RightWingNews.com: An Interview with Thaddeus McCotter, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee About The GOP Fiscal Integrity Task Force

Late last week, I got together with Thaddeus McCotter, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee to talk about the new GOP Fiscal Integrity Task Force that has been announced in the House. I'm always happy to talk with McCotter because he's one of the good guys in Congress -- friendly to blogs and the grassroots, and a sharp thinker when it comes to conservative principles.

What follows is a slightly edited transcript of our discussion.

Earmarks are a big bone of contention even though, percentage wise, they're a very small factor in the deficit. John McCain has said that he wants to eliminate earmarks. Do you anticipate that being something the GOP's Fiscal Integrity Task Force will support?

The first thing we're going to do is look at the definition of earmarks, because there are several floating around. I think McCain's position is important, as is the work of members like Jeff Flake, Jeb Hensarling -- to use this as a symbol of government overspending.

What will also have to be addressed is what takes the place of earmarks. As you'll remember, the reason that earmarks took off in the Gingrich era was because bureaucrats were spending taxpayers' money and bureaucrats and civil servants are unaccountable and unelected. That meant there was nothing that could be done about their bad decisions. So Gingrich, in trying to empower the electorate and the Congressional branch that actually appropriates the money, wanted to bring the accountability down so that if you don't like what your member is doing, you actually have recourse. What broke down though, is the self-policing mechanism, I think.

So, from our point of view, what we want to do is define what earmarks are in a way that makes sense and can help address the problem. Then secondly, if earmarks are banished, how do you prevent the bureaucrats from spending them? So, we have to identify the solution properly, diagnose it, and then go treat it.

...Again, as you point out, the percentage of the spending isn't as important as the symbolism of it. I am like you, hoping that McCain gets elected, as opposed to his two rivals on the Democratic side -- because as we've seen from the Democratic Congress, they've not paid any attention to earmarks other than when we make a stink about it, then they give it lip service and hope it goes away....

...The public should be aware of what the new Democratic Majority wants to do with your money. I think it could be reduced down to one simple phrase: the Democrats take and waste strategy. ...Because they seem to think that every dime government spends right now is so perfectly spent that they have to raise people's taxes to do all this wonderful redistribution of wealth. We would argue as Republicans -- something of a lost art for the last couple of years -- that in fact the government does not appropriately spend every dime of your hard earned money that it takes and the first place they should look is in the waste, fraud, and abuse that's going on in the unfortunately overexpansive promises and entitlements that the government has made....That's the place to start. You don't start by promising to spend money because everything is done properly; you start by looking at the reality that the government wastes a lot of your money and you should always (cut) that before you go looking for (more money).

I have never voted for a tax increase because I have yet to find a governmental entity that doesn't, in one way, shape, or form, have a better way of dealing with your money and treating it in the fiduciary manner it's supposed to....

Now, in your opinion -- people have tried to do this many times before and failed -- what's the most realistic way for us to go about cutting entitlement spending?

Well, I think the way that they've done it is that they've tried to kick the ball down the field. You have to have a realistic assessment of what the global age is going to require and when you look at it, in the past, in the industrial age...there was kind of a deal struck. The corporations would pick up some of the future pensions and health care benefits of employees and the government would fill in the gaps to maintain social order and a social safety net. With globalization, what we're finding is that companies tend to become more multi-national and virtual in their headquarters. The result is that the paradigm between splitting the pensions and health care benefits between the private sector and public sector is breaking down.

What we would argue as Republicans is that you start from the fundamental premise is how you empower Americans to take care of their own needs in the future so that they do not become governmental dependents. That's a fundamental debate we're having with the Democratic Party.

...So, we want to take the premise of "how do you empower people to control their own destiny" and apply it to entitlement programs that were set up under the entitlement programs of Lyndon Johnson...and Franklin Roosevelt, where they firmly believed they could do it with the government on a limited basis because the private entities would also be there as a safety net...that's gone. So, we're trying to look at it through an entirely new prism.

John McCain is advocating a "one-year pause in discretionary spending growth that should be used for a top-to-bottom review of the effectiveness of federal programs." You think that's something Republicans in the House should support?

I think it's great, especially in the sense that the FIT task force is kind of getting a head start on that so that we will be able to come in with ideas to help the McCain Administration as they freeze spending and get it up and running.

...McCain's right. Unless you figure out what's going on, you're going to see the Democrats continue to tempt people to give away their liberty and prosperity in return for government benefits and that has to stop. I think that the one year McCain freeze on discretionary spending can be very helpful to let Americans realize what the real choice is between parties. It's either that their future will be moving towards individual liberty, empowerment, and prosperity or towards government dependency.

Another McCain proposal is that it should "require a 3/5 majority vote in Congress to raise taxes." You think the GOP would support that overwhelmingly?
Absolutely. We're reaching a very dangerous point. I think the Christian Science monitor reported (that more than half of Americans receive significant revenue from the federal government). Also, you see studies that show half of all federal tax filers only pay 3.5% of revenues. If you reach a point where people consider higher taxes a boon rather than a burden, our entire exercise in self-government and our free republic is going to be in danger. I would argue that the harder you make it for the government to take what you make, the better off you're going to be.

Pushing a Balanced Budget Amendment would send a powerful signal about the GOP's seriousness on fiscal conservatism. Is that something you think might happen?
Absolutely. There are people who say that it will never happen. But, we live in a country that has seen the Constitution amended so that slavery has been abolished, so that women have the right to vote, and I think those were a lot harder things to do than to just ask politicians not to waste your money and run up deficits...We always hear arguments from people about how something can't be done, but if we would have listened to that, we'd probably still have 13 colonies.

What issues do you think the pundits and bloggers are not spending enough time on in the spending front?
I think that they're doing it pretty well, but I always like to point out one fundamental thing: the Democrats told us Washington spent too much money, they got elected, and then they immediately spent more.

So, I think what would be helpful is if people had instances or ideas about government spending that they wanted to send to the Fiscal Integrity Task Force, send them to the House Policy Website or post them, because we check the blogs. Give your ideas to us; now's a great time! Also, ...if they think their Congressman would be a good member of a FIT task force, encourage them to join us. The more the merrier...

John Hawkins
Right Wing News

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President Bush Must Skip Communist Olympics

It's all the rage to say, "Our GOP has lost its way." It's quite beyond dispute, for the truth remains the truth.

Yet the stock recitation of selected symptoms -- spending, Iraq, Katrina, etc. -- omits a sinister affliction consuming the heirs of Lincoln and Reagan. The ravenous malady eclipsing our honor is this: Republicans coddle communist China.

No starker episode exhibits our anile need for a moral hospice before we slither into the dust bin of history than the one playing out before Americans' astonished eyes. Legacy building with the urgency of a dying Pharaoh staring at an unfinished Sphinx, George Walker Bush is bent upon being the first U.S. President to attend a foreign nation's Olympics. The nation in question is communist China, the shock troops of which are presently bludgeoning Tibetan Monks as if they were orange bathrobed baby seals. (One shudders at the prospect this Tibetan repression is the Chi-coms' sedulous sally into Olympic demonstration sports.)

Notwithstanding the Global Generation's remaining misanthropes' unsophisticated quibbling (i.e., me and mine), our Compassionate Conservative-in-Chief has eagerly RSVP'ed to the communist dictatorship's dramatic recreation of the Berlin Olympics. Given "The Decider's" resolve, hope dims we might disabuse his whimsy that watching a wobbling discus with the wanton butchers of Tiananmen Square can advance the sacred cause of human freedom. But we are duty-bound to the endeavor, lest as "history with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past" she finds us fallen from the ranks of honor.

Perhaps we could appeal to our President's historical sensibilities by reminding the Leader of the Free World that attending this evil regime's games will forever stain his legacy by depicting him as calloused to the subjugation of Tibet and sundry other communist abominations. Really, how would this generation of Americans esteem Franklin Roosevelt -- no slouch at setting Presidential precedents -- had he not let the cup of the Berlin Olympics pass from his nicotine stained lips and, instead, pursed them into a smirk with Der Fuerher for Leni Riefenstahl's lens.

Yes, this assumes Mr. Bush worries he may one day be regarded by posterity in the manner William Manchester recalled a discredited generation of sophisticated British "statesmen", save one:

"And as (Churchill's) debts mounted and his gloom deepened, England's indebtedness to Stanley Baldwin rose.in his final deed for the homeland, he joined Chamberlain in telling Tory MPs that if they felt they must deplore totalitarianism and aggression, they must not name names. It was important, he said, to avoid `the danger of referring directly to Germany at a time when we are trying to get on terms with that country.' Fleet Street cheered. So did Britain. These were men of peace."

In fairness, they were also the jackasses who paved a second road to Hell.

If such an appeal to history's verdict proves fruitless, we could remind our Commander-in-Chief communist China is:

Arming our enemies;
Engaging in espionage against us, including the use of cyber warfare;
Subjugating Tibet;
Abetting genocide in the Sudan;
Compelling a "One Child Policy" and forcing abortions amongst its people;
Committing predatory trade practices against us;
Denying their people's God-given human rights;
Subverting sovereign democracies;
Supporting their fellow dictatorships; and, generally,
Being an unsporting bastion of tyranny.

Could this partial recounting of the rogue regime's transgressions against our nation and others prove to the President that attending the communist Chinese Olympics will subvert the moral authority of his position as the Leader of the Free World -- a Free World which, along with the world's oppressed, will be watching and weighing his participation?

Could this enumeration of grievances against the Chi-coms help the Chief Executive glean that the President of the United States cannot attend these games as a passive spectator? (This is, after all, why the Chi-coms invited him.)

Could such a factual exposition convince Mr. Bush that attending their Olympics will reinforce our foreign policy "experts'" suicidal communist China "exception" and, in the event, make President Bush's political statement thus: "The United States is devoted to the self-evident truth every human being is endowed by their creator with the unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- except in communist China"?

Given these right reasons, would the President reconsider, for the sake of our free republic's sovereign citizens; and for the sake all the world's enslaved and oppressed who, yearning to breathe free, believe our nation remains their beacon of liberty and bastion of hope?

Thus ends our lesson in rhetorical questions.

Ever the political masochist, I once circulated a "Dear Colleague" letter to President Bush positing much of the above and requesting he not attend communist China's Olympics. Only a handful of brave souls signed my entreaty; undaunted, in September 2007 the missive flew. Certain I had affixed the correct address of Mr. Bush's taxpayer-subsidized housing, I am saddened to report he has not replied to this Congressional correspondence with the alacrity he did the Chi-coms' Olympic invite.

As the Year of the Rat scurries toward the opening ceremonies, however, I and my anti-communist ilk have not been idle. On April 1, I introduced H.R. 5668, which would bar any United States government official from attending the Beijing games' ceremonies. (Importantly, this legislation does not impact our athletes.) Oh, I know H.R. 5668 requires the President's signature or a Congressional over-ride of his veto to become law. Still, while it may not persuade the President to be "unavoidably otherwise occupied elsewhere in the world" during the communist Chinese Olympics, it will meet our moral imperative to our posterity, our country, and the cruel muse of History:

For when, once again, history's flickering lamp illumes our aged cheeks and strews her lengthening shadows across our fleeting existence, she will avow how the supporters of H.R. 5668 did "march always in the ranks of honor."

Pray she finds Republicans amongst them.

"Let It Bleed"

U.S. Representative Thaddeus G. McCotter, Chair
House Republican Policy Committee
U.S. House Floor Special Order
December 12, 2007

Mister/Madam Speaker,

As my Republican party completes its first year in the minority since 1994, we find ourselves held in historically low regard by the sovereign American people.

To end this trend, Republicans must accurately assess our party’s past and present failings; and its future prospects of again providing Americans a meaningful choice between the major parties. This remains, after all, a party’s duty to the citizenry.

For my GOP to fulfill it, first we must bury our ideological dead.

Aftermath
Safely on this side of the cleansing mists of memory, it is chic to eulogize the late Republican majority. From the chattering class few insights emerge, for in the aftermath, only poetry is an apt epitaph:

The world is too much with us,
Late and soon;
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away –
A sordid boon!

Such was the Republican bathos: a transformational majority sinned and slipped into a transactional “Cashocracy” – promises, policies, principles, all bartered, even honor. The majority now is of the ages, may it rest in peace…
And be redeemed.

Dirty Work
Once, George Santayana cautioned: “Those who do not learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them.” If our current Republican minority guilefully refutes or gutlessly refuses to admit, accept, and atone for the bitter fruits of its lapsed majority, it will continue to decline in the eyes of the American electorate. Thus, for the sake of our nation in this time of transformation, we must fully and frankly examine and understand the cardinal causes of the Republican majority’s recent demise; and, sadder but wiser, commence our Republican minority’s restoration as a transformation political movement serving the sovereign citizens of our free republic.

Through the Past Darkly
Big Hits and Fazed Cookies
To begin, we must retrace our steps down a darkened alley of broken hopes to glean the essence of our party’s headier times, big hits and fazed cookies.
Though many of its legislative leaders may moot the point, two Presidents caused the 1994 Republican Revolution: Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

The members of 1995’s new Republican Majority were Ronald Regan’s political children. From President Reagan, Republican Congressional revolutionaries inherited a philosophy of “politics as the art of the possible.” Cogently expressed by conservative intellectuals ranging from Edmund Burke to Russell Kirk, this philosophy’s central tenets held:

1. Men and women are transcendent children of God endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights.

2. Government was instituted to defend citizens’ inalienable rights and facilitate citizens’ pursuit of the good and of true happiness.

3. Over the generations, Divine Providence has established and revealed through tradition, prescriptive rights and custom within communities how order, justice, and freedom – each essential, co-equal and mutually reinforcing – are best arranged and nurtured for humanity to pursue the good and true happiness.

4. Human happiness is endangered by every political ideology, for each is premised upon abstract ideas; each claims a superior insight into human nature not revealed through historical experience; each proffers a secular utopia unobtainable by an imperfect humanity; and, each demands an omnipotent, centralized government to forcefully impose its vision upon an “unenlightened” and unwilling population.
This is the political philosophy and resulting public policies a once impoverished youth from Dixon, Illinois, Ronald Reagan, engagingly articulated to America throughout his Presidency in the 1980s. By 1994, the American people who, having taken Reagan at Russell Kirk’s word that “conservatism is the negation of ideology” and remembering its beneficent impact upon their daily lives, yearned for its return. For self-described Congressional Republican revolutionaries, this formed fertile electoral ground (one shaped as well, it must be admitted, by a host of unheralded and immensely talented GOP redistricting attorneys). But like all revolutions, the piece required a villain.

Enter President Clinton.

Exuberant at having defeated an incumbent President George H. W. Bush, Clinton mistook a mandate against his predecessor as a mandate for his own craftily concealed liberalism. In his first two years in the oval office, this mistake led Clinton to over-reach on “kitchen table” issues, such as raising taxes and socializing medicine. Daily, the four-decade old Democratic Congressional majority abetted Clinton’s radical policies; and across the political spectrum voters seethed.
Congressional Republicans bided their time, planned their revolution, and seized their moment. Led by their spell-binding and abrasive guru from Georgia, Congressional Republicans unveiled their “Contract with America” to much popular – if not pundit – acclaim.

Though much mythologized, if it is to prove instructive for the present Republican minority, this Contract can and must be placed in its proper perspective. A musical analogy is most elucidating.

When a reporter once praised the Beatles for producing Rock’s first “concept album,” Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, John Lennon curtly corrected him: “It was a concept album because we said it was.” Lennon’s point was this: yes, the Beatles had originally set out to produce a concept album; but early in their sessions the band dropped any conceits to creating a concept album and recorded whatever songs were on hand. Recognizing their failure, the Beatles tacked on a final song, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise), to engender the illusion they had, after all, created a “concept album.” Importantly, when the band later tried to produce a true “concept album” and accompanying film, Magical Mystery Tour, the lackluster result was one of the Beatles’ few failed artistic ventures.

Similarly, Congressional Republicans’ “Contract with America” was a collection of specific policy proposals and concrete grievances against the incumbent Democratic President and his legislative allies. It possessed merely an implicit philosophy (one obviously harkening back to Reagan). Even less than Sergeant Pepper, the individual tracks of which have (mostly) stood the test of time, today many of the Contract’s specific proposals sound dated. But like Sergeant Pepper, what endures about the Contract is the fact it was marketed as a revolutionary “concept” in governance. Of course, it is not. The Contract was a suitable period piece which served its purpose – the election of Congressional Republicans in sufficient numbers to attain our party’s first majority in forty years. Nevertheless the Contact’s lack of a clearly enunciated political philosophy with immutable principles sowed the seeds of the subsequent Republican Devolution.

Therefore, if the current Republican minority buys into the myth and makes the Contract the basis of a derivative “concept” agenda, the GOP will be condemned to another forty-year Magical Mystery Tour through the political wilderness.

Out of Our Heads
This is not to say the members of 1995’s new Republican majority lacked a political philosophy or immutable principles. Quite the contrary: these members were steeped in the Reagan tradition. But after an initial rush of laudable accomplishments, the members found themselves trapped by the Contract’s inherent pragmatism and particularity. Absent a philosophical anchor in the Contract, members drifted into the grind of governance, which distorted Reagan’s philosophical principles for public policy into non-binding precedents for political popularity. Exacerbating this process, the new majority’s leaders, exuberant at having defeated an incumbent Democratic Congressional majority, mistook a mandate against their predecessors as a mandate for their own finitely posited conservatism. In its first two years in control of the House, this led the majority’s leaders to erroneously conclude it could govern as a parliament, rather than as a Congress equivalent in power to the executive branch; and they over-reached on key issues, most notably in the shut down of the United States government over the issue of spending. Artfully framed by President Clinton with sufficient plausibility as an irresponsible Republican ideological attack on good government, this moment marked the beginning of the Republican majority’s end - in point of fact, from the government shutdown to the present the House GOP Conference has never had as many members as it did in 1995.

Some persist in too facilely dismissing this Republican debacle as being due to Clinton’s superior messaging of the issue from his bully pulpit. This analysis is errant. The reason Clinton succeeded is the kernel of truth he wielded on this issue: House Republican leaders had stopped governing prudently in accordance with Reagan’s political philosophy of politics being the art of the possible and, instead, started acting belligerently in an ideological manner against the public’s interest. It is no an accident this battle fundamentally affected Clinton’s thinking and spurred his reinvention from a liberal ideologue into a pragmatic problem-solver and proponent of “good government.” Unfortunately, Clinton’s publicly applauded posturing as a “centrist” incensed the Republican majority; and accelerated their efforts to differentiate themselves from an unprincipled President by being increasingly ideological, which they confuted with being principled.

As this ideological fever progressed through 1996, too late did the new majority’s members intuit the political cost to candidates considered “ideologues.” The Republicans’ majority did survive the partisan carnage of Clinton’s overwhelming 1996 re-election, but the cycle’s cumulative effect was lasting and damning. Without gawking at the gruesome minutia of each ensuing GOP ideological purge and internal coup instigated by this election, we can note it spawned the unseemly political perversion of the House Republicans’ transformational majority into a transactional “Cashocracy.”

Beggars Banquet
Hubristically deemed by its leading denizens as a “Permanent Majority,” the GOP Cashocracy was a Beggars’ Banquet at taxpayers’ expense. The Cashocracy’s sole goal was its own perpetuation; and its Cashocrats and High Priests of Money-theism myopically chased this aim through pragmatic corporatism and political machinations.

Obviously, the Cashocracy’s cardinal vice was its conviction to survive for its own sake. Curiously, this is not the height of arrogance; it is the height of insecurity. Aware it stood for nothing but election, the Cashocracy knew anything could topple it. This fear cancerously compelled the poll-driven Cashocrats to grope for ephemeral popularity by abandoning immutable principles. Materialist to their core and devoid of empathy, the Cashocrats routinely ignored the centrality to governmental policies of transcendent human beings.

A Bigger Bang
This Cashocracy’s first cardinal facilitated its second: pragmatic corporatism. Ensconced in insular power, the GOP Leadership lived the lives of the rich and famous, despite their middling personal means, due to their new-found friends in the corporate and lobbying community. Cut off from Main Street, these GOP leaders embraced “K Street.” The desire was mutual, and the corporatists’ influence grew gradually but ineluctably. Closed within a corporatist echo chamber, the GOP majority became deadened to the tribulations and aspirations of real Americans, and came to measure the “success” of its pragmatic policies by their reception on K Street. Reams of measures spewed forth prioritizing the interests of multi-national corporations over the needs of middle class Americans.

In fairness, even without the Cashocrats’ incessant inducements, blandishments and bullying, the majority of GOP members truly did feel they were promoting the interests of their constituents. This belief was insidiously sustained by the Cashocrats grafting their pragmatic corporatism onto the philosophy of economic determinism. It was not an unforeseeable development. Akin to their conservative brethren who after the fall of the Soviet Union proclaimed the “End of History,” House Republicans convinced themselves the ideology of democratic capitalism was an unstoppable deterministic force predestined to conquer the world; and, on their part, they viewed their job as hastening its triumph and preparing Americans to cope with its consequences. Combined with the Cashocracy’s insatiable need of corporate contributions for its sustenance, this adherence to ideological democratic capitalism reveals how the Republican House majority helped President Clinton (whom they had unknowingly come to emulate and, likely loathe ever more because of it) grant the Permanent Normalization of Trade Relations to Communist China. With this enact of this legislation, the Cashocracy reached its political zenith and moral nadir, for it did not shape globalization to suit Americans’ interests; it had shaped Americans’ interests to suit globalization.

Sticky Fingers
The handsome rewards for such “courageous” legislation fueled the Cashocracy’s third vice, avarice. The process was both seductive and simple, especially in a materialistic town forsaking the qualitative measurement of virtue for the quantitative measurement of money. While this temptation is to be expected in a city where politicians “prove” their moral superiority by spending other people’s money, it was equally to be expected Republicans would collectively resist it.

They didn’t.

Earmarks, which began as a cost-saving reform to prevent federal bureaucrats from controlling and wasting taxpayers’ money in contravention of express Congressional intent, spiraled out of control once the Cashocrats and their K-Street cronies realized the process could be manipulated to direct any appropriation, however undeserving, to any client, however questionable. In turn, political contributions materialized from the recipients of these earmarks for the members on both sides of the aisle who dropped them into legislation, often times without the knowledge of or the appropriate review by their peers. The passage of policy bills, too, increasingly mirrored the earmark process, as special interest provisions were slipped into the dimmer recesses of bills in the dead of night. The outcome of this fiscal chicanery was an escalation of the K-Street contributions the Cashocracy required to attain its aim of perpetuating itself in power; and of the illegal perks required to sate the more venal tastes of some morally challenged members who are now paying their debts to society.

Black and Blue
Cumulatively, in addition to rendering it morally bankrupt, these three vices left the Cashocracy intellectually impotent. Tellingly, within this less than subtle and manifestly sinister system of earmarks and contributions, the Cashocrats’ greased the skids for their legislative “favors” by relegating the majority’s younger members to voting rather than legislating; ignoring these members’ qualitative virtues, ideals and talents; measuring these members by the quantitative standard of how much money they raised; and, thereby, condemning these members to the status of highly paid telemarketers. Having squandered this infusion of youthful energy and insight, the Cashocrats hailed the election of Republican President George W. Bush and handed him the nation’s legislative agenda.

At first, the Cashocrats’ subordination of their separate, equal branch of government to the executive branch bore dividends. But by 2006, when the failures of the Iraq War’s reconstruction policy and Hurricane Katrina’s emergency relief torpedoed Bush’s popularity, the latent danger to the Cashocrats of hitching their SUVs to the fortunes of a President was evident. Precluded from tying its vicarious popularity to Bush’s coat tails, the Cashocracy teetered beneath the gale force invective of the Democrats’ campaign mantra the Congressional Republican majority was “a culture of corruption” slothfully content to “rubber stamp” the failed policies of an unpopular President. Panic stricken, the politically tone-deaf Cashocrats urged GOP members to tout America’s “robust economy” and attack Democrats on national security issues. The innately materialist economic argument was doomed to fail, because the “robust” economy was not to be found in regions like the Northeast and Midwest. The latter argument proved unconvincing to an electorate convinced Iraq and New Orleans were GOP national security fiascos. And, finally, nothing could persuade an outraged electorate to return a Republican majority which, in the interests of perpetuating itself in power, failed to protect House pages from predatory members of Congress.

By election day the public had concluded the Republican majority cared more about corporations than Americans; and, when the tsunami hit, the Cashocracy crumbled down upon many now former GOP members, who became the last, blameless victims of its stolid cupidity.

In hindsight, the Cashocracy would best have heeded President Theodore Roosevelt’s warning:

“The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.”

Exile on Main Street

December’s Children
Straggling back to Washington for the Republican Revolution’s death vigil, the 2006 election’s surviving GOP members bid anguished goodbyes to defeated friends and struggled to make sense of it all. Dazed and confused, some members managed to grasp the reality of their newly minted minority, while some still grapple with it. Out of this former group, a distinct vision has emerged concerning how House Republicans can revitalize and redeem themselves in the estimation of their fellow Americans.


Got Live if You Want It
“Restoration Republicans” are best considered Reagan’s grandchildren. Like their Reagan-Democratic parents, Restoration Republicans were attracted to our party by the intellectual, cultural, and moral components and proven practical benefits of philosophical conservatism. Transcending talking points and political cant, these Restoration Republicans’ are devoted to restoring human soul’s centrality to public policy decisions; and focusing these policies on preserving and perpetuating the permanent things of our evanescent earthly existence which surpass all politics in importance.

The enduring ideals of Restoration Republicans are succinctly enumerated by Russell Kirk in his book, The Politics of Prudence:

1. The conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order.

2. The conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity.

3. Conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription – that is, of things established by immemorial usage.

4. Conservatives are guided by the principle of prudence.

5. Conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety.

6. Conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability.

7. Conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked.

8. Conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism.

9. The Conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passion.

10. The thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society.

Given how the Cashocracy repeatedly violated these principles during its descent into oblivion, and how the Democrats’ 2006 consequent rallying cry was “change,” this tenth ideal merits deeper contemplation. For to understand it fully is to fully understand why Restoration Republicans, who are convinced we live amidst a crucible of liberty, proclaim our minority must emulate and implement the philosophical conservatism of Ronald Reagan and the fiery integrity of Theodore Roosevelt in the cause of empowering Americans and strengthening their eternal institutions of faith, family, community and country. Again, Kirk:

“Therefore the intelligent conservative endeavors to reconcile the claims of Permanence and the claims of Progression. He [or she] thinks that the liberal and the radical, blind to the just claims of Permanence, would endanger the heritage bequeathed to us, in an endeavor to hurry us into some dubious Terrestrial Paradise. The conservative, in short, favors reasoned and temperate progress; he [or she] is opposed to the cult of Progress, whose votaries believe that everything new necessarily is superior to everything old.

“Change is essential to the body social, the conservative reasons, just as it is essential to the human body. A body that has ceases to renew itself has begun to die. But if that body is to be vigorous, the change must occur in a regular manner, harmonizing with the form and nature of that body; otherwise change produces a monstrous growth, a cancer, which devours its host. The conservative takes care that nothing in a society should ever be wholly old, and that nothing should ever be wholly new. This is the means of the conservation of a nation, quite as it is the means of conservation of a living organism. Just how much change a society requires, and what sort of change, depend upon the circumstances of an age and a nation.”

Love You Live
Kirk’s words compelled Restoration Republicans to empathetically assess our nation’s age and circumstances; and ponder the direction and scope of the changes our American community requires.

In making these determinations, Restoration Republicans draw parallels between and inspiration from America’s “Greatest Generation.”

Our Greatest Generation faced and surmounted a quartet of generational challenges born of industrialization:

1. Economic, social, and political upheavals;

2. A second world war against abject evil;

3. The rise of the Soviet “super-state” as a strategic threat and rival model of governance; and

4. The civil rights movement’s moral struggle to equally ensure the God given and constitutionally recognized rights of all Americans.

Today, our generation of Americans must confront and transcend a quartet of generational challenges born of globalization:

1. Economic, social and political upheavals;

2. A third world war against abject evil;

3. The rise of the communist Chinese “super-state” as a strategic threat and rival model of governance; and

4. Moral relativism’s erosion of our nation’s foundational, self-evident truths.

The critical difference between the challenges conquered by the Greatest Generation and the challenges crises confronting our generation of Americans is this: they faced their crises consecutively; we face our crises simultaneously.

In response to these generational challenges to our free republic, Restoration Republicans have drawn upon the roots of their philosophical conservatism to affirm the truth America does not exist to emulate others, America exists to inspire the world; and to advance the policy paradigm of American Excellence, which rests upon a foundation of liberty, and the four cornerstones of sovereignty, security, prosperity and verities.

Individually and collectively, American Excellence’s foundation and four cornerstones are reinforced by these policy principles:
1. Our liberty is granted not by the pen of a government bureaucrat, but is authored by the hand of almighty God.

2. Our sovereignty rests not in our soil, but in our souls.

3. Our security is guaranteed not by the thin hopes of appeasement, but by the moral and physical courage of our troops defending us in hours of maximum danger;

4. Our prosperity is produced not by the tax hikes and spending sprees of politicians, but by the innovation and perspiration of free people engaged in free enterprise.

5. Our cherished truths and communal virtues are preserved and observed not by a coerced political correctness, but by our reverent citizenry’s voluntary celebration of the culture of life.

Restoration Republicans conclude, therefore, we must be Champions of American Freedom in challenging new millennium to keep our America a community of destiny inspired and guided by the virtuous genius of our free people; and forever blessed by the unfathomable grace of God.

Metamorphosis
It will not be easy, given the root public policy question of our times. In the Age of Industrialization, President Theodore Roosevelt empathized with Americans’ feelings of powerlessness in the face of the economic, social and political forces radically altering or terminating their traditional, typically agrarian, lives. Writing years later in his book A Humane Economy, the economist Wilhelm Ropke examined the impacts upon human beings by these forces, which he collectively termed “mass society”:

“(T)he disintegration of the social structure (generates) a profound upheaval in the outward conditions of each individual’s life, thought, and work. Independence is smothered; men are uprooted and taken out of the close-woven social texture in which they were secure; true communities are broken up in favor of more universal but impersonal collectivities in which the individual is no longer a person in this own right; the inward, spontaneous social fabric is loosened in favor of mechanical, soulless organization, with its outward compulsion; all individuality is reduced to one plane of uniform normality; the area of individual action, decision, and responsibility shrinks in favor of collective planning and decision; the whole of life becomes uniform and standard mass life, ever more subject to party politics, ‘nationalization,’ and ‘socialization.’”

In that epoch, the root public policy question was how to protect Americans’ traditional rights to order, justice, and freedom from being usurped by corporate or governmental centralization. Aware of this quandary, T.R. responded by taming an emerging capitalist oligarchy which considered itself above the laws and, thereby, soothing the economic, social, and political anxieties of urban industrial workers which threatened the stability of our free republic. Over time, from T.R.’s seminal efforts arose the industrial-welfare state which, in a tenuous detente, divided solutions to Americans’ economic and social upheavals between and within both centralized corporations and government.

No Security
In this Age of Globalization, however, while Americans are vexed by their seeming inability to influence the potent economic, social and political forces radically reshaping their lives, American corporations are busy decentralizing into “virtual corporations” reliant upon the outsourcing of jobs to other nations to obtain lower labor costs and evade cumbersome domestic laws and regulations. Such “rootless capital” being sent around the world in a keystroke to more “competitive markets” has cost Americans their livelihoods; reduced their wages and employer provided benefits; diminished their unions’ memberships; eclipsed their optimism regarding our economy’s continued vitality; and, in cases of extreme economic distress and angst, destroyed their marriages and dreams for their children.

The failure to realize the seismic ramifications to normal Americans of this tectonic economic shift was a primary cause of the Cashocracy’s collapse. As rising corporate profits and Wall Street bull markets became increasingly divorced from working Americans’ prosperity, the Cashocrats clung ever more tightly to their corporate benefactors without grasping Americans had concluded what is “good for GM” is no longer necessarily good for them.

The advent of virtual corporations and transient international capital has ended the old industrial-welfare state model of governance, wherein solutions to Americans’ economic and social anxieties were the shared burdens of centralized corporations and government. The stark choice is now between increasing the centralized power of the federal government or decentralization power into the hands of individuals, families and communities.


Steel Wheels
In their urgency to replace their lost or slashed corporate benefits, Americans will be sorely tempted to further centralize federal government to do it. But expanding the authority and compulsory powers of the federal government will be injurious to the American people. Big government doesn’t stop chaos; big government is chaos. By usurping the rightful powers of individuals beneath its bureaucracy’s steel wheels, highly centralized government alienates individuals and atomizes communities. Once more, Ropke speaks to the heart of the matter:

“The temptation of centrism has been great at all times, as regards both theory and political action. It is the temptation of mechanical perfection and of uniformity at the expense of freedom. Perhaps Montesquieu was right when he said that it is the small minds, above all, which succumb to this temptation. Once the mania of uniformity and centralization spreads and once the centrists begin to lay down the law of the land, then we are in the presence of one of the most serious danger signals warning us of the impending loss of freedom, humanity, and the health of society.”

Only liberty unleashes Americans to establish the true roots of a holistic American order – the voluntary and virtuous individual, familial, and communal associations which invigorate and instruct a free people conquering challenges. In contrast, centralized and, thus, inherently unaccountable government suffocates liberty, order and justice by smothering and severing citizens’ voluntary bonds within mediating, non-governmental institutions; and, thereby, stifles our free people’s individual and collective solutions to challenges. In consequence, the temptation for more centralized government must be fought to prevent turning sovereign Americans from the masters of their destiny into the serfs of governmental dependency.



Hot Rocks
Fully versed in this verity, Restoration Republicans have made their decision – power to the people. Thus, in this Age of Globalization, Restoration Republicans vow to:

1. Empower the sovereign American people to protect and promote their God-given and constitutionally recognized and protected rights.

2. Promote the decentralization of federal governmental powers to the American people or to their most appropriate and closest unit of government.

3. Defend Americans’ enduring moral order of faith, family, community and country from all enemies.

4. Foster a dynamic market economy of entrepreneurial opportunity for all Americans.
5. Honor and nurture a “humanity of scale” in Americans’ relations and endeavors.

Further, while these Restoration Republicans will be releasing a more detailed program in the future, the above will form the basis of their concrete policy proposals.

Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out

Mister/Madam Speaker,

My constituents are honest, hard-working, and intelligent people who are bearing the brunt of the generational challenges facing our nation. They have lost manufacturing and every manner of jobs due to globalization and, especially, the predatory trade practices of communist China. Throughout these economically anxious times, they spend sleepless nights wondering if they will be able to afford to keep their jobs; their houses; their health care; their hopes for their children. In the War for Freedom, they have buried, mourned, and honored their loved ones lost in the battle against our nation and all of civilization’s barbaric enemies. And, every day, they struggle to make sense of an increasingly perverse culture disdainful of and destructive to faith, truths, virtue and beauty, if the existence of these permanent things is even admitted.

True, they differ on specific solutions to their pressing issues. But they do agree Washington isn’t serving their concerns. They agree this storied representative institution is increasingly detached from the daily realities of their lives. And they remind me that when we enter this House – Their House – we enter as guests, who must honor the leap of faith they took in letting us in and allowing us to serve them.

With my constituents, I utterly agree. While it is not my purpose here to discuss the majority party, let me be clear as to my own: House Republicans have no business practicing business as usual. My constituents, our country, and this Congress deserve better.

And we will provide it!

Our Republican minority has members who know America isn’t an economy, America is a country.

Our Republican minority has members who know the only thing worth measuring in money is greed.

Our Republican minority has members with the heart to put individuals ahead of abstractions; people ahead of politics; souls ahead of systems.

Our Republican minority has members who have seen sorrow seep down a widow’s cheek and joy shine from a child’s eyes.

Yes, our Republican minority has members who know our deeds on behalf of our sovereign constituents must accord with Wordsworth’s poetic prayer:

“And then a wish: my best and favorite aspiration mounts with yearning toward some higher song of philosophic truth which cherishes our daily lives.”

It is these Republicans whose service in this Congress will redeem our party by honoring the sacred trust of the majestic American people who, in their virtuous genius, will transcend these transformational times and strengthen our exceptional nation’s revolutionary experiment in human freedom.

With these Republicans, I hereby throw in my lot and pledge my best efforts on behalf of my constituents and our country.

May God continue to grace, guard, guide and bless our community of destiny, the United States of America.