The Obama Administration has gotten socialized medicine and higher taxes, and now wants to disarm the citizenry. As if we needed a reminder, the GOP as-is has again proven to be a dummy opponent. Lucky for us, now that Obama temporarily got what he needed from the GOP, Speaker Boehner has become a man of the people, claiming to have returned to the conservatism of his youth. What a relief.
This is not the time for patriots to decide the system can’t change. Not if we want our children to respect us when they are old enough to take measure of the situation and our response.
The truth is, genuine conservatives don’t run a single chamber of a single state government in the nation, much less the federal government. All of the GOP-dominated state Houses are run by the lobby, as if our legislatures exist to pass the next law that will improve politically-connected businesses, unions, associations, and the bureaucracy.
The Democratic Party believes we don’t spend enough. They have no shortage of new spending proposals. They speed us over the fiscal cliff, even as they blame the GOP for it. They collect votes by offering other people’s money and a governmental blessing for anti-social, sinful behaviors that we used to be wise enough to know are corrosive to faith and freedom.
The GOP says it stands against those things, but has a deeply ingrained two-faced culture that everyone in GOP politics feels daily. There is, on the one hand, what the GOP says it stands for in order to corral vote groups. On the other hand, there are the lobby priorities; the real priorities that are served when sessions begin.
Whatever genuineness GOP politicians personally possess regarding long-term issues like true budget balancing, rule of law, and basic moral decency, is often buried under the weight of the short-term lobby priorities. Patriotic concerns end up being chips used in service of lobby demands.
Long term thinking in one party is sacrificed on the altar of power and goodies for the masses. Long term priorities in the other party are sacrificed on the altar of short term goodies for connected businesses and associations. Neither party dares challenge the powerful and bloated bureaucracy.
In Texas in 2011, 30 house members stood in caucus for a grassroots conservative speaker candidate, and 15 members voted on the floor votes against the person occupying the lobby-owned speaker chair. This helped generate a much more conservative session than otherwise would have been possible. It gave establishment moderates a tougher-than-usual “pretend-to-be-conservative” primary-prep project.
This opposition helped produce a very good primary for grassroots conservative candidates, and a very poor primary for moderate establishment candidates and incumbents.
Though we can’t be sure, it is likely that, even at the end, a speaker vote would have included 20 or 25 votes against the lobby-owned speaker chair.
To give perspective, growth of 10 votes each year puts the speakership in the picture in 12 or 14 years. While that probably sounds like eternity to politicians in a capitol city vortex, it isn’t very long to patriots who want to save this country. Think of it this way: it is only three presidential cycles away.
The speaker vote never made it to the floor, but it won’t cause Texans to throw their hands up in the air. We are neither helpless with a lobby-owned speaker chair, nor naive enough to think all problems be solved if we empowered a grassroots-backed speaker.
One thing is sure: our founders did not set up our system so that crony businesses, bureaucracies, and mobs with pitchforks demanding benefits would commandeer it as their personal vehicle.
We must not get swallowed by this system that is now trying to disarm us. We must change it. Anything less says Speaker Boehner’s recent performance as the best we deserve to hope for in this country. Anything less is giving up the war of our age because it is hard, turning on the TV, and wishing our kids and grandkids good luck.