I can only hold three Congress members to task...my House representative and my two Senators.
All three of them are on board, mostly, as conservatives although I'm not happy with Sen. Frist's leadership of the Senate.
So the fight has to be taken to the party and the President. I can't rely on others around the country which can only influence their three members.
So far, Bush's non-discretionary spending is an 8.2% increase. I don't like it. And only his dad and Nixon were close. Nixon was even worse creating entire cabinet level departments.
But it's a calculation I can only use to decide my vote. And all the alternatives are worse. Yes, I'd love to have back that GOP Congress that kept Clinton in line on spending.
Yes, I'd love to wipe out the NEA and worry what will happen once the Dems get control again. But at the same time I see the strategy of maybe just wiping them out to the point we then can curb and cut back and reform and change the mentality. Right now, it's not the time. Buying votes? Sure...that's politics.
Any measures less than just stringing up the politicans and starting over don't seem to work with our non-voting, braindead society.
So unless we are ready to start killing each other again, we'll have to work more slowly over time to educate enough to our point of view to gain more political offices.
Call it a tactical retreat for now.
I can only hold three Congress members to task...my House representative and my two Senators.
I think you can do more. Put the pressure on Tom DeLay, the single most important conservative in the House. He's willing to chart his own course. When he's called 'The Hammer', it's not a cozy nickname.
And join with
the Liberty Committee in supporting the
The Liberty Caucus, a coalition of 21 of Congress' most conservative and constitutional legislators. We've got
Paul, Tancredo, Hostettler and many more strong conservatives. We start every fight with enough congressmen to get a bill on the agenda. And we can win. Sign up for our email updates so you will know when it's time to put the pressure on your congresscritter. No money begging and they don't sell your name or email address. We've won many times before and we can win again.
So far, Bush's non-discretionary spending is an 8.2% increase. I don't like it. And only his dad and Nixon were close. Nixon was even worse creating entire cabinet level departments.
Actually, it's a 24% increase for the 2002-2004 budget years over which he has presided. But Bush's proposed budgets are irrelevant anyway. Only Congress has the federal checkbook. You can blame Bush for not vetoing but not much else.
Congress spends that money, not Bush.
So unless we are ready to start killing each other again, we'll have to work more slowly over time to educate enough to our point of view to gain more political offices.
This seems escapist and defeatist to me. They will never change to our views. The old excuse was we didn't have power to control spending and expansion of government because we lacked the House/Senate/WH. We gave them all those things. Now you tell me that we must be more patient yet.
This notion that we will finally get the constructionist judges we were promised and a substantial shrinking of the federal government is a ruse for the gullible. In theory, it all depends on the control of the Seante with a sixty vote majority. This would actually require about 70 Republicans because some of the GOP senators would defect to the Dims (like Jeffords) or vote with them. The idea that we will ever hold the WH and the House and the Senate with 70 GOP senators is just a trip into LaLaLand.
The real truth is they have no intent to do anything other than try to buy liberal votes with federal dollars and pandering to minorities. Because they wish to dump the fiscal conservatives and the religious Right, something that many of them express openly.
Now, having obviously failed to enact the Rockefellerian program to eliminate the conservative wing of the party and having failed to recruit those voters to whom they have pandered as shamelessly as any Dim ever did, they turn back to us. Because they can't hold those offices without us in '04 and they
know it.
I would say there is a considerable difference between being tolerant of a few excesses in the party and completely abandoning our principles over an 'R' or a 'D'. And we have all been tolerant to a fault.
Brand-names simply aren't all they're cracked up to be.
I would assert that the complacency of so many party faithful contributes directly to the liberalism of the party. It is a license to spend. The conservative wing is far less forgiving, knowing that the mainstream of the GOP actually has no discernable principles. In this election year, conservatives are a swing voting bloc. This has not been true in since the elections of the Eighties but it is true now.