The Sabotage Republicans

The betrayal of Ken Cuccinelli has the GOP going back to the future

A Guest Blog By JEFFREY LORD

Call them the Sabotage Republicans.

They have been busily at work in Virginia these last few weeks, sabotaging the gubernatorial campaign of Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.

But first?

Remember these headlines?

• From 2012: Romney Loses; Conservatives Weigh Limiting Clout of GOP Establishment

• From 2008: McCain Loses: Conservatives Call for GOP Reform

• From 2004: Bush Narrowly Beats Kerry; Conservatives Call for Rove Resignation

• From 2000: Bush wins by Supreme Court vote: Conservatives Call for End of “Compassionate Conservatism”

• From 1996: Dole Loses: Conservatives Demand End to Moderate Nominees

• From 1992: Bush Loses to Clinton: Conservatives Weigh Restrictions on GOP Establishment

If you don’t recall these headlines, no, your memory isn’t failing. They were never written. And if you saw these headlines yesterday your eyes weren’t failing you either. They were written:

• From the New York Times: GOP Weighs Limiting Clout of Right Wing

• From the Washington Post: Close Result in Va. Governor’s Race Hardens GOP Divisions

• From Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal: Lessons for 2014 From a Virginia Defeat

While we’re at it, let’s throw in one more headline, like the last three from yesterday, this headline too is a real one:

• From 1976 in the New York Times: Reagan Urges His Party to Save Itself By Declaring Its Conservative Beliefs

Now, notice anything here?

Every time some Establishment GOP nominee loses the White House or a hot gubernatorial, Senate or other race — conservatives have been silent about this unending ability of Establishment Republicans to lose either close elections or win them by unnecessarily close margins..

Yet if one conservative — that would be Ken Cuccinelli this week — loses a race, Katie bar the door.

Worse, up until now not much has been made of the long, disgraceful trait of Establishment Republicans to demand party unity — unless they lose a primary or a convention. In which case they simply refuse to unite behind the winning conservative. And deliberately, with malice aforethought — actively seek to sabotage that conservative.

There was one notable exception to this, captured in that 1976 New York Times headline which we have cited in this space many times. Ronald Reagan had finally had enough — and in the aftermath of yet another Establishment GOP presidential crash he made clear what path the GOP had to follow if it really wanted to win. Losing to Gerald Ford in the battle for the 1976 nomination, Reagan made a rallying speech for Ford at the convention and campaigned for him that fall. Ford lost. A month after the 1976 election, Reagan made a point of breaking the traditional conservative silence on losing Establishment races and turned the tables. A political party was not a “fraternal order” he said tartly to the Times, and that was the real problem with moderate, Establishment Republicanism. Which is why they kept setting the party up for repeated defeats.

In fact, one of the real problems here — as exemplified by the Cuccinelli defeat — is that moderate Republicans not only refuse to pull together. They go out of their way to sabotage the conservative.

Say it again? That word is sabotage. Betrayal. The Establishment GOP goes out…of…its…way to sabotage. Spelled s-a-b-o-t-a-g-e.

Let’s name some names here, shall we? Present and past to illustrate the point.

We’ll start here with this story in Breitbart by Matthew Boyle. The headline?

Cantor’s Ex-Chief of Staff Helped McAuliffe to Victory

The story begins thusly:

The ex-chief of staff for House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) helped Democrat Terry McAuliffe beat Republican Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia’s gubernatorial election race.

Boyle goes on to detail how GOP House Majority Leader’s ex-chief of staff Boyd Marcus, who had supported the GOP moderate Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling over Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli for governor. Cuccinelli won the day — so what to do? Why but of course! Marcus was out the door to help defeat Cuccinelli by actively working to elect Democrat Terry McAuliffe.

Marcus is quoted as saying — and I have supplied the bold print for emphasis:

“I was looking at the candidates, and I saw Terry McAuliffe as the guy who will work with everybody to get things done… Virginia needs an experienced businessman who will put the practical needs of our people ahead of political ideology. I’ve never before supported any Democrat, but this election Terry is the clear choice for mainstream conservatives. I am excited to work with him to grow the already-long list of prominent Republican leaders who are supporting his campaign.”

Got that?

Terry McAuliffe — your basic left-wing liberal, huge supporter of Obamacare, abortion on demand, high taxes and big government among other things (does the name Hillary Clinton ring a bell?) — and Boyd Marcus the Cantor/Bolling guy, plus an “already-long list of prominent Republicans,” see Ken Cuccinelli as the ideologue. And these guys are, they say, the “mainstream conservatives.”

Scratch a “mainstream conservative” on Eric Cantor’s staff, apparently, and what you really have is a left-wing liberal.

Is there any wonder why the GOP House Leadership has had so many problems dealing with conservative members? Clearly there is reason to believe the Leader’s staff of the supposedly conservative party isn’t even close to being “mainstream conservative.” In the case of Marcus, he has vividly illustrated that in fact he was all too willing to go over the side to a far-left ideology.

Marcus isn’t alone in the Sabotage Republican category. In fact, he is merely typical of the breed.

Here’s the difference between conservatives and Establishment Republicans.

Back in the paleo-days of American political history — 1960 — Barry Goldwater’s name was placed in nomination for the presidency. He lost — he actually never ran a real campaign — but be that as it may, when he went to the podium of the 1960 GOP convention to withdraw his name and endorse Establishment winner Vice President Richard Nixon he said this, bold print added for emphasis:

Now you conservatives and all Republicans, I’d like you to listen to this. While Dick and I may disagree on some points, they’re not many. I would not want any negative action of mine to enhance the possibility of a victory going to those who by their very words have lost faith in America….. And you conservatives think this over—we don’t gain anything when you get mad at a candidate because you don’t agree with his every philosophy. We don’t gain anything when you disagree with the platform and then do not go out and work and vote for your party.

…I know what you say. You say, “I’ll get even with that fellow. I’ll show this party something!” But what are you doing when you stay at home? You are helping the opposition party elect candidates dedicated to the destruction of this country!

…Now I implore you. Forget it! We’ve had our chance, and I think the conservatives have made a splendid showing at this convention!

We’ve had our chance: we’ve fought our battle. Now let’s put our shoulders to the wheels of Dick Nixon and push him across the line. Let’s not stand back. This country is too important for anyone’s feelings: this country in its majesty is too great for any man, be he conservative or liberal, to stay home and not work just because he doesn’t agree. Let’s grow up, conservatives.

Let’s, if we want to take this party back—and I think we can someday—let’s get to work.

I’m a conservative and I’m going to devote all my time from now until November to electing Republicans from the top of the ticket to the bottom of the ticket, and I call upon my fellow conservatives to do the same. Just let us remember that we are facing Democrat candidates and a Democrat platform that signify a new type of New Deal, far more menacing than anything we have seen in the past.”

Then comes 1964. Barry Goldwater and his conservatives defeat liberal Republican New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Like Goldwater the loser fours earlier, Rockefeller the loser this time gets his five minutes to address the delegates and the nation via television.

Unlike the conservative loser Goldwater in 1960, the Establishment loser Rockefeller took a very different approach to losing.

Said Rockefeller, and we will leave in the notations of “Crowd Boos” as they happened in the original, with bold print supplied for emphasis:

During this year I have criss-crossed this nation fighting—to keep the Republican party the party of all the people and warning of the extremist threat, it’s a danger to the party.

—It’s danger to the party and it’s danger to the nation. The methods of these extremist elements, I have experienced first hand. [Crowd boos.] That’s right. Their tactics have ranged from cancellation by coercion of a speaking engagement before a college to outright threats of personal violence.

This is still a free country ladies and gentlemen. [Crowd boos.] These things, ladies and gentlemen have no place in America, but I can personally testify to their existence. And, so can countless others who have also experienced anonymous mid-night and early morning telephone calls. That’s right. [Crowd boos.] Unsigned and threatening letters. Smear and hate literature, strong-arm goon tactics, bomb threats and bombings. Infiltration and takeover of established political organizations by Communist and Nazi methods! [Crowd boos.]

Some of you don’t like to hear it ladies and gentlemen, but it’s the truth. These extremists feed on fear, hate and terror…There is no place in this Republican party…for such hawkers of hate, such purveyors of prejudice, such fabricators of fear. [Crowd boos.] Whether Communist, Ku Klux Klan or Birchers! [Crowd boos and begins continuous cheer of “We want Barry!] There is no place in this Republican Party for those who would infiltrate its ranks, distort its aims and convert it into a cloak of apparent respectability for a dangerous extremism. And make no mistake about it, the hidden members of the John Birch Society and other like them are out to do just that.

Lovely. Not a word there about the real opponent in 1964 — Lyndon Johnson, the Great Society, the impending deluge of Big Government that would swamp the country and set it on the road to fiscal disaster. No, Rockefeller’s approach was to go after conservatives and trash them. They were Nazis. Klan members. Haters.

Then there was this jewel.

In the closing hours of that 1964 nomination battle, when it was abundantly clear to all that Goldwater had well-more than a majority of the votes, out came this charming missive over the name of Rockefeller’s last minute replacement as the liberal GOP hope to defeat Goldwater. Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton. Tellingly, it was written by Scranton’s staff and not seen by their boss, but it reflected the liberal GOP mindset. The letter was, as presidential campaign chronicler Theodore H. White described it, theoretically a debate challenge. But in fact it read “less like a challenge to debate than an indictment, a summons to Goldwater to stand trial before the Convention delegates.” The letter read, in part, with bold print added for emphasis:

Your organization…feel they have bought, beaten and compromised enough delegate support to make the result a foregone conclusion. With open contempt for the dignity, integrity and common sense of the convention, your managers say in effect that the delegates are little more than a flock of chickens whose necks will be wrung at will…

You have too often casually prescribed nuclear war as a solution to a troubled world.

You have too often allowed the radical extremists to use you.

You have too often stood for irresponsibility in the serious question of racial holocaust.

You have too often read Taft and Eisenhower and Lincoln out of the Republican Party.

In short, Goldwaterism has come to stand for a whole crazy-quilt collection of absurd and dangerous positions that would be soundly repudiated by the American people in November.

Got that? The winner of the GOP nomination was “absurd,” his positions “dangerous.”

When the 1964 convention was over, instead of uniting behind Goldwater as Goldwater had done with Nixon — and asked his supporters to do the same — the Establishment/Rockefeller wing of the GOP took a walk. They sat on their hands — or went out of their way to sabotage Goldwater.

Decades later, moderates were still at it. In 2010 Delaware, GOP moderate Congressman Mike Castle was filled with soothing calls for party unity — until he lost the GOP Senate nomination to the conservative Christine O’Donnell. And promptly sat on his hands along with the Delaware and Washington GOP Establishments. Which spent their time shorting her on funds and attacking her.

Now the same stunt has been pulled in Virginia with the GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli. The moderates, led by moderate Lieutenant Governor Bolling and Eric Cantor’s ex-chief of staff, lost in a convention to the conservative Cuccinelli. So Bolling spends his time, like Nelson Rockefeller and liberal Republicans all the way back in 1964, and does the minimal. With Cantor’s friend Marcus simply going over to the other side, period.

What, pray tell, was going on with Reince Priebus and the Republican National Committee? With the Chamber of Commerce? Here’s this from Politico:

McAuliffe outraised Cuccinelli by almost $15 million, and he used the cash advantage to pummel him on the airwaves. A lack of resources forced the Republican to go dark in the D.C. media market during the final two weeks.

The Republican National Committee spent about $3 million on Virginia this year, compared to $9 million in the 2009 governor’s race.

The Chamber of Commerce spent $1 million boosting McDonnell in 2009 and none this time.

“If the Republicans would have rallied around the nominee instead of refusing to support Cuccinelli, he would have won,” said a GOP source involved in the race.

Then there is Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and the Republican Governors Association deciding to take their money and, instead of giving directly to Cuccinelli, going off on their own to do commercials talking about… China. That’s right…not Obamacare, but China.

Here’s Matt Lewis on this over at the Daily Caller:

“Bobby Jindal’s presidential campaign is over,” said the Cuccinelli advisor. “He screwed this up so bad. And I don’t know why. The campaign knew it was moving numbers over ObamaCare. And the RGA was not very far from that information, they could have obtained it themselves,” the advisor continued. “They should have given the money to the campaign to spend as opposed to running these stupid China ads. They just blew it.”

About the only thing one can say for Jindal is that this was political incompetence as opposed to political sabotage.

And who will forget Chris Christie? Last year, as the key moment of the presidential campaign arrived along with Hurricane Sandy, Christie went out of his way to put his arm around Romney opponent President Obama. This year….cruising to a 60% percent victory and asked to spare a few hours for Cuccinelli, Christie refused. Once again, it was all about Christie..

And this is the guy who is supposed to be the new leader of the party?

The fact here is that sabotaging conservatives is built into the DNA of the GOP Establishment. Unable to win themselves a considerable bit of the time — and then continuing to move the country left when they do win, just not as fast and so much better managed don’t you know — they have never ever changed.

Governor Christie is being touted as some sort of inevitable nominee in 2016. The next Tom Dewey, the next Gerald Ford, the next Bob Dole and John McCain and Mitt Romney.

And if by chance he flames out? With the conservative base in open rebellion in the 2016 primaries, awarding the nomination to, say, Texas Senator Ted Cruz? You can bet that America will be treated to yet another knee-jerk, reflexive response from the quarters of the GOP Establishment.

Sabotage.

The GOP Establishment will find a way — quietly or not so quietly — to sabotage the conservative nominee if there is a conservative nominee in 2016. This is what they do. They did it to Barry Goldwater in 1964, they tried to do it to Ronald Reagan in 1980 with liberal GOP Congressman John Anderson. Anderson who lost in the primaries to Reagan, running as a third party candidate in a deliberate attempt to sabotage Reagan. Anderson failed — but it wasn’t for a lack of trying.

The Republican Party has two serious problems on its hands.

The first is with those like Eric Cantor’s ex-chief of staff who are invited into leadership positions in the party — when they in fact are not conservatives at all and quietly or openly seek to sabotage the party.

The second is with those Establishment Republicans who do manage to win — and then see their job as merely managing the leftist status quo.

This time around the target was Ken Cuccinelli.

But Ken Cuccinelli wasn’t the first — and he isn’t going to be the last.

That is the Republican Party’s real problem. And it’s a big one.

Republished with permission from The American Spectator

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The Real Dysfunction: A $17 Trillion National Debt

A Guest Blog By David Boaz

Gentlemen may cry default, default, but there will be no default. (With apologies to Patrick Henry.)

Once again the media are full of talk about dysfunction and default, as the partial government shutdown threatens to linger until the federal government hits the limit of its borrowing capacity, possibly on Oct. 17. The parties in Congress are still far apart on passing a budget bill to keep the government running, and Republicans are also promising not to raise the debt ceiling without some spending reforms.

If in fact Congress doesn’t raise the ceiling by mid-October—or by November 1 or so, when the real crunch might come—then the federal government would be forbidden to borrow any more money beyond the legal limit of $16.699 trillion. But it would still have enough money to pay its creditors as bonds come due. The government will take in something like $225 billion in October, but it wants to spend about $108 billion more than that. You see the problem. If it can’t borrow that $108 billion—to cover its bills for one month—then it will have to delay some checks.

Now the U.S. Treasury isn’t full of stupid people. Back in 2011, when the debt ceiling of $14.3 trillion was about to be reached, the Washington Post reported:

The Treasury has already decided to save enough cash to cover $29 billion in interest to bondholders, a bill that comes due Aug. 15, according to people familiar with the matter.

You can bet they’re making similar plans today.

Back in that summer of discontent I talked to a journalist who was very concerned about the “dysfunction” in Washington. So am I. But I told her then what’s still true today: that the real problem is not the dysfunctional process that’s getting all the headlines, but the dysfunctional substance of governance. Congress and the president will work out the debt ceiling issue, if not by October 17 then a few days later. The real dysfunction is a federal budget that doubled in 10 years, unprecedented deficits as far as the eye can see, and a national debt bursting through its statutory limit of $16.699 trillion and heading toward100 percent of GDP.

We’ve become so used to these unfathomable levels of deficits and debt—and to the once-rare concept of trillions of dollars—that we forget how new all this debt is. In 1981, after 190 years of federal spending, the national debt was “only” $1 trillion. Now, just 33 years later, it’s headed past $17 trillion. Traditionally, the national debt as a percentage of GDP rose during major wars and the Great Depression. But there’s been no major war or depression in the past 33 years; we’ve just run up $16 trillion more in spending than the country was willing to pay for. That’s why our debt as a percentage of GDP is now higher than at any point except World War II. Here’s a graphic representation of the real dysfunction in Washington:

Those are the kind of numbers that caused the Tea Party movement and the Republican victories of 2010. And many Tea Partiers continue to remind their representatives that they were sent to Washington to fix this problem. That’s why there’s a real argument over raising the debt ceiling. It’s going to get raised, but many of the younger Republicans are determined to set a new course for federal spending in the same bill that authorizes another yet more profligate borrowing.

And where did all this debt come from? As the Tea Partiers know, it came from the rapid increase in federal spending over the past decade:

Annual federal spending rose by a trillion dollars when Republicans controlled the government from 2001 to 2007. It rose another trillion during the Bush-Obama response to the financial crisis. So spending every year is now twice what it was when Bill Clinton left office a dozen years ago, and the national debt is almost three times as high.

Republicans and Democrats alike should be able to find wasteful, extravagant, and unnecessary programs to cut back or eliminate. And yet many voters, especially Tea Partiers, know that both parties have been responsible for the increased spending. Most Republicans, including today’s House leaders, voted for the No Child Left Behind Act, the Iraq war, the prescription drug entitlement, and the TARP bailout during the Bush years. That’s why fiscal conservatives have become very skeptical of bills that promise to cut spending some day—not this year, not next year, but swear to God some time in the next ten years. As the White Queen said to Alice, “Jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.” Cuts tomorrow and cuts in the out-years—but never cuts today.

If the “dysfunctional” fight that has sent the establishment into hysterics finally results in some constraint on out-of-control spending, then it will have been well worth all the hand-wringing headlines. The problem is not a temporary mess on Capitol Hill and not a mythical default, it’s spending, deficits, and debt.

David Boaz is the executive vice president of the Cato Institute and has played a key role in the development of the Cato Institute and the libertarian movement.

The Third American Revolution has begun.

 

A Guest Blog by Jeffery Lord
The Third American Revolution has begun.

Mark Levin’s The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic is the revolutionary blueprint millions of Americans have been waiting for. Released today, Levin leads the charge for “restoring constitutional republicanism and preserving the civil society from the growing authoritarianism of a federal Leviathan.”

Carefully and powerfully written, the book uses the Constitution itself to illustrate how to reform the Constitution itself. To finally turn the tables on progressives and liberals — Statists, to use the term Levin has brought back to life — who have spent the last century slowly and not so slowly transforming America into the aforementioned “federal Leviathan.”

Levin knows his subject. The nationally syndicated talk-radio host is also the lawyer heading the Landmark Legal Foundation, and, among his string of credentials a former chief of staff to Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese III. Levin also has three earlier best sellers that have set the stage for The Liberty Amendments: Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America, in which Levin examined the role of judicial activism and the subversion of democracy in favor of the liberal agenda (hint: think slavery, segregation, abortion, the importation of laws from other countries, the role of a Klan member in erecting the so-called “separation of church and state). Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto in which Levin detailed the “modern liberal assault on Constitution-based values…that has steadily snowballed” since FDR’s New Deal. And Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America. In which Levin reveals the role of the liberal ideal of utopia, the never-never land of human perfection that is always possible with just one more use… just one more… always just one more use… of power. A power that in harsh reality becomes a weapon “to dehumanize the individual and delegitimize his nature…a tyranny disguised as a desirable, workable, and even paradisiacal governing ideology.”

Liberty and Tyranny, written before the dawn of the Obama presidency but published just as the Tea Party burst onto the scene, in fact became what Congresswoman Michele Bachmann lauded as the “intellectual foundation” of the movement. As noted in this space at the time, the response to L&T was so overwhelming (as captured in this remarkable video of a Levin book signing in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia) it was waved in the air at Tea Party rallies, with former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin photographed holding a copy as she waited to speak.

The problem thus understood and discussed in detail in Levin’s earlier books — not to mention experienced in daily life by millions of Americans — the question is clear: What to do?

Levin’s answer is now at hand in The Liberty Amendments, the bookend to Men in Black, Liberty and Tyranny and Ameritopia.

Levin’s research into the Constitution, the debates of the 1787 Constitutional Convention as well as those of the state ratification conventions are beyond thorough. As is his sharp eye for the extensive writings of Founders famous — James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, George Mason — and lesser known: Virginia’s Edmund Randolph, Pennsylvania’s Gouverneur Morris and James Wilson along with Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts and others. Levin has plunged into the contemporaneous thoughts and writings of all the Founders to document precisely what reasoning lay behind the creation of the nation’s founding document.

Writes Levin in his opening chapter of the nation’s current state of affairs:

Social engineering and central planning are imposed without end, since the governing masterminds, drunk with their own conceit and pomposity, have wild imaginations and infinite ideas for reshaping society and molding man’s nature in search of the ever elusive utopian paradise.

How in the world did America ever get to this place?

How did a country so carefully crafted as a constitutional republic by thoughtful men who had experienced tyranny up close and personal ever get to the point where the federal administrative state runs wild, Supreme Court justices, the president and the Congress disdain the Constitution they are all sworn to uphold and the nation, in Levin’s words, “is teetering on financial ruin due to the unconscionable profligate spending, borrowing, taxing and money printing by the federal government”? How does America wake up every day to find its government exercising unlimited power over the private economic behavior of every American? How is it possible that a federal government designed to operate from a defined “enumeration of grants of specific power” is now:

…the nation’s largest creditor, debtor, lender, employer, consumer, contractor, grantor, property owner, tenant, insurer, health-care provider, and pension guarantor….with aggrandized police powers…(that) for example…regulates most things in your bathroom, laundry room, and kitchen, as well as the mortgage you hold on your house. It designs your automobile and dictates the kind of fuel it uses. It regulates your baby’s toys, crib, and stroller; plans your children’s school curriculum and lunch menu; and administers their student loans in college. At your place of employment the federal government oversees everything from the racial, gender, and age diversity of the workforce to the hours, wages, and benefits paid.”

And that’s before it regulates your light bulbs and toilets.

In effect, over a century after the original American Revolution of 1776, followed by the writing and adoption of the Constitution after exhaustive debate in both Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention and in the various states that then had to vote up or down on ratification — a Second American Revolution took place.

A revolution that wasn’t termed as such, that was for the most part non-violent and in fact presented itself as just ordinary-politics-of-the-day. A “reform” that would, Americans of the day were assured, modernize the nation. This Second American Revolution — the Progressive Movement — burst onto the American scene in the 1880s. Progressives directly opposed the underlying principles of America. Where the Founders believed man was an individual — as Levin says a “unique, spiritual being with a soul and a conscience ….free to discover his own potential and pursue his own legitimate interests, tempered… by a moral order that has its foundation in faith….” the Progressives believed something else altogether.

Progressives believed man was not born free, that freedom was not a gift from God but a gift dispensed from the hand of the state. Freedom was redefined as the quest for utopia — or as Levin has termed it, Ameritopia. And in the endless quest for that utopia the social re-engineering of America, the Second American Revolution — the effective nullification of the Constitution — began.

Scornful of the Founders’ belief in limited government, out poured constitutional amendments that restructured the original design of the American government. Next up was the construction of an administrative state, and Levin quotes Alexis de Tocqueville — who was eerily prescient about what was to come in America long after his death in 1859. America, said the famous French philosopher, could be at risk of being consumed by a system that

…covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Alas, this is exactly the effect of the Statist or Progressive movement, taking a century to lead the nation into what Levin calls a “post-constitutional soft tyranny” through an endless series of “inventions and schemes hatched and promoted openly by their philosophers, experts, and academics, and the coercive application of their designs on the citizenry by a delusional elite.”

It is remarkable how many commentators, without knowing of Levin’s coming book, have expressed some version of the same sentiments that both Levin today and Tocqueville long ago have expressed. A look back through the last few months and one finds the following headlines:

“Let’s Get Skeptical: America Is In Need Of A James Madison Moment” (Austin Hill in Townhall); “Government Gone Wild” (Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal); “The Rise of the Fourth Branch of Government” (George Washington University Professor Jonathan Turley in teh Washington Post); “Why There’s a Deficit Trust” (Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post); “Losing America” (U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow in National Review Online); “Our Masters, the Bureaucrats” (Jay Cost in the Weekly Standard); “Slipping the Constitutional Leash” (George Will in The Washington Post); “The Great Disconnect” (Ross Douthat in the New York Times); “Justice Anthony Kennedy’s Contempt” (Rich Lowry in National Review Online); “Is America in a Pre-Revolutionary State this July 4th?” (Roger L. Simon at PJ Media); “Celebrating Liberty As It Slips Away” (Michael A. Walsh in the New York Post); “From the Constitution to Pandora’s Box” (Mario Loyola in National Review Online); “How Free Are We on This July Fourth?” (Editorial Board of the Las Vegas Review-Journal); “Obama Suspends the Law” (Former U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Michael McConnell in the Wall Street Journal); “Big Government Implodes” (Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal); “ The Perils of Dispensing With the Law” (Michael Barone in theNew York Post); “Our Broken Checks and Balances” (Henry I. Miller in National Review Online).

And that doesn’t even take into account the emergence of the Tea Party, the grassroots surge of interest in the Constitution and the writings of the Founders.

What Levin is proposing in his usual well-researched thorough fashion is, as the subtitle of his book suggests, a Constitutional path to restore the American Republic. He is nothing if not specific — and most assuredly this book and its contents will infuriate the American Left. One is willing to bet there may even be some “conservatives” out there who, already balking at defunding ObamaCare, will balk as well at the idea of putting a full stop to the pernicious doctrine that Progressivism has shown itself to be. Who cares about the Constitution when you have the New Deal?

So let’s get to this.

Writes Levin:

…I propose that we, the people, take a closer look at the Constitution for our preservation. The Constitution itself provides the means for restoring self-government and averting societal catastrophe (or, in the case of societal collapse, resurrecting the civil society) in Article V.

And there it is. The Constitutional way-out of the Statist nightmare — or, as Levin calls it the “Achilles’ heel” of Statism. Article V of the United States Constitution. Levin reprints the relevant portion of Article V with his italics for emphasis:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress….

Levin notes a very important point. Article V does not provide for a constitutional convention. It provides for a process of proposing amendments. Article V:

…provides for two methods of amending the Constitution. The first method, where two-thirds of Congress passes a proposed amendment and then forwards it to the state legislatures for possible ratification by three-fourths of the states, has occurred on twenty-seven occasions. The second method, involving the direct application of two-thirds of the state legislatures for a Convention proposing Amendments, which would thereafter also require a three-fourths ratification vote by the states, has been tried in the past but without success. Today it sits dormant.

Which is to say, a new Constitutional Convention and the subsequent ratification process would begin the long overdue process of shifting power out of the hands of the federal Leviathan — balance — and handing it back to the states. The states that created the federal government — a much different federal government — in the first place.

Admits the author:

I was originally skeptical of amending the Constitution by the state convention process. I fretted it could turn into a runaway caucus. As an ardent defender of the Constitution who reveres the brilliance of the Framers, I assumed this would play disastrously into the hands of the Statists. However, today I am a confident and enthusiastic advocate for the process. The text of Article V makes clear that there is a serious check in place. Whether the product of Congress or a convention, a proposed amendment has no effect at all unless “ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States or by Conventions in three fourths thereof…” This should extinguish anxiety that the state convention process should hijack the Constitution.

Thus Levin in The Liberty Amendments lays out in clear, concise language eleven proposed amendments to the Constitution. They are:

An Amendment to Establish Term Limits for Members of Congress
An Amendment to Restore the Senate
An Amendment to Establish Term Limits for Supreme Court Justices and Super-Majority Legislative Override
Two Amendments to Limit Federal Spending and Taxing
An Amendment to Limit the Federal Bureaucracy
An Amendment to Promote Free Enterprise
An Amendment to Protect Private Property
An Amendment to Grant the States the Authority to Directly Amend the Constitution
An Amendment to Grant the States the Authority to Check Congress
An Amendment to Protect the Vote
We’ll focus here on our favorites — actually they are all favorites. But some deserve a particular focus.

An Amendment to Restore the Senate
SECTION 1: The Seventeenth Amendment is hereby repealed. All Senators shall be chosen by their state legislatures as prescribed by Article 1.

This amendment may well be, as Levin notes, considered to be “the most controversial and politically difficult to institute.” A rare Levin understatement. But repealing the 17th Amendment, which provides for the popular election of U.S. Senators, would decidedly begin to right the balance in the American governmental ship of state.

The 17th Amendment was sold to Americans by Progressives as, in Levin’s words, “a cleansing and transforming expansion of popular democracy” when in fact it has turned out to be “an object lesson in the malignancy of the Progressive mind-set and its destructive impact on the way we practice self-government in a twenty-first century, post-constitutional nation.”

The United States Senate, as its name indicates, was designed to represent — the states. For 124 years it did so, producing along the way some of the nation’s greatest legislators including Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, Kentucky’s Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. But as Levin points out, the idea in the early 1900’s was that since electing members of the House of Representatives by direct popular vote was working as designed — why not do this with senators?

The obvious answer brushed aside in the day was that the Framers had a reason for making the lower House chosen by popular vote and the Senate by state legislatures. The reason? They wanted both individuals and state governments to have “direct input in the national government” — the states that had, of course, created the federal government in the first place. To prevent, in the words of George Mason, the possibility that “the national Legislature will swallow up the Legislatures of the States.” The Founders wanted a direct flow of power from the institutions of state government into the process of making federal law.

The 17th Amendment decidedly undid this bedrock principle — and all too predictably the federal government did in fact “fill whatever areas of governance and even society it chooses.” Translation?

In point of fact, United States Senators today are not representative of the interests of their state governments — which are elected directly by the people. Instead they are beholden to, as Levin accurately notes, “Washington lobbyists, campaign funders, national political consultants, and other national advocacy organizations.” Or in other words: goodbye Boston, Albany, Harrisburg, Springfield, Lincoln, Little Rock, Atlanta, Austin, Sacramento, Carson City, Juneau and Jackson — hello K Street. And who, exactly, elected K Street lobbysists? No one, of course.

The fact of the matter is that the responsibility of the states in the national government as envisioned by the Founders has been stripped away, taking power once reserved specifically for states and turning it over to, as Levin notes, Washington’s “governing masterminds and their disciples.” Indeed, there is considerable irony in the furious anger from President Obama and liberals over the recent defeat of gun control legislation by the U.S. Senate. Who did they blame for the defeat? That’s right — the NRA. Not an elected state government. They blamed a lobby.

The repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment effectively created K Street and the modern “lobbyist/consultant industrial complex” America has come to know and hate today. To repeal the Seventeenth Amendment would effectively become an attack on that thoroughly “bipartisan” and distinctly well-heeled complex. Most assuredly, as Levin indicates, launching a battle royal between Washington elites and the rest of America.

An Amendment to Establish Term Limits for Supreme Court Justices and Super-Majority Legislative Override
SECTION 1: No person may serve as Chief Justice or Associate Justice of the Supreme Court for more than a combined total of twelve years.

[…]

SECTION 4: Upon three-fifths vote of the House of Representatives and the Senate, Congress may override a majority opinion rendered by the Supreme Court.

SECTION 5: The Congressional override under Section 4 is not subject to a Presidential veto and shall not be the subject of litigation or review in any Federal or State court.

SECTION 6: Upon three-fifths vote of the several state legislatures, the States may override a majority opinion rendered by the Supreme Court.

There’s more in this amendment, but these sections listed above — designed to rein in what many perceive as an out-of-control federal judiciary will alone doubtless cause an uproar only marginally less vivid than the battle to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment.

Levin notes the concerns various Founders and others had with the idea of the federal judiciary (to use a modern phrase) “going rogue.” He cites the prescient writings of New York Judge Robert Yates, an articulate opponent of the Constitution. As supporters of the Constitution rallied around The Federalist Papers, Yates and others writing under pen names authored The Anti-Federalist Papers. In Anti-Federalist 11 Yates warned:

The real effect of this system of government, will therefore be brought home to the feelings of the people, through the medium of the judicial power…..They are to be rendered totally independent, both of the people and the legislature…No errors they may commit can be corrected by any power above them…nor can they be removed from office for making ever so many erroneous adjudications…

And so it has turned out. Yates died in 1801, two years before Chief Justice John Marshall famously wrote in 1803’s Marbury v. Madison:

The judicial power of the United States is extended to all cases arising under the constitution.

Levin notes importantly that Abraham Lincoln took the occasion of his first inaugural address in 1861 to speak out in favor of limits to judicial power. Lincoln went on at length that he did not “forget the position assumed by some that national questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court….” But as a staunch opponent of the Court’s fateful 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford — in which Democrats led by Andrew Jackson appointee and slave-owner Chief Justice Roger Taney attempted to write slavery into the Constitution — Lincoln believed the Court had arranged affairs so that “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.”

Contrast this with that exemplar of the Progressive movement and a liberal hero to this day — the Democrats’ Woodrow Wilson. Wilson the Progressive — and staunch segregationist — “endorsed flat-out judicial tyranny” says Levin. Wilson believed “the federal judiciary was to behave as a perpetual constitutional convention,” rewriting the Constitution at will and “nearly always promoting the centralization and concentration of power in the federal government.” Indeed, things are now so far off track with the federal judiciary that the liberal Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has urged the Court to “look beyond one’s shores” to international law when writing and justifying Court rulings. The Constitution? What’s that?

Levin writes that by “claiming authority not specifically granted by the Constitution, abuses of power would certainly follow, as they have.”

The notion that, for example, Roe v. Wade might have been overturned by three-fifths of the state legislatures had Levin’s amendment been in place in January of 1973 will doubtless cause a frenzy on the left. On the other hand, there is no doubt the Left would love for this particular Liberty Amendment to be in place right now — so they could try and repeal Citizens United.

Giving the Congress and the States veto power over Supreme Court decisions will surely roil the waters political.

We won’t run through all the other amendments in detail here. It’s safe to say that each in their own fashion will arouse considerable controversy.

Limiting taxation to 15% of income? Abolishing the death tax and prohibiting a value-added (VAT) tax? A failure by the Congress and the President to adopt and sign a budget no later than the first Monday in May mandates “an automatic, across-the-board, 5 percent reduction in expenditures” from the previous year’s budget? Individually reauthorizing “all federal departments and agencies….individually in stand-alone reauthorization bills every three years by a majority vote of the House…and the Senate” — or said departments and agencies automatically expire? Finally reining in the much abused Commerce Clause? Securing “the fundamental right to own and maintain property” from government regulatory takings by forcing the government to “compensate fully” any financial loss over $10,000?

Oh the howls to come.

Another favorite in this corner is Section 2 of Levin’s Taxing Amendment, which reads:

The deadline for filing federal income tax returns shall be the day before the date set for elections to federal office.

Can you imagine the furor from certain quarters when they realize April 15th — tax day — would now be shifted from April to November? Specifically “the first Monday before the first Tuesday” of November? This ingeniously ties the paying of taxes tightly to the tail of those in the federal government who are out there pounding the drums for election. Leaving voters with a fresh next-day memory of the link connecting the amount of taxes paid to votes to be cast.

Ouch.

While the Liberty Amendments are the heart of Levin’s book, it is critical to go back to the reason for this book — and the undoubted reaction to his proposals that is surely about to rain down on the book and its supporters, not to mention the author himself. Writes Levin in his Epilogue, appropriately titled The Time for Action:

No doubt, in a twist of logic, the state convention process and The Liberty Amendments will be assaulted by the governing masterminds and their disciples as an extreme departure from the status quo and, therefore, heretical, as they resist ferociously all efforts to diminish their power and position. Paradoxically, it is they who distort the Constitutions’ text and trespass its purpose by actively pursuing its nullification and abandonment. History demonstrates that republics collapse when demagogues present themselves as their guardians to entice the people and cloak their true intentions…..Indeed, the closer the approach to constitutional restoration, should that day arrive, a torrent of fuming and malevolent rage will, predictably, let loose, alleging perfidy by the true reformers.

The Liberty Amendments — all eleven of them — are a serious work of restoration and reform. They are ironically the very embodiment of that current liberal favorite: “Hope and Change” — turned back on the entire progressive concept of government. There is in fact no reason whatsoever that Americans must accept what Levin calls the “obtuse and defeatist notion of moderation that accepts the disposition of inevitable societal self-destruction without recourse to an available escape. Its irrationality is self-evident.”

It is all too apparent after a hundred-years plus of the Progressive “Second American Revolution” that the revolution is not only failed but dangerous. Exceptionally dangerous. Dangerous to everything from the larger financial underpinnings of America to the individual lives of Americans who must daily face this, that or the other onslaught from their own government.

The plethora of scandals from recent years — tellingly in both the Obama and Bush administrations —speaks to the fundamental recognition that the problem is the inevitable out-of-control nature of a massive, intrusive federal government apparatus. From the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused financial crisis of 2008 to recent headlines about the IRS, FEC, DEA, SEC, EPA, State Department, Food Stamps and more, all in a very real sense are nothing but the latest confirmation of just how massive and irrational the federal government has become. Indeed, the defense of President Obama by liberal allies in the IRS scandal is that surely one cannot expect the President to have any idea about what’s going on in his own government because the government is in fact so huge.

Bingo.

All the way back in 1964 in that famous speech A Time for Choosing (found here) that introduced Ronald Reagan to America as a political figure, Reagan saw all this coming. Said the future president in those famous closing lines:

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.

We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us that we justified our brief moments here. We did all that could be done.

The challenge Mark Levin’s Liberty Amendments now poses to millions of Americans is exactly Reagan’s challenge.

Will we preserve the last best hope of man on earth?

Will, in Levin’s words, “we the people restore the splendor of the American Republic”?

Ronald Reagan’s A Time for Choosing has now become Mark Levin’s The Time for Action.

And Mark Levin has provided the blueprint.

The battle is joined.

The Third American Revolution has begun

The Clash of the Crusades

A Guest Blog By Jeffrey Lord

http://spectator.org/archives/2013/10/03/the-clash-of-the-crusades

The Obama ideological crusade finally meets its match.

“A lot of people talk about wanting to change Washington. Well, if we actually change Washington there’s a lot of resistance. This is what it looks like. And we shouldn’t be surprised that when Washington is being forced to change by the American people, is being forced to actually listen to the voters that there’s going to be a lot of resistance because a lot of people are vested to the status quo.” — Senator Ted Cruz on ‘The Mark Levin Show’

Finally. Recognition dawns.

Last night Speaker Boehner emerged from the White House to report that President Obama and his left-wing allies refused to negotiate.

No kidding! Shocker.

The Real Question in politics is never the first three of those journalistic “W’s.”

The question is never Who, What or When.

The Real Question is always: Why?

As in: Why is President Obama doing what he’s doing with Obamacare? Why is the President refusing to negotiate with Republicans over the government shutdown? Indeed, why has the President spent the entire last five-plus years doing what he’s doing?

As in: Why are so many Republicans demanding the defunding or, at a minimum, the delay of Obamacare? Why are so many Republicans perfectly prepared to withhold support for a Continuing Resolution or a rise in the debt ceiling?

As in: Why are so many nominally “conservative” columnists, editorial writers, commentators, joined by some GOP congressman and senators, quaking in their political boots?

In a word?

These are not disagreements — they are crusades.

Which is why they generate so much fear and loathing.

The two words “fear” and “loathing” were first linked by the late “gonzo” journalist Hunter Thompson in his novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a tale of a drug-fueled binge that takes place while the two main characters muse on the decline of culture in what they see as the insanity of Las Vegas.

In context for today, fear and loathing of one set of crusaders for the other in Washington, D.C. explains the “why” questions exactly.

President Obama and his factional allies on the far left have an absolute loathing for America as founded. Following along the well-trod path of a century-plus worth of progressives, Mr. Obama and his friends are on a crusade to turn America ever further left than it was when they took charge. A $17 trillion dollar debt? Almost $90 trillion in unfunded liabilities for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and ObamaCare ? No big deal.

This is precisely what the President accuses his opponents of pursuing: an ideological crusade.

The Obama-left wing crusade is dedicated to controlling the lives of 300 million Americans, in this latest instance through the alluringly if grossly misnamed “Affordable Care Act.” The President’s supporters make much of the fact that Obamacare has been passed and it’s “the law.” (Mind you, these are the political heirs of those who said slavery and segregation laws were inviolate, but that abortion laws had to be changed. Doubtless there are plenty of these people who as younger Americans were deliberately violating Vietnam-era draft laws by burning draft cards and the like. Their newfound devotion to “the law” is nothing if not disingenuous, not to say amusing.)

Yet as the always dogged and perceptive Betsy McCaughey points out, since its passage and approval as a “tax” by the Supreme Court, the president has unilaterally and unconstitutionally changed the law. Notes McCaughey, who has made herself the premiere expert on Obamacare:

The president is illegally picking and choosing what parts (of Obamacare) to keep. Gone is the employer mandate, the cap on out-of-pocket expenses, income verification for subsidy recipients, and over half the deadlines in the law.

Got that? The law supporters’ claim to be inviolate was unilaterally changed by the president himself. In itself an act that showcases contempt for the Constitution — and the mentality of a leftist crusader.

Not to be forgotten here is the news that Obamacare agents of control will be left-wing “navigators” — not so coincidentally drawn from an army of left-wing labor leaders and community organizers from the SEIU to ACORN to Planned Parenthood. Left-wing activists who have access to every piece of confidential, private information of every American’s life — including, yes indeed, your voter registration. Crusaders one and all.

This is the “Why” of what Obama is doing. He is about, as he famously said, “transforming America.” Making of a country designed as a constitutional — and capitalistic — Republic into a socialist state.

So what about the “Why” of Republicans?

Tea Party Republicans — which is to say conservatives — understand vividly what Obama is about. It’s always worth reminding that the Tea Party came into being not because of Barack Obama but George W. Bush. It was Bush’s TARP response to what in fact was a government-induced financial crisis, on top of his spending policies, that brought the Tea Party to life. When President Obama took office he immediately began doubling-down on the Bush policies — quadrupling down, in fact.

Conservatives understood instantly what Obama and his allies were up to — a left-wing ideological crusade. Five years later the reason for the alarm signaled by Rush Limbaugh a few days before Obama’s first inaugural — “I hope he fails” said Rush — is now understood in the bones of every conservative.

For conservatives, this shutdown and the response to Obama is about nothing less than the life of America itself. A crusade to restore America to the constitutional republic it was designed to be. Obamacare is seen as a direct if just the latest threat to the life of the nation’s founding as a constitutional republic. The conservative crusade demands calling a halt to the massive spending that will make of America the national version of Detroit — bankrupt. An economic pauper, where the freedom and ability of every individual to pursue their dreams is replaced by a nation of beggars, drones (the human kind) and government slaves.

One indicator after another is viewed with alarm by conservatives. From the rising poverty rate, unemployment and the companion millions who have given up and simply stopped looking for work, the millions on food stamps, not to mention the original housing crisis spawned by government regulations that mandated financing for prospective homeowners who had little chance of meeting the payments – all this and more tells Tea Partiers and the conservative base of the GOP that this is a titanic life-and-death struggle for the American soul. Not a humdrum business-as-usual Republicans want to spend X and Democrats want to spend X-plus budget argument.

Alas, there are those in the conservative media who see all of this as about nothing more than “tactics.” Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and House conservatives aren’t using “smart tactics,” goes the complaint. Congressman Peter King, so far off the deep-end he is now being praised by George Clooney, has repeatedly accused Cruz of being a “fraud.”

All of this is quite telling.

The other night Mark Levin reminded of something that has been discussed in this space on occasion. That would be the late William F. Buckley Jr.’s “Mission Statement” for National Review. At this exact moment in time it is indeed worth recalling Buckley’s words, with the bold for emphasis provided:

The inroads that relativism has made on the American soul are not so easily evident. One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things.

Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals’….Conservatives in this country — at least those who have not made their peace with the New Deal, and there is serious question whether there are others — are non-licensed nonconformists; and this is dangerous business in a Liberal world, as every editor of this magazine can readily show by pointing to his scars. Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by the Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity.

Ouch.

If Buckley was on to the “well-fed Right” all the way back in 1955 he would have no problem spotting them now, nor the fear and loathing that animates them.

Many, not coincidentally, are ex-Bush aides populating Fox and/or the pages of various papers and online sites — theirs the presidential boss who summoned the Tea Party to life in the first place as he departed with a 35% approval rating. Others — aside from people like Congressman Peter King who seems to have gone totally around the bend — are (as here) non-Bushies pushing what Buckley called the “well-fed Right” line that busily embraces the status quo under the guise of so-called realism. The status quo, of course, is already tilted well to the left, much further so than when Buckley penned his mission statement.

“This approach places great value on zeal and combativeness and isn’t very concerned with success,” writes Daniel Larison over at the American Conservative. Larison is quoted and linked approvingly in a piece by Rod “Crunchy Con” Dreher. Both apparently unaware like Buckley in 1955, Reagan in the 1980s was all too familiar with conservatives who ran at the drop of a liberal hat. Reagan’s scornful term for these conservatives was “rabbits.” Conservatives who scurried from the first hint of defeat when Reagan himself was very much willing as president to, for example, veto a bill he knew would be overridden and bring the requisite liberal media chorus of damnation that so terrified the rabbits.

Dreher, not an ex-Bush aide, goes off on a riff perfectly describing the Bush-moderate GOP Establishment world view, praising prudence as “the cardinal virtue of conservative politics.” This is precisely the timid, status quo view that Reagan scorned as “ fraternal order” politics. To illustrate the real thinking here, this quote from Dreher’s piece will serve, bold emphasis mine:

But I told a Louisiana conservative friend the other day that the Congressional Republicans are making me consider the previously unthinkable: throwing my vote away by voting for a Democrat in the special election next month to replace my GOP congressman, who just resigned to take another job. The GOP candidates in this local race are hot and heavy to overthrow Obamacare. I think about how poor this district is — 26 percent of the district lives in poverty, making it one of the poorest Congressional districts in America — and how badly we need jobs and economic growth, and I think: What kind of world do these people live in?

So scratch a crunchy con and one finds a liberal who believes that Obamacare is the key to “jobs and economic growth.” Clearly and remarkably it never dawns on Dreher that the massive size and expense of the federal government is exactly why the poverty rate is soaring to the highest level in 52 years. The money pours out of his part of Louisana and the rest of the country and creates cushy $100,000 jobs for bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. — and don’t forget all those Obamacare “navigators” from ACORN and the SEIU who will be scarfing up tax dollars to make sure they too are well fed.

Here’s another Dreher beauty on GOP opponents to Obamacare in his area:

…these guys would make our economic situation even more parlous by shutting the government down to overturn what in any stable political environment would have been a settled law?

Good thing ol’ Rod wasn’t advising Lincoln or his district would still have the settled law that provided both slavery and segregation, those lovely staples of the Democratic Party.

So it all comes down to finally pulling the curtain aside and understanding the primal emotions that drive the left — and a good many of those “well-fed” conservatives or “rabbits” that Buckley and Reagan spoke of.

They have fear and loathing.

They want control — over every single thing in your life. Or, they’re too afraid to stand up and draw the line about that control, particularly when confronting the liberal media nationally or the cocktail crowd in Washington, D.C.

Obamacare all by itself is going to be demanding to know everything about you, including — as Betsy McCaughey documents here — about your sex life. You missed this? Here’s the question:

“Are you sexually active? If so, with one partner, multiple partners or same-sex partners?”

Where in the Constitution of the United States does it say every American must be forced to discuss their sex life — “because it’s the law”?

What’s really going on here is that millions of Americans have had it. They are fed up. They know full well this is not the constitutional republic the Founding Fathers carefully designed. They know that this dispute is well-beyond a bickering about budget numbers X or Y.

This is about the Why.

Why is this being done by President Obama and his liberal allies? Answer: He and they are on a far-left progressive ideological crusade to remake America into a socialist utopia.

Why are Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, and a band of courageous House Republicans insisting that change finally come to Washington — and fearlessly stepping up to the plate to deliver that change by not accepting the status quo? Because their constituents are finally fed up. A century’s- plus worth of this has finally reached its sell-by date. They have had enough — and they are demanding — demanding — action. They have come to the belief that they too must embark on a crusade — a crusade to save the country from people Ronald Reagan once described as follows:

“If someone is setting fire to the house, it doesn’t really matter if he is a deliberate arsonist or just a fool playing with matches; the damage will be the same.”

And if their Members don’t get that their constituents see Obama and company as either fools or arsonists, there will be no hesitation about abandoning senators and congressmen and women who are perceived as abandoning their own constituents to follow the Washington Establishment herd.

Why are there conservatives who are wilting under the pressure, running like the “rabbits” Reagan so scorned or the “well-fed Right” Buckley disdained? In their own bumbling fashion these people too are engaged in what passes for an Establishment crusade — riding forth on the old nags ridden by one moderate after another to raise the flag of that oldest of chestnuts. The repeatedly failed gambit of turning the GOP into the me-too Republican acceptance of the status quo on the premise of realism and victory. In spite of the fact that this devotion to the purity of moderation has lost again and again and again and again. And in the occasional moment of victory leads the country even further left under the guise of managing the leftist-constructed status quo.

For once, President Obama has it right.

This is all about an ideological crusade. His.

As all crusades inevitably do, the Obama crusade has summoned forth its opposite. What might be called the conservative crusade — which in turn always travels with the carping, always losing, mini-moderate crusade to its rear.

This is why the seeming arrogance from the Obama White House and Harry Reid.

They are on a crusade — and only with the advent of Ted Cruz have they suddenly spotted the masses of another crusade, their armor of energetic opposition forces glinting now in the near distance.

It’s been a long five years. Actually, it’s been a long century-plus since the dawn of William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson. There have been repeated battles — and many calls for surrender.

Now the battle is joined again. Last night Speaker Boehner emerged from the White House to report the obvious: Obama and his far-left faction will not negotiate.

Of course not. This is a crusade.

And the American Left’s long crusade — not to mention President Obama’s personal crusade — to control your life does in fact have something to worry about.

Finally.

By Jeffrey Lord on 10.3.13 @ 6:11AM

http://spectator.org/archives/2013/10/03/the-clash-of-the-crusades

America's Tyranny Threshold

A Guest Blog by:Eileen F. Toplansky

As he finishes up his Martha's Vineyard vacation, Barack Obama would be well-served to recall the fiery words of Jonathan Mayhew, who is famous for his sermons "espousing American rights -- the cause of liberty, and the right and duty to resist tyranny."

Mayhew, born at Martha's Vineyard on October 8, 1720, was "bitterly opposed to the Stamp Act and urged colonial liberties."  Though he did not live to see the American Revolution (he died on July 9, 1766), his "sermons and writing were a powerful influence in the development of the movement for liberty and independence."

And they need to be revisited as the Obama presidency continues its legacy of lawlessness.

First published in Boston in 1750, "A Discourse concerning the unlimited submission and non-resistance to the high powers" was a sermon delivered on the 100^th anniversary of the execution of Charles I.  It was so powerful that it was published in London in 1752 and again in 1767.  In fact, this sermon was the "first volley of the American Revolution, setting forth the intellectual and scriptural justification for rebellion against the Crown."

The following words from the Discourse fly off the page in light of the continuing unconstitutional acts of President Obama.

Civil tyranny is usually small in its beginning, like 'the drop in a bucket,' till at length, like a mighty torrent of raging waves of the sea, it bears down all before it and deluges whole countries and empires.

Although the president cannot write or rewrite laws, this president thinks he is above the law.  The "entire system of separation of powers ... is designed to limit governmental power," but Mr. Obama continually makes it clear "that he won't respect these basic constitutional limits on his power." 

Tyranny brings ignorance and brutality along with it.  It degrades men from their just rank into the class of brutes.  It dampens their spirits.  It suppresses arts.  It extinguishes every spark of noble ardor and generosity in the breasts of those who are enslaved by it.

And American young people are being dampened in their enthusiasm for their futures because of the actions emanating from this White House.  A millennial caller on the Rush Limbaugh radio show recently made the astonishing comment that her generation is being told there is no hope for the future.  Like the serfs of the feudal system, young people in Obama's America "are predestined to misery and failure," because they no longer have "any free will," and only the government can provide and coddle this generation because upward mobility is no longer possible.  The Horatio Alger belief in hard work bringing rewards is being destroyed by this administration as it deliberately burdensgenerations of Americans, some not even born.

Thank you, Mr. Obama, for $17 trillion in debt, increasing unemployment, prohibitions against genuine American energy-independence, and onerous regulations on critical aspects of life.

[Civil tyranny] makes naturally strong and great minds feeble and little and triumphs over the ruins of virtue and humanity.  This is true of tyranny in every shape.  There can be nothing great and good where its influence reaches.

Concerning ObamaCare alone, Obama's tyranny has grown incrementally.  Delaying provisions of the ACA law does not lie within the purview of the executive branch.  This authority is with the Congress.  But we have a president who has repeatedly stated that he "can do this without Congress."  In April Obama "delayed a provision...to cap out-of- pocket health care costs."  He also decided to delay the employer mandate for a year. This exceeds his authority.  The president continues to ignore the court's ruling that his National Labor Relations Board recess appointments were unconstitutional since they were not approved by Congress.

Further acts by the Obama administration that are inconsistent with the laws of America include:

• This administration was displeased with Congress's failure to enact the DREAM Act.  So in 2012 he "implemented portions of legislation he could not get through Congress ... and acted in ways blatantly at odds with the existing immigration laws [.]"
• Concerning the "No Child Left Behind" law, Obama, "unable to convince Congress to revise key provisions of the law, simply authorized waivers from many requirements of the law -- except that the 'No Child Left Behind' does not provide for such waivers."
• Furthermore, Obama waived a "central tenet of the Clinton welfare-reform law" by eliminating the requirements that recipients of welfare either work or prepare to do so through approved education or training.  This federal work requirement is not subject to waiver, but Obama ignored the law.
• More recently, Obama is working "to unilaterally impose a tax on cell phones," maintaining that "where Congress is unwilling to act, I will take whatever administrative steps that I can in order to do right by the American people."  But "[c]onstitutionally, it's Congress that decides how federal funds should be spent."  Yet this president uses his bully pulpit to circumvent the proper safeguards that the Founding Fathers built into our system.

In 1765, with the Stamp Act fresh in everyone's mind, Mayhew stated that the "essence of slavery, consists in subjection to others -- 'whether many, few, or but one, it matters not.'"

Thus, he wrote:

Those nations who are now groaning under the iron scepter of tyranny were once free.  So they might probably have remained by a seasonable caution against despotic measures.

Though "seasonable caution" is being heard in the country, there are still Americans who do not sense the looming danger that this president represents as he ignores the Constitution, appoints people who continue to break the law with impunity, and has overweening contempt for America and her ideas and ideals.  He flouts the law as he sees fit.

Mayhew asserts:

Since magistrates who execute their office well, are common benefactors to society; and may, in that respect, be properly stiled the ministers and ordinance of God; and since they are constantly employed in the service of the public; it becomes you to pay them tribute and custom; and to reverence, honor, and submit to, them in the execution of their respective offices." This is apparently good reasoning. But does this argument conclude for the duty of paying tribute, custom, reverence, honor and obedience, to such persons as (although they bear the title of rulers) use all their power to hurt and injure the public?

Yet:  

For what can be more absurd than an argument thus framed?. Common tyrants, and public oppressors, are not intitled to obedience from their subjects[.]

Although he was writing with reference to the oppressiveness of the kingly or monarchical government, Mayhew reminds his readers that:

The essence of government (I mean good government); ....consists in the making and executing of good laws--laws attempered to the common felicity of the governed. And if this be, in fact, done, it is evidently, in it self, a thing of no consequence at all, what the particular form of government is;--whether the legislative and executive power be lodged in one and the same person, or in different persons;--whether in one person, whom we call an absolute monarch;--whether in a few, so as to constitute an aristocracy;--whether in many, so as to constitute a republic; or whether in three co-ordinate branches, in such manner as to make the governmentpartake something of each of these forms; and to be, at the same time, essentially different from them all. If the end be attained, it is enough.

But he reminds his readers:

... nothing can well be imagined more directly contrary to common sense, than to suppose that millions of people should be subjected to the arbitrary, precarious pleasure of one single man; (who has naturally no superiority over them in point of authority) so that their estates, and every thing that is valuable in life, and even their lives also, shall be absolutely at his disposal, if he happens to be wanton and capricious enough to demand them. What unprejudiced man can think, that God made ALL to be thus subservient to the lawless pleasure and frenzy of ONE, so that it shall always be a sin to resist him!

Continuing regulations emanate from this White House on a daily basis.  We will soon have no control over our health decisions; businesses are being burdened in oppressive ways.  IRS and NSA scandals are nonchalantly described as "phony scandals."

A man who has no shame has no right to be a leader.  Obama has abused the trust of the American people.

But it is equally evident, upon the other hand, that those in authority may abuse their trust and power to such a degree, that neither the law of reason, nor of religion, requires, that any obedience or submission should be paid to them: but, on the contrary, that they should be totally discarded; and the authority which they were before vested with, transferred to others, who may exercise it more to those good purposes for which it is given[.]

We already have the necessary means to resist the assault on our republic.  But we must be unrelenting in demanding that the Congress meet its obligations and restore the checks and balances our Founding Fathers created.  If legislators do not adhere to the Constitution, they have no right to be in Washington, D.C.

Certainly Obama has taken on the trappings of an emperor, despite his protestations, but are we not obliged to resist?  He has broken the pledge to uphold the Constitution.  He has been derelict in his duty.  The National Black Republican Association (NBRA) has filed articles of impeachment against Barack Obama.  And other calls forimpeachment are increasing.

It was with "unfeigned love" for his country that Mayhew wrote.  In his sermon entitled "The Snare Broken," he wrote of the joy that Americans felt when Great Britain repealed the onerous Stamp Act in March 1766.  However, on the same day, "Parliament passed the Declaratory Acts, asserting that the British government had free and total legislative power over the colonies."  Mayhew died less than two months after this event, and, though eminently prescient, he was not privy to the continuing intrusions of Great Britain into America's well-being that ultimately led to the American Revolution.

Will we take to heart these words of Mayhew, or will we, too, "groan under the iron scepter of tyranny" in the not too distant future?

Eileen can be reached at middlemarch18@gmail.com.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/americas_tyranny_threshold.html?utm_source=08-19-12&utm_campaign=AT+Newsletter+08-19-13&utm_medium=email#ixzz2cPrbKZuS
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Conservatives………………..WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

Is this thing on?

I am sitting here trying to understand why the 41% plus of Americans that publicly identify themselves as Conservative are still supporting a political system that has……..short of shooting us down in the streets…….completely attacked and or violated every single moral, ethical, legal, religious or political value we treasure.

If the last 12 months have not demonstrated that we are living the nightmare of a 2 party political reign of terror, created by a ruling class, that has usurped power with the help and full support of elitists from academia, crony capitalists, crony finance and banking, media, and the useless idiots they have created by their monopoly of these segments of society, then what is it going to take?

“The history of the president, Barack Hussein Obama is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over the United States. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy of the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A president, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our elected representative brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence.They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.”

If you have ever read the entire Declaration of Independence than you recognize that we have far surpassed the violations of our rights that moved our forefathers to action and subsequently create the GREATEST EXPRESSION OF SELF-DETERMINATION IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD!

I have changed only 10 words to modernize this document, every other word is as it was published 237 years ago this July 4th.

I have intentionally changed and moved sections to hopefully get your attention and more importantly get you mad as hell………….because you should be.

“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.”

Thomas Jefferson

Replace King of Britain with Barack Hussein Obama as I did above.

I AM NOT CALLING FOR OVERTHROWING OUR GOVERNMENT……… JUST THOSE OCCUPYING IT!

We must work within the current system to take back what is ours by Divine Right of being Americans.

We can accomplish this by NOT PLAYING THEIR GAME ANYMORE AND REVOLT AGAINST THEIR 2 PARTY POLITICAL SYSTEM.

I have written countless times this statement of fact: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing the same way every single time you do it and expect different results”

Albert Einstein

Well what could be more insane than the last 12 months of political betrayal by all members of our 3 branches of government? Do I need to list them for you, they far out way and infringe on our defined rights and liberties and defy our rule of law than anything George was guilty of 237 years ago.

And to the many naysayers that are sure to respond with “we need to change the GOP from within” or “elect more conservative republicans” or “we need to elect tea party republicans”!

A little recent history lesson for you, several are all of the above by GOP standards.

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Sen. Jeff Chiesa of New Jersey, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada, Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota, Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

These are the authors and supporters of the latest affront to our rule of law by signing legislation that will further legitimize people WHO BROKE THE LAW IN COMING TO AMERICA AND INSTEAD OF PUNISHING THEM FOR BREAKING OUR LAWS, THEY ARE REWARDING THEM WITH CITINZENSHIP!

With this celebration of our Independence I am challenging every God loving, Freedom loving, Conservative American to join the Conservative Party of America and end the 2 party political reign of terror before it is too late.

You have a chance to take control of your destiny America, if you have the courage of our forefathers and the love of Liberty they embraced.

Welcome Home America: http://home.conservativepartyusa.org/

Dr. Keith C. Westbrook Ph.D.

Vice Chmn./Pres. Conservative Party-Florida