Showing posts with label Republican. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Republican. Show all posts
Friday, April 25, 2008
Rep. McCotter on America's Energy Situation
Transcript:
Mr. McCOTTER. I appreciate that. Thank you. We have a fundamental agreement and yet a disagreement. I think that everyone can see that there are three key elements to America's energy situation: Production, conservation, and innovation. We all agree on conservation. We'd like to see America more energy efficient, and we differ on whether or not what the extreme would be in terms of conservation. Republicans generally would hope that they would be community-oriented conservation, recognizing
these tiny ripples of hope, citizen engagement in protecting their local environment would be the most efficacious way to deal with this situation rather than pass an overarching bill in Washington, with no citizen participation and only hope and more regulation, taxation, and burden upon America's industry and upon the American people.
In the area of innovation it is a very stark difference. Our side of the aisle believes that the free market and the genius of the American people will come up with the innovative solutions necessary to move us toward green fuels and a cleaner environment. The other side of the aisle believes the government knows best, and if they just capture enough revenues from the hardworking American people, they will then determine what ideas will work and will not work and force them upon the market.
But it is most noticeable in the area of production where the two sides differ. We believe production is essential. The gentleman from Iowa has properly laid out we live in a global economy. Supply and demand are the keys to the crisis today. If America does not produce more energy from its own sources, the cost will continue to go up because the supply will remain constricted, if not finite, and the demand will continue to grow from developing countries such as Communist China, India, and others.
What we believe is necessary is a declaration of energy independence which, like our own country's Declaration of Independence, recognizes that it would not happen overnight, it would not be easy; it would require sacrifice, and yet together we would get there.
We need to continue to produce domestic energy as we transition through a free market-based approach to innovations that will get us to a green energy policy and through the community-based conservation that will help foster and perpetuate energy efficiencies within our communities, within our homes.
Now the difference between these two policies is clear in the chart that the gentleman from Iowa has put before us. As someone who does not come from Iowa, but from Michigan, once known as the arsenal of democracy, a proud manufacturing State, the State that put the world on wheels, we see what the cost of energy does. It is not an abstract number, it is a situation which causes an intense amount of pain and anxiety to the constituents of my district and the constituents of my State.
Manufacturing requires energy. We know the manufacturing sector has been decimated by unfair trade competition and other unfortunate policies. Yet, when you take the cost of energy on top of it, you are almost signaling the death knell of the manufacturing base as we know it and as we would like to preserve it, because that cost of energy, as it rises, is put into everything the manufacturer must do. And in the age of global competition, it becomes increasingly difficult for the manufacturer
to keep his costs down, his fixed overhead rising, and in the end, there comes the push, especially from the tier one and tier two suppliers, the push comes from above to either eat the cost or send it offshore.
We also are starting to see what the government dictates in terms of innovation with the emphasis on ethanol and others is we are beginning to hear stories about food shortages in the United States, we are now beginning to hear about how the cost of basic staple commodities is rising. Again, in our economy today, which is slowing down, the cost of energy, the cost of gasoline in particular is the cause. In my mind, this is the cause. Because it is one important commodity that is continuing to
go up in price without any relief in sight, and it also has spillover costs to all of the other commodities related to it.
There is nothing that does not wind up on your kitchen table that does not require energy to produce and transport. There is nothing in your home that you turn on, your Internet, or anywhere else, that does not require energy. As the cost of energy goes up, the cost of everything goes up. If we do not help increase the supply of energy, the costs will continue to rise, the American people will continue to suffer.
Now there will be an attempt, because evidently production conservation and innovation in a sound way is not palatable to some in this chamber, indeed a majority, there would be the attempt to shift the blame for the rising costs of energy to the producers. I am no fan of any multinational corporation. But then, again, I am not their executioner either. Because I remember what Ronald Reagan once said, Corporations are not taxpayers, corporations are tax collectors.
You want a windfall profits tax, you want a punitive tax on oil companies, energy producers, you can do it. And where are these energy producers and oil companies going to get that revenue from? They are going to pass the cost right onto the American people at their pumps, because Americans right now cannot survive without driving their cars to work. They cannot survive without energy. It would seem to me that these are simple lessons that we should have learned in our youth.
Then it occurred to me as I watch my children grow up, we have an entire generation of voters that were not alive in the 1970s. They did not live through the OPEC oil crisis, they did not live through taxation upon energy producers, they did not live through the syn fuels, where government raised taxes, put money in a fund, handed it out and we were going to be energy independent, or when Jimmy Carter went on TV and declared that by turning down the thermostat to 68, this was the moral equivalent
to war.
The gentleman from Iowa and I have in the past talked about our love of history and its need to be taught in the schools. Because anyone with a remote understanding of the 1970s would understand that the failed policies of the 1970s are inadequate to meet the pressing energy needs of today. What we need is a 21st century energy strategy, not a failed 1970s Jimmy Carter policy that actually helped pave the way toward more energy dependence in America.
So I thank the gentleman for what he is doing today, and I would encourage my colleagues to go back and look at what was tried before and failed and then perhaps they would be more amenable to coming across the aisle in joining with us to try to take concrete steps to alleviate not only the rising cost of energy but the rising cost of everyday life that is associated with it.
I yield back to the gentleman from Iowa.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Shenanigans: The Rock 'N' Roll Congressman
McCotter: Still strummin’
Here’s how a conversation with Rep. Thaddeus McCotter starts out:
Us: “Hello, sir, thank you for speaking with me.”
Him: “Why, do people not really talk to you?”
He’s filled with these one-liners.
We’re talking to him about the spoken-word album he just gave out to his peers, called “Freedom Songs: The American Empowerment Agenda,” which is McCotter’s new way of sending out a press kit of sorts, only this one doesn’t have those bulky pages that no one reads. And it’s light as air.
It shouldn’t be surprising that the “rock ’n’ roll congressman,” as W calls him, is making CDs. As it’s known, McCotter plays in the Second Amendments — the bipartisan congressional rock and country band. Oddly, though, he says he likes to read.
“It’s a lot easier to get them to listen than to get them to read it,” he tells us, explaining why he gave his colleagues the CD. But his preference is reading. “I get yelled at all the time, so it’s nice to give the ears a rest.” But he’s just glad the GOP can have some fun again. “We had fun with it. Republicans haven’t had that for awhile. … We used to be hip and fun,” says the Michigan Republican.
Which is what the band’s for? “Yeah, Bush had us to the White House.” Pause. “Once.” Pause. “He learned his lesson!” he says with a laugh. “I blame it on [band member Rep. Collin] Peterson’s singing and his politics.”
But if McCain were to win, you guys could go back there, no? McCotter’s iffy. “Depends. McCain’s traditional Scotch-Irish, and he has a long memory. I probably won’t ever see the inside of the place.”
As for Obama, McCotter’s hopes are still dashed. “You think there’s a liberal media? How can I play guitar and he has a Grammy?”
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
McCotter Rocks the Hill With New Policy CD
April 7, 2008
By Emily Heil and Anna Palmer, Roll Call Staff
It Has a Good Beat. A CD of House Members speechifying in earnest tones might not be headed for the top of the Billboard charts, but Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (Mich.) is doing his rockin’ best to jazz up the Republican Policy Committee’s message.
On Friday, McCotter was distributing a bootleg version of a CD of the committee’s members giving speeches on not-so-sexy topics like health care, taxes and terrorism —all dressed up to look like a rock ’n’ roll album.
He tells HOH that the CD was an alternative to an “eight-foot stack of policy papers.”
“Hopefully, it’s much more conducive to thought and discussion,” he says. The CDs distributed last week were a preliminary version, he says, and he’ll present the final version to House Minority Leader John Boehner (Ohio) this week. “You don’t give Murray the K the session tapes,” he tells us. (He’s referring to Murray Kaufman, the rock impresario who influenced bands including the Beatles, natch).
In the liner notes, McCotter credits each of the speakers with “vocals” on the album’s tracks. The liner notes for “Freedom Songs: The American Empowerment Agenda” also include old black-and-white photographs of people listening to the radio, with a superimposed logo featuring McCotter playing guitar, rock-god-style, behind the back. Elsewhere in the notes, the zany McCotter thanks the American people: “You are the blessed children of liberty and the hope of humanity,” as well as “staffs of hard-working roadies.”
Instead of trying to make too much sense of the album, HOH figures it’s best to simply take McCotter’s own advice and just, as he implores listeners, “dig it.”
By Emily Heil and Anna Palmer, Roll Call Staff
It Has a Good Beat. A CD of House Members speechifying in earnest tones might not be headed for the top of the Billboard charts, but Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (Mich.) is doing his rockin’ best to jazz up the Republican Policy Committee’s message.
On Friday, McCotter was distributing a bootleg version of a CD of the committee’s members giving speeches on not-so-sexy topics like health care, taxes and terrorism —all dressed up to look like a rock ’n’ roll album.
He tells HOH that the CD was an alternative to an “eight-foot stack of policy papers.”
“Hopefully, it’s much more conducive to thought and discussion,” he says. The CDs distributed last week were a preliminary version, he says, and he’ll present the final version to House Minority Leader John Boehner (Ohio) this week. “You don’t give Murray the K the session tapes,” he tells us. (He’s referring to Murray Kaufman, the rock impresario who influenced bands including the Beatles, natch).
In the liner notes, McCotter credits each of the speakers with “vocals” on the album’s tracks. The liner notes for “Freedom Songs: The American Empowerment Agenda” also include old black-and-white photographs of people listening to the radio, with a superimposed logo featuring McCotter playing guitar, rock-god-style, behind the back. Elsewhere in the notes, the zany McCotter thanks the American people: “You are the blessed children of liberty and the hope of humanity,” as well as “staffs of hard-working roadies.”
Instead of trying to make too much sense of the album, HOH figures it’s best to simply take McCotter’s own advice and just, as he implores listeners, “dig it.”
Thursday, March 13, 2008
McCotter Calls for Real Change From Democrat Majority: Stop Raising Taxes
McCotter Asks: “Is this largest tax increase in American history going to be the last?”
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congressman Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI-11), House Republican Policy Chairman, recently spoke on the House floor about the Democrat Majority’s budget, which if passed would be the largest tax increase in American history, $683 billion.
“Mr. Chairman, I come from Michigan, a State that respects honesty, even when one is in error, so I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised by the integrity, if not the ultimate decision, that we heard from the gentleman from New Jersey.
“We heard a lot about change over the course of a year or two, and I too must be honest. We have seen change in how Washington budgets. We have seen change. We have gone from bad to worse.
“Now, as I recall sitting in Michigan, living there with my wife and children, I have seen a similar instance out of my State government which, in a one-State depression, faced the choice of allowing working families to keep their money and protect their budgets or raising taxes and protecting the State budget.
“They started with the smokers. They went after them. They took their money. Nobody likes smokers. Who cares? Then they had a one-time-only property tax advance. They never did tell us when the property tax relief comes, but I am sure one day it will. It is only once. And then they raised our income taxes. They raised our income taxes because by then it was for the greater good. And whose family budget wants to stay in the way of the greater good? Certainly not somebody like me, somebody whose children are looking at college, somebody whose mother may be getting older and may need care, somebody who worries that their dreams of their future for their children might go up in ashes in a State that is mismanaged by a government that cares more about itself than it cares about the sovereign citizens who elected it.
“And then I come out here to do their work as their servant and I see the same thing. I see the same thing. I hear the same talk. I see the change that was promised and delivered. The sad part is the promise was implied.
“I remember hearing the government spent too much. Got to stop. The government spent too much. We are going to change that. I didn't hear the part where you said the government spends too much. We are going to spend more.
“I heard people talk about working families struggling, and we are only going to tax the rich. We are only going to tax the rich. Evidently we must not be doing too well. There is not enough rich to back up the promises. So what do we do? The largest tax increase in American history on everybody. Well, that is a change. I concede the point. It is a change.
“But I was shocked again with both the honor and the erroneous conclusion of the gentleman from New Jersey. I never in my life expected to see a Member of Congress apologize for not raising taxes on the American people. That is a change. I grant you that.
“The question is then, if the American people need to have their taxes raised to come into prosperity, surely you know what the ultimate number is. How high, how fast until we get to prosperity? How much more of my money has to go the Federal Government before I can dream for my family and feed them? Surely somebody must know that number.
“Is this largest tax increase in American history going to be the last? Are we then going to reach the American Dream? Are we going to have our liberty and economics to pursue that dream through our own works, or will government have to do that for us? Are we going to get bureaucrats as life coaches? What is going to be necessary? Give me a number. I haven't heard that number. I haven't heard that percent.
“I think the one thing that we do need to change immediately right now in rejecting this budget scheme to bloat, to soak your family budget, to bloat the Federal Government's budget, is I want to hear somebody admit that America's economic prosperity comes from our free people, not from the growth of government, for that is a truth to hear that would be a refreshing change of late.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congressman Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI-11), House Republican Policy Chairman, recently spoke on the House floor about the Democrat Majority’s budget, which if passed would be the largest tax increase in American history, $683 billion.
“Mr. Chairman, I come from Michigan, a State that respects honesty, even when one is in error, so I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised by the integrity, if not the ultimate decision, that we heard from the gentleman from New Jersey.
“We heard a lot about change over the course of a year or two, and I too must be honest. We have seen change in how Washington budgets. We have seen change. We have gone from bad to worse.
“Now, as I recall sitting in Michigan, living there with my wife and children, I have seen a similar instance out of my State government which, in a one-State depression, faced the choice of allowing working families to keep their money and protect their budgets or raising taxes and protecting the State budget.
“They started with the smokers. They went after them. They took their money. Nobody likes smokers. Who cares? Then they had a one-time-only property tax advance. They never did tell us when the property tax relief comes, but I am sure one day it will. It is only once. And then they raised our income taxes. They raised our income taxes because by then it was for the greater good. And whose family budget wants to stay in the way of the greater good? Certainly not somebody like me, somebody whose children are looking at college, somebody whose mother may be getting older and may need care, somebody who worries that their dreams of their future for their children might go up in ashes in a State that is mismanaged by a government that cares more about itself than it cares about the sovereign citizens who elected it.
“And then I come out here to do their work as their servant and I see the same thing. I see the same thing. I hear the same talk. I see the change that was promised and delivered. The sad part is the promise was implied.
“I remember hearing the government spent too much. Got to stop. The government spent too much. We are going to change that. I didn't hear the part where you said the government spends too much. We are going to spend more.
“I heard people talk about working families struggling, and we are only going to tax the rich. We are only going to tax the rich. Evidently we must not be doing too well. There is not enough rich to back up the promises. So what do we do? The largest tax increase in American history on everybody. Well, that is a change. I concede the point. It is a change.
“But I was shocked again with both the honor and the erroneous conclusion of the gentleman from New Jersey. I never in my life expected to see a Member of Congress apologize for not raising taxes on the American people. That is a change. I grant you that.
“The question is then, if the American people need to have their taxes raised to come into prosperity, surely you know what the ultimate number is. How high, how fast until we get to prosperity? How much more of my money has to go the Federal Government before I can dream for my family and feed them? Surely somebody must know that number.
“Is this largest tax increase in American history going to be the last? Are we then going to reach the American Dream? Are we going to have our liberty and economics to pursue that dream through our own works, or will government have to do that for us? Are we going to get bureaucrats as life coaches? What is going to be necessary? Give me a number. I haven't heard that number. I haven't heard that percent.
“I think the one thing that we do need to change immediately right now in rejecting this budget scheme to bloat, to soak your family budget, to bloat the Federal Government's budget, is I want to hear somebody admit that America's economic prosperity comes from our free people, not from the growth of government, for that is a truth to hear that would be a refreshing change of late.”
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
"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.
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.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Congress Thaddeus McCotter Interview by Jill Warren on Big Red Tent TV
Big Red Tent TV promotes Republican candidates and issues and political news. In this interview, host Jill Warren interviews Congressman Thaddeus McCotter about his core principles and his vision for conservative leadership.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Fiscal Predators: The Seduction of Governmental Dependency
U.S. Representative Thaddeus G. McCotter, Chair
The Republican House Policy Committee
The Left claims the Bush Administration manufactured a bogus war on terrorism to scare Americans into ceding their civil liberties to a police state. In reality, however, the Left is seducing Americans into surrendering their sovereignty, liberty, and prosperity to the welfare state.
Breaking their promise to provide fiscal responsibility to federal spending, every week the House floor echoes with the Democrats’ siren paeans to whatever slice of “social justice” du jour will ostensibly excuse hiking taxes and spending. By now taxpayers should be versed in the Left’s tricks of their trade: refusing to reduce government spending; refusing to prioritize government spending; and sweetly alleging only to be taxing a targeted group they’ve unfairly demonized to purportedly “help” a targeted group of vulnerable individuals - the poor, the sick, the kids (excepting the unborn). But in truth, the Left has only helped themselves in the near and long term to more of your prosperity, liberty and sovereignty.
Bent to feast upon the taxpayers’ money needed to sate their craving for social and electoral engineering, in the 110th Congress these Fiscal Predators have already:
• Passed five-year authorizations of $887,473,870,000, of which $25,476,250,000 is mandatory spending.
• Passed over $80,000,000,000 in NEW TAXES.
• Budgeted for the largest tax increase in American history – between $217,000,000,000 and $392,500,000,000.
• Raised the federal statutory debt limit by over $850,000,000,000 from $8.965 trillion to $9.81 trillion.
• Refused to devote a dime of deficit or debt reduction in their legislation.
• Refused to enact real earmark reforms.
• Refused to propose any entitlement reforms to defuse the ticking fiscal time-bombs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
• Ignored the fact economic growth – not tax hikes and Keynesian spending sprees – increased federal revenues by approximately $6,000,000,000 and will decrease the federal deficit by 36.2% at the end of FYO7.
Yet despite these alarming acts of fiscal irresponsibility, it appears the Left’s seductive spending is enticing the American electorate.
Earlier this year, in the Christian Science Monitor analyst Gary Shillings reported 52.6% of Americans receive “significant income from government programs… That's up from 49.4% in 2000 and far above the 28.3% of Americans in 1950. If the trend continues, the percentage could rise within ten years to pass 55%, where it stood in 1980 on the eve of President Reagan's move to scale back the size of government.” Future attempts will prove even more difficult. En masse, the aging baby boomers are hitting “entitlement age,” and beginning to receive Social Security and Medicare benefits.
Compounding the problem, under the “progressive” federal income tax, a full 50% of the lowest earning Americans provide only 3.5% of federal tax revenues. In consequence, soon over half of all Americans will view future tax hikes and massive spending increases as bargain, if not a boon. And, by the way, since the Republican Party strayed from its root principle of fiscal discipline, the electorate empowered a new Democratic majority to handle America’s treasury. Combined, these events conspire to supplant free enterprise with wealth redistribution as Americans’ unifying economic philosophy and system.
The fiscal tipping point is passing. Like it or not, in our capitalist system money is not only a measure of your prosperity; money is a measure of power and, thus, your liberty and sovereignty in relation to the subservient national government. Thus, whenever Washington’s Fiscal Predators raise taxes, it reduces your prosperity and your liberty; and whenever Washington’s Fiscal Predators increase spending, it expands their power and diminishes your sovereignty over it. If nothing is done – and done quickly – to tether the Fiscal Predators and reaffirm the historic fact our free people engaged in free enterprise are the foundation of our national prosperity, Americans, who were once the masters of their fate, will be fated to be mastered by their once subservient government.
For the sovereign citizens of a free republic conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition government only exists to protect our God-given rights, this portends a less than divine descent into Hell.
The Republican House Policy Committee
The Left claims the Bush Administration manufactured a bogus war on terrorism to scare Americans into ceding their civil liberties to a police state. In reality, however, the Left is seducing Americans into surrendering their sovereignty, liberty, and prosperity to the welfare state.
Breaking their promise to provide fiscal responsibility to federal spending, every week the House floor echoes with the Democrats’ siren paeans to whatever slice of “social justice” du jour will ostensibly excuse hiking taxes and spending. By now taxpayers should be versed in the Left’s tricks of their trade: refusing to reduce government spending; refusing to prioritize government spending; and sweetly alleging only to be taxing a targeted group they’ve unfairly demonized to purportedly “help” a targeted group of vulnerable individuals - the poor, the sick, the kids (excepting the unborn). But in truth, the Left has only helped themselves in the near and long term to more of your prosperity, liberty and sovereignty.
Bent to feast upon the taxpayers’ money needed to sate their craving for social and electoral engineering, in the 110th Congress these Fiscal Predators have already:
• Passed five-year authorizations of $887,473,870,000, of which $25,476,250,000 is mandatory spending.
• Passed over $80,000,000,000 in NEW TAXES.
• Budgeted for the largest tax increase in American history – between $217,000,000,000 and $392,500,000,000.
• Raised the federal statutory debt limit by over $850,000,000,000 from $8.965 trillion to $9.81 trillion.
• Refused to devote a dime of deficit or debt reduction in their legislation.
• Refused to enact real earmark reforms.
• Refused to propose any entitlement reforms to defuse the ticking fiscal time-bombs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
• Ignored the fact economic growth – not tax hikes and Keynesian spending sprees – increased federal revenues by approximately $6,000,000,000 and will decrease the federal deficit by 36.2% at the end of FYO7.
Yet despite these alarming acts of fiscal irresponsibility, it appears the Left’s seductive spending is enticing the American electorate.
Earlier this year, in the Christian Science Monitor analyst Gary Shillings reported 52.6% of Americans receive “significant income from government programs… That's up from 49.4% in 2000 and far above the 28.3% of Americans in 1950. If the trend continues, the percentage could rise within ten years to pass 55%, where it stood in 1980 on the eve of President Reagan's move to scale back the size of government.” Future attempts will prove even more difficult. En masse, the aging baby boomers are hitting “entitlement age,” and beginning to receive Social Security and Medicare benefits.
Compounding the problem, under the “progressive” federal income tax, a full 50% of the lowest earning Americans provide only 3.5% of federal tax revenues. In consequence, soon over half of all Americans will view future tax hikes and massive spending increases as bargain, if not a boon. And, by the way, since the Republican Party strayed from its root principle of fiscal discipline, the electorate empowered a new Democratic majority to handle America’s treasury. Combined, these events conspire to supplant free enterprise with wealth redistribution as Americans’ unifying economic philosophy and system.
The fiscal tipping point is passing. Like it or not, in our capitalist system money is not only a measure of your prosperity; money is a measure of power and, thus, your liberty and sovereignty in relation to the subservient national government. Thus, whenever Washington’s Fiscal Predators raise taxes, it reduces your prosperity and your liberty; and whenever Washington’s Fiscal Predators increase spending, it expands their power and diminishes your sovereignty over it. If nothing is done – and done quickly – to tether the Fiscal Predators and reaffirm the historic fact our free people engaged in free enterprise are the foundation of our national prosperity, Americans, who were once the masters of their fate, will be fated to be mastered by their once subservient government.
For the sovereign citizens of a free republic conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition government only exists to protect our God-given rights, this portends a less than divine descent into Hell.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
McCotter Demands Ahmadinejad Apologize at Ground Zero
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 7, 2007
WASHINGTON D.C. -Congressman Thaddeus McCotter, Chairman of the Republican House Policy Committee, today released the following statement on Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s upcoming visit to the United Nations and Ahmadinejad’s request to visit Ground Zero during his trip to New York City.
“The irrational ruler of Iran, which is reported to shield Al-Qaeda members from the full measure of justice, should only be allowed to view Ground Zero in order to apologize and pledge to atone by opposing terrorism.
“If Ahmadinejad does not, he will be going to gloat over the site where his terrorist cohorts invaded American soil and killed over three thousand American souls. To those who naively claim we can ‘negotiate’ with Ahmadinejad, his actions belie the sanity of your proposed diplomacy.”
McCotter issued his statement just as it was reported Coalition forces arrested a corps of Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Quds Force officer in Sulimaniyah, who was involved in training foreign terrorists in Iraq and transporting explosive devises into Iraq responsible in the lethal attacks against the our soldiers, Iraqi Government, and all Coalition Forces.
NOTE: Ahmadinejad is scheduled to arrive September 24 to speak to the U.N. General Assembly, as the Security Council decides whether to increase sanctions against Iran for its uranium enrichment program.
###
September 7, 2007
WASHINGTON D.C. -Congressman Thaddeus McCotter, Chairman of the Republican House Policy Committee, today released the following statement on Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s upcoming visit to the United Nations and Ahmadinejad’s request to visit Ground Zero during his trip to New York City.
“The irrational ruler of Iran, which is reported to shield Al-Qaeda members from the full measure of justice, should only be allowed to view Ground Zero in order to apologize and pledge to atone by opposing terrorism.
“If Ahmadinejad does not, he will be going to gloat over the site where his terrorist cohorts invaded American soil and killed over three thousand American souls. To those who naively claim we can ‘negotiate’ with Ahmadinejad, his actions belie the sanity of your proposed diplomacy.”
McCotter issued his statement just as it was reported Coalition forces arrested a corps of Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Quds Force officer in Sulimaniyah, who was involved in training foreign terrorists in Iraq and transporting explosive devises into Iraq responsible in the lethal attacks against the our soldiers, Iraqi Government, and all Coalition Forces.
NOTE: Ahmadinejad is scheduled to arrive September 24 to speak to the U.N. General Assembly, as the Security Council decides whether to increase sanctions against Iran for its uranium enrichment program.
###
McCotter to Democrats: “Match Rhetoric with Results on Earmark Reform”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 20, 2007
WASHINGTON D.C. - Today Congressman Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI), Chairman of the House Policy Committee, signed a discharge petition which, if it acquires 218 Congressional signatures, will help put full transparency and disclosure into House tax and authorizing bills. If the discharge petition is successful, House Democrats would be compelled to bring Minority Leader John Boehner’s H. Res. 479 to the floor for an up-or-down vote. H. Res. 479 would require taxpayer-funded earmarks in all authorizing and tax bills to be publicly disclosed and open to House debate.
“This isn’t Washington’s money. It is the taxpayers’ money, born of their hard-work’s perspiration and shorn from their hard-earned prosperity,” said McCotter, an original co-sponsor of H. Res. 479.
“Any and all attempts by politicians to imprudently spend the people’s money must be publicly exposed and immediately stopped.”
“I call on my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to match their rhetoric with results on fiscal discipline and earmark reform. If not, they will be signaling their intent to continue wasting the people’s money and breaking the public’s trust,” said McCotter.
###
September 20, 2007
WASHINGTON D.C. - Today Congressman Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI), Chairman of the House Policy Committee, signed a discharge petition which, if it acquires 218 Congressional signatures, will help put full transparency and disclosure into House tax and authorizing bills. If the discharge petition is successful, House Democrats would be compelled to bring Minority Leader John Boehner’s H. Res. 479 to the floor for an up-or-down vote. H. Res. 479 would require taxpayer-funded earmarks in all authorizing and tax bills to be publicly disclosed and open to House debate.
“This isn’t Washington’s money. It is the taxpayers’ money, born of their hard-work’s perspiration and shorn from their hard-earned prosperity,” said McCotter, an original co-sponsor of H. Res. 479.
“Any and all attempts by politicians to imprudently spend the people’s money must be publicly exposed and immediately stopped.”
“I call on my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to match their rhetoric with results on fiscal discipline and earmark reform. If not, they will be signaling their intent to continue wasting the people’s money and breaking the public’s trust,” said McCotter.
###
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Back by popular demand...McCotter Bowl 3
YOU ARE INVITED TO ATTEND OR PARTICIPATE!
BYOFA (Bring Your Own First Aid)
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Is Petraeus correct that Iraq surge is working?
If you missed my oped in the Detroit News on Thursday, Sept. 13th.....
Is Petraeus correct that Iraq surge is working?
Iraq becomes more stable as U.S. starts winning 'War for Freedom'
Rep. Thaddeus McCotter
Critics whose foreign policy expertise fits on an eco-friendly foreign car's fender allege Iraq is a "bumper sticker war without end." This slogan is false. Finally, if fitfully, this integral theater in our nation's War for Freedom is becoming a free, stable state opposed to terrorism; and the Iraq war is ending because we are winning.
This news was obscured amid the repugnant partisan attempts to spin the congressional testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker as dishonest or erroneous. While it will arrive neither quickly nor cheaply, the truth will emerge as our troops succeed in their mission and start coming home.
Incorporating Crocker's diplomatic initiatives, Petraeus' new counter-insurgency strategy's goal in Iraq is to eradicate insurgents and place reconstruction efforts into local Iraqis' hands. This strategy is succeeding. Due to increased security and economic opportunity, Iraqis are choosing liberty instead of the insurgency.
Iraqi shift to liberty
In his Sept. 7 letter to the Multi-National Force-Iraq, Petraeus stressed the importance of Iraqis' political shift to liberty:
"We are also building momentum in an emerging area of considerable importance -- local reconciliation. Local Iraqi leaders are coming forward, opposing extremists and establishing provisional units of neighborhood security volunteers. With growing government of Iraq support, these volunteers are being integrated into legitimate security institutions to help improve local security. While this concept is playing out differently in various areas across Iraq, it is grounded in a desire shared by increasing numbers of Iraqis -- to oppose extremist elements and their ideologies.
"This is very significant because, as many of you know first hand, extremists cannot survive without the support of the population. The popular rejection of al-Qaida and its ideology has, for example, helped transform Anbar Province this year from one of the most dangerous areas of Iraq to one of the safest. The popular rejection of extremists has helped Coalition and Iraqi Forces take away other areas from al-Qaida as well, and we are seeing a spread of this sentiment in an ever-increasing number of Sunni areas. Now, in fact, we are also seeing a desire to reject extremists emerge in many Shia areas."
Iraqi security participation up
This critical local reconciliation has increased Iraqi participation in their security; hastened the day they will be solely responsible for it; and, as in the early days of American independence, Iraqi local reconciliation will precede, facilitate and dictate national reconciliation. But most important for Americans, Iraqis' local reconciliation is the reason Petraeus proposed commencing troop reductions this month and continuing them through July 2008, when nearly 30,000 of our citizen-soldiers will have departed harm's way for home.
Perversely, critics decry this good news as a "token" political stunt. Demanding our immediate retreat in Iraq, these detractors ascribe their own misdeeds upon others -- namely, playing politics with our troops.
A strategic retreat is a dangerous maneuver for a fighting force, which gets smaller as the advancing enemy grows stronger. When rushed, disaster results, as happened to the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. Petraeus and Crocker refuse to repeat this mistake. Thus, American troop reductions are based upon progress in Iraq, not politics in Washington.
This responsible nexus for our troops' return threatens the radical left because it mutes its propaganda claims that a "war without end" has somehow already ended in America's defeat. Instead, every American has a concrete "benchmark" to measure our progress to victory in Iraq: witnessing and welcoming the return of our triumphant troops.
True, our troops can't come home quickly enough. No, this does not mean the war is won, as arduous and dangerous work remains. Yes, our nation must vigilantly monitor the facts on the ground to ensure the Iraqis' local political shift to liberty proceeds with requisite speed.
But let those who won't unite behind the cause of victory at least welcome the news that our troops -- because of progress in Iraq -- are coming home with their "mission accomplished." Now that will look good on the grille of a Michigan-made SUV.
Is Petraeus correct that Iraq surge is working?
Iraq becomes more stable as U.S. starts winning 'War for Freedom'
Rep. Thaddeus McCotter
Critics whose foreign policy expertise fits on an eco-friendly foreign car's fender allege Iraq is a "bumper sticker war without end." This slogan is false. Finally, if fitfully, this integral theater in our nation's War for Freedom is becoming a free, stable state opposed to terrorism; and the Iraq war is ending because we are winning.
This news was obscured amid the repugnant partisan attempts to spin the congressional testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker as dishonest or erroneous. While it will arrive neither quickly nor cheaply, the truth will emerge as our troops succeed in their mission and start coming home.
Incorporating Crocker's diplomatic initiatives, Petraeus' new counter-insurgency strategy's goal in Iraq is to eradicate insurgents and place reconstruction efforts into local Iraqis' hands. This strategy is succeeding. Due to increased security and economic opportunity, Iraqis are choosing liberty instead of the insurgency.
Iraqi shift to liberty
In his Sept. 7 letter to the Multi-National Force-Iraq, Petraeus stressed the importance of Iraqis' political shift to liberty:
"We are also building momentum in an emerging area of considerable importance -- local reconciliation. Local Iraqi leaders are coming forward, opposing extremists and establishing provisional units of neighborhood security volunteers. With growing government of Iraq support, these volunteers are being integrated into legitimate security institutions to help improve local security. While this concept is playing out differently in various areas across Iraq, it is grounded in a desire shared by increasing numbers of Iraqis -- to oppose extremist elements and their ideologies.
"This is very significant because, as many of you know first hand, extremists cannot survive without the support of the population. The popular rejection of al-Qaida and its ideology has, for example, helped transform Anbar Province this year from one of the most dangerous areas of Iraq to one of the safest. The popular rejection of extremists has helped Coalition and Iraqi Forces take away other areas from al-Qaida as well, and we are seeing a spread of this sentiment in an ever-increasing number of Sunni areas. Now, in fact, we are also seeing a desire to reject extremists emerge in many Shia areas."
Iraqi security participation up
This critical local reconciliation has increased Iraqi participation in their security; hastened the day they will be solely responsible for it; and, as in the early days of American independence, Iraqi local reconciliation will precede, facilitate and dictate national reconciliation. But most important for Americans, Iraqis' local reconciliation is the reason Petraeus proposed commencing troop reductions this month and continuing them through July 2008, when nearly 30,000 of our citizen-soldiers will have departed harm's way for home.
Perversely, critics decry this good news as a "token" political stunt. Demanding our immediate retreat in Iraq, these detractors ascribe their own misdeeds upon others -- namely, playing politics with our troops.
A strategic retreat is a dangerous maneuver for a fighting force, which gets smaller as the advancing enemy grows stronger. When rushed, disaster results, as happened to the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. Petraeus and Crocker refuse to repeat this mistake. Thus, American troop reductions are based upon progress in Iraq, not politics in Washington.
This responsible nexus for our troops' return threatens the radical left because it mutes its propaganda claims that a "war without end" has somehow already ended in America's defeat. Instead, every American has a concrete "benchmark" to measure our progress to victory in Iraq: witnessing and welcoming the return of our triumphant troops.
True, our troops can't come home quickly enough. No, this does not mean the war is won, as arduous and dangerous work remains. Yes, our nation must vigilantly monitor the facts on the ground to ensure the Iraqis' local political shift to liberty proceeds with requisite speed.
But let those who won't unite behind the cause of victory at least welcome the news that our troops -- because of progress in Iraq -- are coming home with their "mission accomplished." Now that will look good on the grille of a Michigan-made SUV.
Monday, September 10, 2007
Rep. McCotter speaks on the House Floor about Gen. Petraeus' Testimony on the progress in Iraq.
Tonight I spoke on the U.S. House floor to discuss Gen. Petraeus' Testimony. Below is a video of my remarks.
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