Radio Address by the President to the Nation, 12-13-03

THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. This week I was honored to sign the Medicare Act of 2003, the greatest advance in health coverage for America's seniors since Medicare was founded nearly four decades ago. This new law will give seniors better choices and more control over their health care, and provide a prescription drug benefit.

Beginning in 2006, most seniors now without prescription coverage can expect to see their current drug bills cut roughly in half, in exchange for a monthly premium of about $35. And for the first time, seniors will have peace of mind that they will not face unlimited expenses for their Medicare.

These and other major improvements in Medicare came about because Republicans and Democrats in Congress were willing to work together for the interests of our senior citizens. We were able to pass this law because we listened to the people, set the right priorities and worked hard until we finished the job.

The reform and modernization of Medicare was one milestone in a year of accomplishment. We worked with Congress to take action in a number of areas on behalf of the American people. Last May, the House and Senate passed my jobs and growth package into law, delivering substantial tax relief to 91 million Americans. We reduced taxes for everyone who pays income taxes, increased the child tax credit, cut the taxes on dividends and capital gains, and gave 23 million small business owners incentives to invest for the future.

And now we are seeing the results. In the third quarter, the economy grew at the fastest pace in almost 20 years. Productivity, manufacturing and housing construction are expanding. And we have added over 300,000 jobs since August. The tax relief we passed is working, and our economy is gaining strength.

Legislation passed this year also showed the compassion and the good heart of America. We created the American Dream Down Payment Fund to help low-income citizens afford the down payment on homes of their own. We defended children from the violence of partial birth abortion, and passed new incentives to promote the adoption of children in foster care. And we acted to fight the global spread of AIDS by launching a multi-year emergency effort to prevent millions of new infections in Africa and the Caribbean, and to provide medicine and humane care to millions more who suffer.

This year we took important action to protect the environment. Our whole nation saw the devastation left by wildfires in the west, and we passed healthy forest legislation to thin the underbrush that fuels catastrophic blazes.

Our government also took urgent action on every front in the war on terror. Congress appropriated more than $31 billion for the Department of Homeland Security to prepare first responders and safeguard our ports and infrastructure, and help scientists develop vaccines against dangerous biological threats. Our country stood behind the men and women of our Armed Forces as they liberated Iraq and helped carry out the work of reconstruction there and in Afghanistan. In Congress, members of both parties worked together to provide vital resources for our troops, who are fulfilling their responsibility to defend the nation.

All these actions have made us safer, more prosperous, and a better country. We confronted problems with determination and bipartisan spirit. Yet our work is not done. There will be pressing business in the new year on issues from job creation to health care to public schools. And above all, we will continue to fight the war on terror until the war is won.

On behalf of all Americans, I thank the Congress for a productive year. Working together, we can add to this progress in the year to come.

Bush forgot to mention CFR.

Here's the letter I faxed to Bush on that topic:

You have attained success in your attempt to restrict the ability of your constituents to comment upon or criticize your political behavior. The USSC upheld your traitorous, evil, affirmative signature on the CFR legislation.

As Scalia so eloquently stated:

"The first instinct of power is the retention of power, and, under a Constitution that requires periodic elections, that is best achieved by the suppression of election time speech. We have witnessed merely the second scene of Act I of what promises to be a lengthy tragedy. In scene 3 the Court, having abandoned most of the First Amendment weaponry that Buckley left intact, will be even less equipped to resist the incumbents' writing of the rules of political debate. The federal election campaign laws, which are already (as today's opinions show) so voluminous, so detailed, so complex, that no ordinary citizen dare run for office, or even contribute a significant sum, without hiring an expert advisor in the field, can be expected to grow more voluminous, more detailed, and more complex in the years to come — and always, always, with the objective of reducing the excessive amount of speech. "

The key point here is that you and the rest of the ruling political class have now legally constrained who can speak about you and when. The rest of the act is just fluff.

Repeat: We are now restricted, by law (by you), from speaking about political candidates prior to an election upon pain of imprisonment.

Some will argue that, oh it's only certain groups of people who cannot speak, but that is a red herring. Once the ability of the American people to manifest political speech has been limited, it is only a matter of time until that freedom to speak is reduced to complete uselessness. Indeed, ultimately we will be told we have the freedom of political speech but the only situation in which we will be able to exercise that 'freedom' will be when we are alone in the toilet.

You, the political class, have now made it clear you are separated from us common folk. You have established the precedent of yourselves as the new feudal aristocracy in America and objections from us common folk will not be tolerated upon penalty of imprisonment.

In 2000 I prayed for your victory. I voted for you. I rejoiced when you won.

You have betrayed that support.

From this point on I will publicly oppose your position as President. I will actively work against your re-election attempt - due primarily to your decision to impose an untouchable political aristocracy upon your constituents. I will do all in my power to assure that neither you nor your progeny will ever again subvert and corrupt the freedom given us by God and protected by the blood of our citizens.

You have earned the enmity of all who love liberty and resist tyranny. You have made it clear you represent the same evil that gave the world Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Hitler. You have subverted liberty. You have imposed tyranny upon your constituents.

May God have mercy on your soul.

Here is a copy of the letter I will be sending to President Bush soon:

Dear Mr. President,

As I write this letter, my heart is heavy. My voice, and the voices of millions of Americans, has been muzzled. Despite all that we say to you, Mr. President, we are not heard.

When your father ran for President, I voted for him; to continue the policies of President Reagan, the policies that made the 80s one of the greatest growth periods of modern America and set the foundation for the explosive growth of the 90s. When you ran for the Governor of Texas, I was there to vote for you, just as I was there to vote for you when you ran for President. When I moved to Florida, I was proud to vote for your brother, Jeb, to be re-elected as governor.

In the 60s, when my country needed me to stand for freedom, I answered her call. Today, as the result of exposure to Agent Orange, I have a service-connected disability. I served my country to the best of my ability, Mr. President, always concerned that the impact of not serving could have on future generations of Americans. Above all, I was willing to lay down my life to preserve the most precious, most sacred document that exists in America; our Constitution.

The Constitution is more than an old, yellowing piece of paper protected in the Library of Congress archives. It is the document that stunned the world of the 18th century, providing a framework of government that reserved and guaranteed rights for the citizens of America. Nowhere else on earth did the citizens have guaranteed rights against the formidable power of the government; only in the United States of America. These guaranteed rights, memorialized by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, made America the sole beacon of freedom in the world. From, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, South America, Central America, Antarctica and the Arctic, people from all walks of life risked their lives, their families and their fortunes to participate in the freedom America offered.

For more than two hundred years, our Constitutional rights have been the sacred trust of our elected representatives and our Supreme Court. Only under your administration have our Constitutionally guaranteed rights been muzzled. When the McCain-Feingold Bill was first presented, you promised to veto it, noting the unConstitutional provisions it contained that violate our First Amendment rights. Instead of vetoing a bill that you knew was flawed, you signed it; passing the buck to the Supreme Court to eliminate the unConstitutional provisions of the bill. In signing that bill, Mr. President, you betrayed your promise to veto it, you betrayed your countrymen and you betrayed me. I fought to ensure that the provisions of the Constitution would always be available to future generations. Never in my wildest imagination did I believe that a conservative President would support a law that muzzles the most precious of American values; the freedom of speech.

When you signed that bill into law, Mr. President, you opened the floodgates of an assault on the remainder of our freedoms. Already, legislators across the country are developing legislation for the new Congress that will curtail our freedoms even more. And, to reward the author of our loss of freedom, you are allowing Sen. John McCain to develop the foundation of your new “immigration reform”. The same Sen. McCain who gave us McCain-Feingold and the loss of our freedom of speech.

With Sen. McCain writing the fundamental provisions of “immigration reform”, I expect more of my Constitutional rights to be eroded in the guise of legislation intended to benefit America. It won’t. Instead of any effort to control the flow of illegals across our borders, I fully anticipate that our borders will be completely erased and American citizenship will be for sale to the highest bidder. America has only been a beacon to immigrants around the world because of the freedoms our Constitution guarantees. When we give away the rights of citizenship to those who entered this country by violating our laws, citizenship is no longer the prize it should be regarded but, instead, becomes only a cheap and meaningless caricature of itself to those who gained it fraudulently.

Successive polls have routinely shown that Americans all across this great nation want our borders controlled, our laws enforced and illegal immigration stopped. Instead of heeding the wishes of Americans who fund the programs and agencies charged with controlling immigration and the sovereignty of our country, our elected representatives ignore us and push legislation that rewards those who come to this country in violation of our laws. Instead of finding them, arresting them and deporting them, they are, instead, given access to deplete our social services and safety net programs of their resources, thereby depriving the Americans who have paid for those services the ability to access them. Instead of establishing English as our national language, we have rewarded illegal immigrants not by requiring that they speak our language, but that we speak theirs!

Next month you will meet with President Vicente Fox to renew immigration talks. Here are the results I would like to see from those talks:

1) The U.S. would demand that Mexico begin enforcing the sovereign borders that divide the US and Mexico,
2) The U.S. would demand that Mexico impose punitive measures on repeat illegal immigrants,
3) The U.S. would demand that Mexico stop encouraging Mexicans to immigrate illegally to the US,
4) Mexico and the U.S. would come to a substantive agreement on a guest worker program that would benefit both Mexico and the US and, when it was over, ensure that those guest workers went back home,
5) Mexico would begin investing some of the profits from its oil revenues from Pemex into developing new industries that would keep potential illegal immigrants at home,
6) The U.S. and Mexico would develop a joint task force that would penetrate the Hispanic communities in the US to arrest and deport illegal immigrants,
7) Establish meaningful and substantive fines for those employers who hire illegal immigrants.

I fully expect none of that to occur. Given your and Secretary Ridge’s historically soft stance on illegal immigration, I expect that more Americans will be displaced from their jobs by illegal aliens. In recent years, the caliber of illegal aliens coming to this country from Mexico are better educated and have taken professional, white collar jobs from American citizens of equal or better education. Rather than the stereotypical peons living in squalor to eke out enough of an income to support family in Mexico, many of these recent “immigrants” have college educations, live in up-scale neighborhoods and drive SUVs.

When the new Congress convenes, Mr. President, I would like to see you support a bill that completely and totally repeals the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) in its entirety. Since the Supreme Court failed to observe its most basic and sacred duty, preserving the rights guaranteed under the Constitution, the only way to right this stunning wrong committed by you, the Congress, the Senate and the Supreme Court is to repeal the law. If it is not repealed, Senate and Congressional incumbents may be re-elected under the terms of this flawed, unConstitutional and criminal legislation, but you may not be so fortunate. Many conservatives, myself included, are outraged at the loss of freedom that this bill represents and nothing short of its repeal will suffice.

In addition, when you meet with Mexico’s President, Vicente Fox, it would please a majority of Americans if you would take proactive measures to restore our sovereign borders, curtail the flow of illegals across our southern border, deport those who are living in the U.S. illegally and work with Mexico to enforce our laws and preserve the rights of citizenship for American citizens.

Campaign Finance Reform (McCain-Feingold) and “immigration reform” are but two issues you have tackled as President. Overall, Mr. President, aside from the tax cuts you championed and the War on Terror, in my opinion, there are many issues you have tackled that are not hallmarks of a conservative President. Conservatives appreciate having a strong President in office that will defend our security, but we also want a President who stands for principles of honesty and fairness. Chief among those are the stalwart defense of the Constitution. I defended that Constitution, Mr. President, as did you and our fathers, our grandfathers and so on. America is a great country with great traditions. We need you to help restore those traditions; restore the greatness of a country on the precipice of more greatness or bitter decline.

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