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The Thing Most Needful
If you have a moment free, read Steve Hayward’s “Crisis of the Conservative House Divided.” If you have hardly a free moment, read it anyway. Then read it again. It is that important.
Steve has cut through the muck — the list of good things that conservatives favor — and he has focused in on the only thing that really counts: whether elections matter any more.
Back in 1733, Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de la Brede et de Montesquieu published an exquisite little book entitled Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline. In a sly passage directed against the French monarchy, he focused in on an advantage that Rome possessed, which everyone reading it in that year would have recognized that France did not possess: the capacity to correct course. Then, he alluded to England’s ability to do so.
What he had in mind when he mentioned England had two dimensions: freedom of the press, and free elections. They enabled the people of England to force their rulers to alter course.
We can no longer do that. We can elect conservatives. We can elect them in a landslide, giving them more governorships, state houses, and more seats in Congress than Republicans have had at any time since 1928 — and nothing happens. The administrative state continues to grow; the progressives in charge force the states to accept same-sex marriage and men in the ladies room; they persuade all the universities in the land to institute an inquisition to hound and ruin young men who have incurred the pique of a young woman or two by stealing a kiss or (more often) by ceasing to steal kisses; and they promise to censor political dissent by identifying as “hate speech” any statement that breaks from orthodoxy.
In response, what do the conservatives in office do? They cower; they run; when put under pressure, they fold (yes, Mike Pence, it is you I have in mind). And when the Presidential candidate foisted on their party by popular fury aimed, in fact, at them speaks an unpleasant truth, they wring their hands. Theirs is the party of the white flag. They show their talents best in retreat.
The history of modern liberty has always been bound up with one thing: the capacity of the legislative power to elicit from the executive a redress of grievances. That is the role played from the medieval period on by England’s House of Commons, and it used to be the role played by our House of Representatives. The chief thing was not their law-making capacity — though that was important. The chief thing that gave them the leverage they needed if they were to hold the executive accountable and stop it in its tracks if it went astray was, as I argued in a blogpost some months ago, the power of the purse.
I do not know what will happen in November. I fear both possibilities. Neither Clinton nor Trump is, in my opinion, palatable. What I do know, however, is that if Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and their associates do not recover for the legislative branch of our government the power of the purse we might as well not have elections anymore. For the progressives will use their leverage in the courts and in the executive agencies to shove whatever measure elite opinion comes to favor down the throats of everyone else. We are no longer a democracy. We have become a narrow, ideologically-driven, highly partisan oligarchy, and it would take something like a revolution to restore constitutional democracy and democratic control in these United States.
Let me be blunt. Under our Constitution, the House of Representatives has the power to stop anything it really wants to stop. All that it has to do is to zero out the budget allocated for the activity it wants to stop. If it is unwilling or unable to exercise that power, it should close shop. The Republicans are the victims of their own cowardice.
This post was originally published on Oct. 23, 2016.
Published in Politics
I am still puzzling over how to parlay this quote into better advocacy for a convention of states; but I have not found a way to improve upon it’s own existence.
If you agree with me that this is true, then let us not hang our hat of hopes and dreams upon another election.
You and me both.
The quote you mentioned is a half truth.
For example, an overwhelming majority of Americans like Social Security. If I run for president or US Senate on a platform of eliminating Social Security, I will likely lose the election. One could conclude that this demonstrates that “elections no longer change the character of our government.”
But let’s say I run on a platform of reducing taxes by 10 percent and win and then enact this tax cut plan. Then one could conclude that elections can change the character of our government.
Sometimes certain policies can not be changed because there is insufficient voter support for such change. The author of that quote you mentioned seems to think that if the policies of the US government do not conform to his preferences, elections no longer matter. This is incorrect.
No, that’s wrong. And forget “Let’s say.” It was wrong in practice.
Republicans have run on a platform of reducing taxes for decades and have in fact reduced them. But part-and-parcel of their promise to reduce taxes has always been – what?
The concomitant promise that government’s revenues would be increased – remember? That we could have our tax cuts and big government too. Instead of “tax-and-spend” the actual Republican promise, backed up by the Laffer Curve, was “tax cut-and-spend.”
And in both cases it ended up being “borrow-and-spend,” didn’t it?
No change in the character of government at all. The government continued to grow and to accrue more power to itself, facilitated by the ideology of the supply-siders, instead of by the ideology of the Keynesians.
Ok. Let me use another example. Let’s say I run on a platform reducing government spending. My opponent runs 30 second television ads saying that I “want to reduce Social Security payments to senior citizens and reduce Medicare payments to doctors so that seniors can not find adequate health care.” I lose the election.
Can I then say that this proves that elections do not change the character of government? No. It simply means that the voters did not approve of the changes in the character of government that I was proposing.
The author assumes that his policy ideas either must be enacted into law or elections no longer have the ability to change the character of government. The author leaves out the possibility that he and the voters prefer different policy ideas.
Same difference either way.
This seems very naive unless you are a Democrat defending it.
OK. I came back to Ricochet too soon.
I know of no better explanation, or of any way this is inconsistent with observed behavior.
I can no longer agree with this. I think they simply agree much more with people like Obama than they do with the people who vote for them. I further think the voters have figured this out, thus choosing Donald Trump as nominee and president, heedless of the warnings and threats from the usual suspects of the gop.
Of course, they’re still at it. I see today that Ryan and McConnell have endorsed Barry’s latest Russia sanctions, thus pointlessly undercutting the incoming president for no reason other than to add their typical me-too stamp of approval on a yet another bit of policy upon which they had no say.
It will be fascinating to watch the fireworks when the split between the gop-led Congress and the Trump-led executive branch goes nuclear, with Ryan and McConnell openly siding with the left and Trump openly attacking them.
It will make an interesting 2018 election cycle, to put it mildly.
I’m saying they better go with the people.
Probably won’t. They’ll stick to what they know and do best.
Probably won’t. More likely they’ll stick to what they know and do best.
Yes, I agree that this is what has been revealed in the last few election cycles. Certainly, as a minimum they don’t want to fight about it but the leadership really does seem to want to curry favor with the media and the left. Is this cowardice? There’s a little bit of that, too — but I agree with you that we have been fundamentally misunderstanding what is going on with our side’s leaders.
Left versus Right is a matter of issues, not personalities. If the Democrats hypocritically discover a new love for federalism and limited government in opposition to Trump’s use of the imperial Presidency (obviously not going to happen), then more power to them.
Conservatives have no reason to permanently side with either the Trump wing or the Ryan wing of the Republican Party, neither can be trusted to pursue our priorities if they feel empowered to screw us over.
But who is the people?
There was overwhelming anti-Establishment feeling this year, but not overwhelming pro-Trump feeling. Even ignoring the half of the country that voted for Hillary, “the people” among the right are simply not united on the issues.
I think I have an idea who it’s not.
After so many years of “failure theater” from them, I prefer to use the term management here. I realize this probably won’t signify a difference in the minds of most but I would argue it should. I haven’t seen an ounce of anything approaching leadership from the “executive” positions in the party in a loooooong time. To pretend we have had anything but managed capitulation against our best interest for the better part of the last 20 years seems a bit silly to me.
Again, just my 2 cents worth…
Agreed.