I Am Being Abandoned By My President And My Party






I’ve always thought that being a Republican meant that you were fiscally conservative, that you didn’t spend more than you took in, that you respected civil rights and protected individual liberties, that you balanced the dual needs of job creation and environmental protection, that you were opposed to large government bureaucracies, and that you didn’t start fights, you finished them. Having said all that, I’m starting to feel as if I am being abandoned by my president and by my national political party.

If you had told me during the 2000 presidential election campaign that, within three years, the US would launch two pre-emptive wars, would create a massive new national bureaucracy that usurps personal liberties and would adopt a federal budget that locks in multi-trillion-dollar deficits for the next 10 years, I would have guessed that Al Gore, not George Bush, would be sitting in the Oval Office.

What is happening to the leadership of the national Republican Party? When I came of age politically in the late 1960s and early 1970s, being a Republican meant that you lived within your means; it meant that you didn’t try to tell everybody else how they should live their lives. When I voted for George Bush three years ago, I thought I was supporting a continuation of those basic values. It isn’t turning out that way.

What seems to be cropping up is a “New Republicanism” that ignores those basic conservative precepts. I don’t believe that this new direction is “more to the right” on the political spectrum. Ironically, it seems more to resemble Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” policies of the 1960s, when LBJ thought he could wipe out Communism abroad and rewrite the domestic policy agenda at the same time by elevating public spending and busting the budget.

In case after case, Bush II has moved in ways that are contrary, not only to the historical base of beliefs of Republicans and conservatives, but to the best interests of the nation. Let me take my four major concerns (military adventurism, government expansion, diminishment of civil liberties and economic irresponsibility) one at a time.

Throughout our history, Americans have been liberators, not conquerors. We have finished fights, not started them. For almost a century, we have readily accepted that our responsibility as a preeminent world power requires us to protect and defend democracy from tyrants. Time after time, in Europe, the South Pacific, Southeast Asia and most recently the Middle East, Americans have spilled their blood and sacrificed their lives to beat back the advances of totalitarian forces.

But there’s a big difference – an immense difference, an absolutely huge difference – between what American solders did liberating France from the Germans in 1944 and what our fighting men and women did liberating Kuwait from the Iraqis in 1991 from what has occurred the last two years in Afghanistan and Iraq. Terrorism and the 9/11 attacks notwithstanding, neither Afghanistan nor Iraq posed any sort of imminent threat to our safety and security. And let’s be honest, if we were going to presumptively preempt any possible danger to America, we would have started with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, from which most of the 9/11 terrorists hailed. But of course, that doesn’t play into our national interests, so we didn’t do anything that would undermine the House of Saud. Instead, we attacked, conquered and occupied two third-world domains, decisions that will come back to haunt us (militarily and economically) for years to come. And perhaps most ironically, our actions have galvanized the opposition of Islamic militants worldwide, which will probably lead to even more domestic terrorism.

Which leads us to the Department of Homeland Security. Republicans used to believe that Small Government was preferable to Big Government; that “smaller” meant leaner, more accountable and more responsive. All of us want our nation to be safer from terrorism. But it strikes me that putting a super-bureaucracy atop an amalgam of 170,000 public employees and 22 departments will make it less agile and more cumbersome, leading to less accountability and control and making our homeland less secure. There should be ways for the FBI, CIA, INS, AFT and other pieces of the federal alphabet soup to coordinate their activities without putting a new, costly, inefficient layer atop the federal pyramid.

Another reason I’m down on Homeland Security efforts is enactment of the so-called USA Patriot Act, which does more to shred constitutional liberties than anything since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. There’s a reason our Founding Fathers included Fourth Amendment protections in the Bill of Rights, including prohibitions on unreasonable search and seizure and requiring probable cause (both of which can be obviated through this new Act). Americans shouldn’t have to sacrifice their civil liberties in order to feel safe in their homes. After all, what are we fighting to protect, if not our personal freedoms? I, for one, am not willing to give up my civil rights in exchange for personal protection. If we just use the tools available to us, we should be able to have both.

(An historical footnote, which could serve as a warning to President Bush: The Sedition Act was passed by John Adams’ Federalist Party to try and quash Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party, which at the time was supporting the French Revolution. It temporarily set aside many First Amendment liberties, including the rights of free speech and a free press, and was a political disaster, contributing to Jefferson’s election as president and the dissolution of the Act.)

Finally, a bedrock principle of conservatism and Republicanism has been requiring government to live within its means. Since FDR’s New Deal progressivism of the 1930s, our plea has been for government to be leaner, for government to do less and individuals be more personally responsible, so that taxes could remain low, leaving more money in the pockets of hardworking men and women, who would then spend that money the way they (not government) saw fit. We’ve said that government’s finances should operate like a household or a solvent business – don’t spend more than you take in. For decades, we Republicans faulted Democrats for “busting the budget” as that they favored pet projects and created new entitlement programs.

It’s shocking that the shoe is now on the other foot -- that a Democratic president (Bill Clinton) presided over the first budget surplus in 50 years (thanks to the booming economy of the late 1990s), while two Republicans (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush) have done more to expand the federal debt than all other presidents combined. A note to my liberal friends: it’s not just the tax cuts; it’s an unwillingness to reduce spending in proportion to the total taxes collected. LBJ couldn’t have his cake and eat it, too, and neither can GWB.

Make no mistake, I’ll be supporting W for re-election next year. Despite all my complaints and concerns, I’m certain that I would have disliked a Gore presidency even more. And looking at the current roster of Democrats seeking the White House, I can’t imagine any of them being even as capable as Gore. No, I’ll continue supporting traditional conservative Republican values. I just wish my party’s national leadership would do likewise.


Previous Articles

Determine Your Beliefs
Personal Experience
Half a Loaf
Compromising on Strong Opinions
Economics
Short Shots
The Budget Season
The Lesson

---

About the Author;
Vic Ellison, Apple Valley, Minnesota, is the father of three and the grandfather of two, and has been married for 25 years. Vic is an independent businessman with extensive backgrounds in politics and writing. He can be reached at Vic@boomerjournals.com