Memo to foes of Big Government: Stay together in 2010
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
Early American patriots wanting out from under England and its increasingly despotic King George III were warned by Benjamin Franklin they should all hang together or they would all hang separately.
Timely advice from one of our smartest and most practical founding fathers.
We mention this as a reminder to any testy center and right factions of the conservative movement, all who very much want to dislodge Barack Obama and stop the radical Left’s march toward Big Government.
For the 2010 and 2012 elections, there are already hints and headlines about a third party outside the Republican ranks.
That didn’t work well for those splitting the GOP by voting for H. Ross Perot over George H.W. Bush in 1992.
And it won’t work well in 2010 or 2012 for Tea Partiers, old-line Republicans, conservative-leaning Independents, Reagan Democrats, libertarians, and others.
Following the third party path will simply guarantee continuing control of Congress by Obama Democrats in 2010 and probably Obama’s reelection in 2012.
Many anti-big government conservatives, this writer included, feel that without Republican control, at least in the House where spending bills originate, Obama will consolidate power and be unstoppable in 2012.
He is just that good at using taxpayer money for political ends, of which there is so much out there, i.e., unspent TARP billions, stimulus billions, and more billions for bailing out and taking control of big companies, even whole industries.
Pending a Senate change in 2010, keeping the Obama team in charge of committees will be no picnic for center and right voters either.
Those committees keep the floodgates open for Obama’s passing parade of liberal judges, radical regulators, and departmental oinks such as the eight assistants in the Justice Department who are now prosecuting the same al Queda masterminds they once defended in private practice.
Republicans brought the modern Democrat Party to power when, in that 1992 election, Perot drained enough votes from the first President Bush in a three-way race to elect Democrat Bill Clinton.
Nice job. Message delivered. But then what? The rest of the 1990s was spent fending off socialized medicine via HillaryCare and holding in check the worst items on the Democrat Party social spending wish list.
The nation also suffered under Clinton White House dithering over radical Islam. Meanwhile, terrorists executed the first Twin Towers bombing in 1993, killer explosions at U.S. embassies overseas, the sinking of the U.S.S. Cole off Yemen with loss of life, and plotting the 9/11 attacks that killed 3,000 innocents.
To further better ends, this writer urges all factions of the center and the right to rally around their obvious uniting theme — reverence for the United States Constitution, which has been so savaged in just one year by the Democrat-controlled Congress and the Obama Administration.
Specifically, we’d like to see a “constitutional convention” held as early as possible this spring or early summer to which all factions of the center and the right in America send delegates.
Our recommended final outcome would be offering to the American people a “Contract with the Constitution,” drawn along the lines of the successful “Contract with America” in 1994.
New-age “Constitutionalists” meeting in open sessions, hopefully carried on C-SPAN, would have no law-making powers. But the “Contract” can provide a bright symbol and a set of principles worth fighting for, much like Franklin and the other Founders fought for theirs.
Barack Obama has absurdly dismissed our Constitution as merely an enumeration of “negative rights” — apparently not up to his insights about what one of Freedom’s and Liberty’s greatest inspirations to the world should be.
It doesn’t require insight to see how mauled it has been — from Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the House of Representatives, Majority Leader Harry Reid in the Senate and the Obama cadre of leftists in the White House.
The United States is fast being entombed in socialist policies and anti-freedom practices. Even the work-a-day language of Congress and the White House has expanded to deal in “kickbacks” and bills “deemed” to have passed but not voted upon.
Make your own list. Ours includes radical debt, deficits and impossible to sustain new entitlements, passed outside the law or through short-circuited procedures, abominations to the ways a free people deal with public issues.
We can only guess what is to come through the same Banana Republic approach to legislation — in energy curtailment through cap-and-trade, spending and debt, expanded union power if Democrats succeed in doing away with the secret ballot in elections to unionize farm fields, factory floors, and offices.
No one knows what flotsam and jetsam will float out of those monstrous bills the administration and Congress seem predisposed to.
Nebraskans had an early dose of Obama medicine. It came with the “Cornhusker Kickback” bribe, offered by Obama and accepted by Sen. Ben Nelson. Ominously, it was discovered tucked away on page 2,027 of the massive 2,700-page ObamaCare bill.
We want these Jack-in-the-box bills stopped. We hope enough Americans in the conservative ranks of all factions want Big Government stopped.
2010 will be a mighty test.
There is an operative motto: It is: “Any government big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take all you’ve got.”
Beginning this week those words will appear for the duration of national peril on the front pages of the Midlands Business Journal and our Lincoln Business Journal.
As a reminder, such as Ben Franklin might offer!
April 9, 2010
