Posted on 10/19/2004 3:39:26 PM PDT by CHARLITE
Tom Delay Renews Contract With America
From the 2004 Republican Party Platform (pg. 74): "We believe the Second Amendment and all of the rights guaranteed by it should enable law-abiding citizens throughout the country to own firearms in their homes for self defense...We oppose federal licensing of law-abiding gun owners and national registration as a violation of the Second Amendment and an invasion of privacy of honest citizens."
During the 3rd debate between President Bush and Kerry, a question about the assault weapons ban of 1994 was posed to Bush who responded that he was for it, but that he could have done nothing about extending it because “the Republicans and Democrats were against the assault-weapon ban, people of both parties.”
Kerry responded:
“If Tom DeLay or someone in the House said to me, 'Sorry, we don't have the votes,' I'd have said, 'Then we're going to have a fight.' And I'd have taken it out to the country and I'd have had every law enforcement officer in the country visit those congressmen. We'd have won what Bill Clinton won.”
Leaving aside the huffing and puffing, please note that the assault weapons ban had nothing to do with reducing crime or violence, and everything to do with laying the groundwork for national registration and eventual confiscation of all firearms from law-abiding citizens in order to render them incapable of defending themselves against an overreaching government. Senator Feinstein (D-CA), one of the sponsors of the bill, made the symbolic nature of the bill clear when, shortly after passage, she went on national television and said:
“If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate for an outright ban, picking up every one of them, ‘Mr. and Mrs. America turn them all in,’ I would have done it.”
The ban automatically ceased to be law on 13 Sept. 2004 because of its 10-year sunset provision, and because the Republican leadership of the House, with a fair amount of support from Democrats, simply refused to allow the question to come to a vote.
We do appreciate Kerry's hint at the role Tom Delay, majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, played in all of this.
Namely, as early as 13 May 2003 Delay stated that the House would not consider bills to extend the ban. "The votes in the House are not there to reauthorize it," he said flatly. Indeed, various bills to not only extend the ban, but to also drastically increase the number of weapons covered and to introduce a national registry of firearms and firearms owners, never got out of committee, and the original bill expired.
When I first read Delay’s announcement a year and a half earlier, I felt relieved because of the furor which Bush’s previously expressed approval of an extension had caused among 2nd Amendment supporters. At that moment it also occurred to me that maybe Bush had his carefully considered reasons for saying what he did, because he could count on conservatives in Congress to limit the damage, and maybe do more than that. In short, Bush sometimes plays the nice cop, while Tom Delay is his mean cop.
The big day came this September last and the democrats melted into the underbrush. I wanted to write an appreciative article about Delay, so I went to the search engines to learn more about him. I found a lot of negative to vituperative commentary, and almost nothing positive. His enemies call him a megalomaniac (“I am the government.”), a would-be theocrat, and the world’s greatest threat to “progressive” values. Everyone, enemies and friends alike, call him the hammer, which I would take as a compliment. When I went to the archives of conservative online news outlets, I found some positive treatments of him, but still surprisingly little and not enough.
In the shadow of the impending election and the looming threat to our Republic, it’s time to stand up for him, as he has stood up for us.
From his website bio I learned that he grew up in Texas at the southern border and became a Republican when it was dangerous to do so. He first ran for election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1978, and won for the first time in 1984, despite his district being solidly democrat. About that race he said candidly:
“I was the first Republican ever elected in the history of Fort Bend County. I was not a profile of courage. I didn't tell anybody I was a Republican.”
He has stayed in the House ever since and has accumulated a record of consistent adherence to conservative principles and of supporting the cause of Israel. As former majority whip and current majority leader, he is now perhaps the most powerful politician in America, considering the preeminent role which our founders assigned to the House as the truest expression of the will of our people. It controls the purse strings.
All this was interesting, but I needed more. I struck gold when I came across the text of a speech he gave on 1 Dec. 2003 entitled Reshaping the American Future.
It is an amazing document, full of candid assessments of the current political situation, and offering a course for the country to follow which is so clear, that it could be termed an extension of the Republicans' 1994 Contract with America. Here are the main proposals from that speech:
Double the size of the American economy in the next 15 years; Scrap the current tax code altogether and replace it with a 23-percent national sales tax; Reduce unnecessary regulations which render us less competitive in the world market; Strengthen Medicare and Social Security with market-based reform; Create a free trade zone encompassing the entire Western hemisphere; Cultivate the democracies which will replace terrorist regimes; Curb the grizzly excesses of three decades of abortion on demand in America; Empower working parents to choose the right education for their children; Permanently ban human cloning and the harvesting of human life for medical research; Reaffirm the dignity of marriage as a sacred covenant between a man and a woman and defend its unique status in American life; Welcome people to this country under appropriate circumstances while protecting the sanctity of our borders; Impose discipline on the federal judiciary; Reign in the federal judiciary; Reduce discretionary spending and impose fiscal responsibility on Congress. If a major part of this program gets through Congress, the Republic will be safe for another generation, and the democrats will have to become a national party again. No wonder they fear him and are using every trick in the book to try and weaken him. Unsubstantiated allegations of nebulous connections to financiers and unethical strong-arm tactics on the House floor are becoming more and more frequent. That’s par for the course for someone who has done so much to thwart the democrats’ utopian socialist agenda.
Let us be thankful for the mean cop who patrols the nation’s beat and keeps the Contract with America on course. Comments to Bob Redman:
The standard liberal interpetation:
...blah, blah, blah....Tom Delay is going to destroy us because he is so effective, so we have to defeat him at all cost....blah,blah,blah...
I think the USA needs another Texan President!! Tom Delay in 2008.
http://www.cato.org/dailys/10-31-00.html
October 31, 2000
On My Mind: GOP Pussycats
by Edward H. Crane
"The combined budgets of the 95 major programs that the Contract with America promised to eliminate have increased by 13%."
I think you are right!
final results:
"DeLay received 58.94 percent of the vote, while Richard Morrison (D) fell short with only 38.15 percent"
That's almast 60%!!!
The Hammer has held his ground nicely.
That's almast 60%!!!
Ooops! That's almost.
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