes of clinging to political power, had provided the deciding vote for the Senate bill. Specter, of course, would not have been a senator except for the extraordinary efforts of President George W. Bush, Karl Rove, and the GOP establishment to protect him in his 2004 primary challenge from Pat Toomey.
Come hell or high water, the establishment was going to do good for themselves regardless of earlier promises to stay true to you.
And then there were the many “read my lips” promises from President Barack Obama, always intended as lies to the American people to provide political cover for those Democrats jamming through sweeping, unread legislation that no one wanted. He promised greater transparency and efficiency. He promised an end to the cronyism that always attends a major rewrite of the rules of the game. He promised that you could keep the health insurance you had if you liked it. He promised that his new plan would not ration care. He promised that your family’s health-care costs would go down, not up.
Everyone knew he would break these promises. He just wanted one thing: your vote, in 2012.
The Obama White House has arbitrarily delayed or repealed various provisions of the Affordable Care Act without consulting Congress, even though the legislative branch of our government has the sole responsibility of passing, and repealing or amending, the law. The executive branch is supposed to enforce the law. Under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution of the United States, the president “shall take care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Except when he doesn’t want to? Only when it’s politically advisable? I’m no constitutional lawyer, but I don’t see the wiggle room here. This utterly outrageous and arbitrary process of a president choosing to only implement the parts of laws he likes seems so un-American, even autocratic.
But never mind; no one seems willing to stand up to him. He’s the president, they say. He has the bully pulpit. We will fight, after the next election, they promise, hoping we don’t notice the inconvenient truth that after 2014 comes 2016—another election and another excuse not to stand up.
Dumped again, you hopeless romantic.
To be sure, there are a few brave souls who have stood up, the growing minority in Washington that can be counted on. I’m referring to members of Congress with a seat at the table who ran for office in 2010 and 2012 on the solemn promise, if elected, to do everything in their power to replace ObamaCare with policies that respect patients, not bureaucrats. True, most politicians run on promises to respect your civil liberties, to be prudent with the spending of your cash, or to be deferential to your rights to determine your own health-care choices. But these new guys seem to actually mean it.
And this is a crisis. All of the experts, and political op
eratives, and the octogenarian pooh-bahs who opine from the Senate floor, and “unnamed sources” from congressional leadership staff and “senior officials,” unleashed a united brick wall of hate and venom and “expert advice” against those that would do, in Washington, D.C., what they promised to do back home when soliciting your trust and your vote.
They accuse us of creating false hope among conservatives and libertarians and Tea Partiers and independents who just want to be left alone that we can actually win this fight.
Maybe they just don’t want us to fight at all?
THE HOMOGENIZING PROCESS
Beltway dinosaurs, Democrats and Republicans, are uniting against a new generation of leadership in Washington, leaders like Mike Lee and Ted Cruz and Justin Amash and Thomas Massie and Rand Paul and David Schweikert, all of those who seem so willing to challenge the old way of doing things.
The National Journal asked some of the old bulls what they think about this new type of legislator. Former Republican House Speaker Denny Hastert, for one, pines for the days when campaign finance rules gave party bosses all the power. “The people you got usually weren’t too far to the left or to the right. The party was sort of a homogenizing process,” he says.2
According to Merriam-Webster, to homogenize is to make something uniform or similar. To standardize, unite, merge, fuse, integrate, or amalgamate. Make it the same as all the rest. So the party bosses who got us into the fix we are in want to go back to the way things were before, to do things the same way that they were done in the past. One of Hastert’s former deputies in the House of Representatives agrees, arguing that newly empowered grassroots organizations are too disruptive. “FreedomWorks is not serving the legislative process well by telling these old guys to just buzz off.” Now, Hastert frets, candidates “have to worry constantly about primary challenges.”
What are they really worried about? A little competition? Accountability?
According to Peter Schweizer, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, politics was a lucrative profession for the former House Speaker:
When Hastert first went to Congress he was a man of relatively modest means. He had a 104-acre farm in Shipman, Illinois, worth between $50,000 and $100,000. His other assets amounted to no more than $170,000. He remained at a similar level until he became Speaker of the House. But by the time he set down the Speaker’s gavel, he was substantially better off than when he entered office, with a reported net worth of up to $11 million.3
A report from the Business Insider elaborates on the source of Hastert’s new found wealth:
In 2005, Hastert purchased (or had a hand in purchasing) 264 acres near the site of the proposed “Prairie Parkway,” and the site of a planned real estate development. Months after the purchases in early 2005, he placed a $207 million earmark into the federal highway bill to fund the parkway. He sold 69 acres months later for $4.9 million—and netted between $2 million and $10 million in a year.4
Whereas Hastert was willing to sell out his ideals for profit, tea party conservatives are now being accused of doing just the opposite. The phrase “purity for profit” has come to be used to demonize conservative organizations that want to elect leaders who will actually keep their promises, and resist the Beltway allure in a way that Hastert could not.5
Hastert retired in 2007 after handing over control of the House to Nancy Pelosi. Grassroots outrage over spending earmarks by Republicans helped fuel the shift in power.
Hastert was a cheater. The charms of Beltway power were just too compelling. Pelosi similarly used her position of power to the benefit of her portfolio of properties and investments. But her insider trading and self-dealing seems a better fit within the new Democratic Party, a party that has so fully embraced an expansive government on all aspects of our lives: in our health care, in choosing winners and losers on Wall Street, in expanding the power of the NSA and the IRS, and all the alphabet-soup agencies encroaching on your civil liberties, and even in expanding the war powers of the chief executive.
In 2008, this bipartisan collusion of insiders and politicians-for-life and special interests were busy driving America off a fiscal cliff. First it was Republicans, and then Democrats, but the real story was a mutual admiration club that saw politics as the end in itself, and policy as a by-product. It was a well-paid game, but the policy outcomes served only their interests, not ours.
So the American people rose up in protest, armed with new tools like Facebook, Twitter, Ning (the rotary phone of social networking), and RSS feeds that provided real-time information from bloggers and a multitude of disintermediated media sources. Previously disenfranchised voters were newly committing to get involved, to enter into a long-term relationship and a binding fidelity to first principles. And they were armed with freedom: a host of new online tools that lowered the barriers of entry to people trying to participate in the People’s Business.
So began a permanent paradigm shift in American politics, shifting power from them to us.
And not a moment too soon. The bipartisan purveyors of business as usual seemed utterly uninterested in the consequences of their actions.
PARTY POLITICS
There was a time when I had higher aspirations for Republicans. I worked as the chief economist for Lee Atwater at the Republican National Committee. I was a foot soldier in the “Republican Revolution” of 1994, working for a Republican congressman as we sought to rein in a federal budget that was bleeding red ink.
I noticed over the years that the only great political successes enjoyed by Republicans were inexorably linked to a party that stood for something, that stood on principle. That’s what had happened in 1994, when Republicans took control of the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years, based on a contractual promise to balance the budget and fix broken entitlements like welfare. And, yes, to stop a government takeover of our health care.
Of course the GOP takeover in 1995 would eventually devolve into business as usual, particularly under the Bush administration. Republicans passed the Patriot Act, an expansion of powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, an unsustainable increase in spending on a bankrupt Medicare program, and the practice of earmarking federal spending favors to preferred members of Congress, a practice that made a former high school wrestling coach turned Speaker a very wealthy man.
Spending and the size of government exploded under Republicans’ watch, propelling the election of a little-known state legislator, Barack Obama, to the U.S. Senate in 2004, and the Pelosi Democrats to control of the House in 2006. Both Obama and Pelosi ran for office, against Republicans, promising renewed fiscal responsibility.
In 2006, Obama as the new senator from Illinois voted against increasing the debt ceiling, arguing:
Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that “the buck stops here.” Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.6
He had a point. All of the spending and all of the borrowing was mortgaging the futures of future generations. It was generational theft. Of course there are limits. Even Washington can only spend so much money it does not have. You can only tax so much before producers revolt and stop generating new investment and new income to be taxed away at the margin. There is only so much that our government can borrow from the Chinese government. So what happened? Lots of easy money and credit issued by the Fed monetized all of the easy money being spent by Congress. That easy money fueled bad behavior on Wall Street, and the mega-banks bet it all knowing that someone would bail them out.
With the artificial boom came the inevitable bust in 2008.
The Democrats doubled down, providing the votes for the $700 billion TARP bailout (thank you, Senators Barack Obama [D-IL] and John McCain [D-DC]). President Obama, ignoring the promises he made during his courtship with your
vote, proceeded to spend another $700 billion on crony-allocated “stimulus” on the failed projects of the politically connected. No one was afforded a chance to read what Washington was passing into law. So much for his concerns about “shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren.”
HEART AND SOUL
The first time I saw Ronald Reagan speak was at the White House in 1986. He quoted Ludwig von Mises. I was still a graduate student at the time and knew very little about Washington politics, but I thought it was pretty cool to hear the president of the United States quote my favorite economist. I thought, naïvely, that it was normal, representative of the Republican philosophy based on free enterprise, individual liberty, and a nation of boundless opportunity for those willing to work for it.
I wanted to stand with those guys.
I later learned that Reagan was never “normal,” according to the political establishment. In 1965, the GOP establishment viewed Reagan, by then a candidate for governor in California, as a real threat. “G.O.P. Moderates Fear Coup by Reagan on Coast,” read one New York Times headline. The former actor was “closely identified with the right-wing of the Republican Party.”
Reagan’s response? “I think basically that I stand for what the bulk of Americans stand for—dignity, freedom of the individual, the right to determine your own destiny.”7
In 1975, Manny Klausner of Reason magazine asked Reagan about his political philosophy. The now former governor of California was equally succinct:
If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals—if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.8