Red State Uprising

How to Take Back America

Erick Erickson, Lew Uhler

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781596986268
• eBook ISBN: 9781596981621
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Fed up with our arrogant federal government? Don't want massive programs we don't need and can't afford? Then join the Red State Uprising! In his new book, RedState.com founder Erick Erickson clearly outlines what needs to change in Washington and what we can do locally to make it happen. Red State Uprising is not about anarchy or a revolution—it's about reshaping government to maximize economic growth, individual liberty and private property rights.

CHAPTER 1

REPUBLICANS IN CHARGE: PRO-LIFE STATISTS

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.¹

—PRESIDENT RONALD W. REAGAN, FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS,
JANUARY 20, 1981

Most people endeavoring to write a book like this would immediately start with the Obama Administration and how the Democrats have worked to destroy the country. Intellectual integrity, however, requires that the beginning be with the Republicans.

Many conservatives feel the Republican Party is as bad as the Democratic Party. Though Republican leaders have collaborated with the Democrats to grow government for their own ends, on issues from the sanctity of life to national security, there are overwhelming life and death differences. Nonetheless, the Republicans lost their way during the administration of George W. Bush. Sadly, too many conservatives were corrupted along the way. The only way to fix the problem is to honestly examine it, so we don’t repeat our mistakes.

The starting point for this discussion has a specific date: August 15, 2003. On that day, Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard wrote a now infamous op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in defense of George W. Bush’s administration. That op-ed coined the phrase “big government conservative.”

IS PRESIDENT BUSH really a conservative? When that question came up this summer, the White House went into crisis mode. Bush aides summoned several of Washington’s conservative journalists to a 6:30 a.m. breakfast at the White House to press the case for the president’s adherence to conservative principles. Aides outnumbered journalists. Other conservative writers and broadcasters were invited to luncheon sessions. They heard a similar spiel.

The White House needn’t have bothered. The case for Bush’s conservatism is strong. Sure, some conservatives are upset because he has tolerated a surge in federal spending, downplayed swollen deficits, failed to use his veto, created a vast Department of Homeland Security, and fashioned an alliance of sorts with Teddy Kennedy on education and Medicare. But the real gripe is that Bush isn’t their kind of conventional conservative. Rather, he’s a big government conservative. This isn’t a description he or other prominent conservatives willingly embrace. It makes them sound as if they aren’t conservatives at all. But they are. They simply believe in using what would normally be seen as liberal means—activist government—for conservative ends. And they’re willing to spend more and increase the size of government in the process.

Being a big government conservative doesn’t bring Bush close to being a moderate, much less a liberal. On most issues, his position is standard conservative: a pro-lifer who expects to sign a ban on partial birth abortion, he’s against stem-cell research and gun control, and has drawn the line at gay marriage. His judicial nominees are so uniformly conservative that liberals are furious.²

It is a failing of many on the Right to claim that those who support tax cuts and oppose abortion are conservative. Conservatism must go beyond that. As Ronald Reagan said, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” That was true in 1981. That was true in 2003. It is true today.

Fast forward from Fred Barnes’ August 15, 2003 op-ed, to August 15, 2005, and this Washington Post editorial entitled “Big Government Conservatives”:

Back in 1987, when Mr. Reagan applied his veto to what was generally known at the time as the highway and mass transit bill, he was offended by the 152 earmarks for pet projects favored by members of Congress. But on Wednesday Mr. Bush signed a transportation bill containing no fewer than 6,371 earmarks. Each one of these, as Mr. Reagan understood but Mr. Bush apparently doesn’t, amounts to a conscious decision to waste taxpayers’ dollars. One point of an earmark is to direct money to a project that would not receive money as a result of rational judgments based on cost-benefit analyses.

Mr. Bush, who had threatened to veto wasteful spending bills, chose instead to cave in. He did so despite the fact that in addition to a record number of earmarks the transportation bill came with a price tag that he had once called unacceptable. The bill has a declared cost of $286 billion over five years plus a concealed cost of a further $9 billion; Mr. Bush had earlier drawn a line in the sand at $256 billion, then drawn another line at $284 billion. Asked to explain the president’s capitulation, a White House spokesman pleaded that at least this law would be less costly than the 2003 Medicare reform. This is a classic case of defining deviancy down.³

Conservatives must be willing to accept that being pro-life and pro-tax cuts does not a conservative make. In most every way, Republicans, particularly the leadership of the Republican Party, have behaved as pro-life statists—big government guys who are socially conservative and fiscally reckless.

If the Republican Party is willing to expand government for allegedly conservative ends, the Democrats have a free pass to do the same for liberal ends. Unless the Republican Party is willing to be the party of individual choice, the party of entrepreneurs—the party of conservatives—we will not beat back the leviathan of government.

But let us not kid ourselves. The Republican Party did not actually use government for purely “conservative ends.” It is not the Second Amendment vote or the pro-life vote that count. Those votes are popular with a majority of Americans. The votes that count are those taken in committee or behind the scenes or even on the floor of Congress expanding government programs, regulation, and encroachment on free markets and free people. Time and again, the Republican majority did just that.

In fact, that is perhaps the greatest sin in the Republican Party. With exceptions like Mike Pence and Jim DeMint, too few Republican were ever willing to stand up for conservatism against statism when the Republicans were in charge. Steel tariffs, imposed by President Bush in 2002, were just the beginning of the increase in government that came to define Republicans’ time in power.

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FAILING TO KEEP THE SPIRIT OF ‘94

In 1994, the Republican Party took back control of both houses of Congress for the first time in forty years. In doing so, they presented the American public with a document entitled the “Contract With America.”

The Contract had eight reforms it sought to accomplish with ten pieces of legislation and changes to rules in the House of Representatives. ⁴ The reforms were designed to:

• require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress;

• select a major, independent auditing firm to conduct a comprehensive audit of Congress for waste, fraud or abuse;

• cut the number of House committees, and cut committee staff by one-third;

• limit the terms of all committee chairs;

• ban the casting of proxy votes in committee;

• require committee meetings to be open to the public;

• require a three-fifths majority vote to pass a tax increase;

• guarantee an honest accounting of our Federal Budget by implementing zero base-line budgeting.

The ten pieces of legislation⁵ were:

• THE FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT: A balanced budget/ tax limitation amendment and a legislative line-item veto to restore fiscal responsibility to an out-of-control Congress, requiring them to live under the same budget constraints as families and businesses.

• THE TAKING BACK OUR STREETS ACT: An anti-crime package including stronger truth-in-sentencing, “good faith” exclusionary rule exemptions, effective death penalty provisions, and cuts in social spending from [a 1994] crime bill to fund prison construction and additional law enforcement to keep people secure in their neighborhoods and kids safe in their schools.

• THE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT: Discourage illegitimacy and teen pregnancy by prohibiting welfare to minor mothers and denying increased AFDC [Aid to Families with Dependent Children; i.e., welfare] for additional children while on welfare, cut spending for welfare programs, and enact a tough two-years-and-out provision with work requirements to promote individual responsibility.

• THE FAMILY REINFORCEMENT ACT: Child support enforcement, tax incentives for adoption, strengthening rights of parents in their children’s education, stronger child pornography laws, and an elderly dependent care tax credit to reinforce the central role of families in American society.

• THE AMERICAN DREAM RESTORATION ACT: A $500 per child tax credit, begin repeal of the marriage tax penalty, and creation of American Dream Savings Accounts to provide middle-class tax relief.

• THE NATIONAL SECURITY RESTORATION ACT: No U.S. troops under UN command and restoration of the essential parts of our national security funding to strengthen our national defense and maintain our credibility around the world.

• THE SENIOR CITIZENS FAIRNESS ACT: Raise the Social Security earnings limit which currently forces seniors out of the work force, repeal the 1993 tax hikes on Social Security benefits, and provide tax incentives for private long-term care insurance to let older Americans keep more of what they have earned over the years.

• THE JOB CREATION AND WAGE ENHANCEMENT ACT: Small business incentives, capital gains cut and indexation, neutral cost recovery, risk assessment/cost-benefit analysis, strengthening the Regulatory Flexibility Act and unfunded mandate reform to create jobs and raise worker wages.

• THE COMMON SENSE LEGAL REFORM ACT: “Loser pays” laws, reasonable limits on punitive damages, and reform of product liability laws to stem the endless tide of litigation.

• THE CITIZEN LEGISLATURE ACT: A first-ever vote on term limits to replace career politicians with citizen legislators.

The Contract only promised that the legislation would go to the floor of the House of Representatives for debate. Some of the measures passed. Some did not. Edward H. Crane, the founder and president of the CATO Institute, wrote in Forbes Magazine on November 13, 2000,

Over the past three years the Republican-controlled Congress has approved discretionary spending that exceeded Bill Clinton’s requests by more than $30 billion. The party that in 1994 would abolish the Department of Education now brags in response to Clinton’s 2000 State of the Union Address that it is outspending the White House when it comes to education. My colleagues Stephen Moore and Stephen Slivinski found that the combined budgets of the 95 major programs that the Contract with America promised to eliminate have increased by 13%. Republican congressional candidates are frightened to be associated with George W. Bush’s sensible proposal to allow Americans to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes in real assets.⁶ (Emphasis added)

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My, how far the Republicans have drifted. A Balanced Budget Amendment is nowhere to be found. Republicans have presided over massive growth in government. More and more politicians have become a professional class of political elites and show regular disdain for the average person—let alone conservatives. Consider the implications of that professional class of political elites.

A July 23, 2010 Rasmussen survey found “75% of Likely Voters prefer free markets over a government managed economy. Just 14% think a government managed economy is better while 11% are not sure.” But, among those considered the political class, which transcends party lines, “a government managed economy [is preferred] over free markets by a 44% to 37% margin. . . . [A]mong Mainstream voters, 90% prefer the free market. Outside of the Political Class, free markets are preferred across all demographic and partisan lines.”⁷

Republican leaders in Washington, like their Democratic colleagues, have developed a profound sense of their own righteousness and infallibility, both of which are at odds with history and the opinions of the American public.

Observe, for example, former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS), who is now a lobbyist in Washington. The Washington Post contained this nugget in the run-up to the 2010 elections:

Former Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), now a D.C. lobbyist, warned that a robust bloc of rabble-rousers spells further Senate dysfunction. “We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples,” Lott said in an interview. “As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.”

But Lott said he’s not expecting a tea-party sweep. “I still have faith in the visceral judgment of the American people,” he said.⁸

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Lott’s contempt was shared in the article by Senator Robert Bennett (R-UT), whom tea party activists defeated in his re-election effort. Behind the scenes, the leadership of the Republican Party has been openly contemptuous of the tea party movement. The Senate Republican Leader, Mitch McConnell, ran his 2008 re-election campaign in Kentucky on the pork he brought into the state. In 2010, he opposed his conservative Kentucky colleague Jim Bunning’s re-election efforts, which in part led to Bunning dropping out.

McConnell worked with Senator Harry Reid to keep the push for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) alive despite it being deeply unpopular with conservatives.⁹ In 1994, Washington Republicans decided to put the country first. Ever since, they’ve been putting Washington first. That has led to an enormous growth of government.

The National Senatorial Campaign Committee (NRSC), the body charged with el...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 - REPUBLICANS IN CHARGE: PRO-LIFE STATISTS
• CHAPTER 2 - BARACK OBAMA’S WAR AGAINST ALL THINGS SAVE THE REAL ENEMY
• CHAPTER 3 - UNDERSTANDING OBAMA’S CONTEMPT FOR YOUR AMERICA
• CHAPTER 4 - REBELLION: AMERICA’S BIRTHRIGHT
• CHAPTER 5 - OUR NATION DERAILED
• CHAPTER 6 - BURIED UNDER A MOUNTAIN OF DEBT
• CHAPTER 7 - INVASION OF THE MONEY SNATCHERS
• CHAPTER 8 - GARDEN VARIETY PLUNDER
• CHAPTER 9 - ENTITLEMENT REFORM
• CHAPTER 10 - DOWNSIZE GOVERNMENT
• CHAPTER 11 - THE RIGHT SIZE
• CHAPTER 12 - “THE CHAINS OF THE CONSTITUTION”
• CHAPTER 13 - THE WAY FORWARD
• CHAPTER 14 - IS A NEW PARTY THE ANSWER?
• CHAPTER 15 - TAKE BACK AMERICA
• Acknowledgements
• LEWIS K. UHLER
• NOTES
• INDEX
• Copyright Page