04/25/15

Loretta “I Refuse To Answer” Lynch Confirmed As Attorney General After Republican Betrayal

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

Getty Images

The Republican Party is becoming more and more detached from their conservative base. They seem to vote against anything the conservatives want and do all they can to enable our Marxist president. As Andrew McCarthy put it, “Voting to confirm an attorney general who won’t uphold the Constitution isn’t a way to inspire confidence among conservatives.”

Last Thursday, Karl Rove couldn’t wait to announce that, “The dysfunctional Congress finally appears to be working again as the Founders intended.” Really? Because this isn’t the way I perceive the Founders having intended it at all. They would have impeached and removed a sitting president who acted like a monarch. Then to validate Rove’s proclamation, the GOP-controlled Senate confirmed as attorney general Loretta Lynch who blatantly supports the systematic non-enforcement of federal law. Ms. Lynch also supports President Obama’s boldly unconstitutional usurpations of legislative authority, including Congress’ power to set the terms of lawful presence by aliens in our country. Ted Cruz SLAMMED the Republican majority in the Senate for allowing the Lynch nomination:

On the Senate floor a few moments ago, Ted Cruz SLAMMED the new Senate Republican majority for refusing to block Loretta Lynch’s nomination to attorney general. He said that the Republican majority could continue to block the nomination if they wanted to and it’s something he’s urged them to do because of her admissions to run the DOJ in a lawless fashion just like Eric Holder.

He pointed out that more than a few voters are asking what is the difference between a Republican and Democratic Senate majority when someone promising the exact same lawlessness as Holder will be allowed to get confirmed. He says that’s something each Republican will have to explain to their constituents.

He also adds that not a single Republican can vote for such a nomination and be consistent with their oath of office to support and defend the Constitution.

Unfortunately, Loretta Lynch was just confirmed. Sigh.

Here is a small sampling of Loretta Lynch’s answers at her confirmation hearing:

Q: Will you defend Obama’s illegal Executive Amnesty?
A: Lynch thinks the Administration’s contrived legal justification is reasonable. She sees nothing wrong with the President’s decision to unilaterally grant lawful status and work authorizations that are explicitly barred by federal law to nearly 5 million people who are here illegally.

Q: Who has more right to a job in this country? A lawful immigrant who’s here as a citizen – or a person who entered the country unlawfully?
A: Lynch believes that the right and the obligation to work is one that’s shared by everyone in this country regardless of how they came here. And certainly, if someone is here, regardless of status, she would prefer that they would be participating in the workplace than not participating in the workplace.

Q: Concerning the limits of prosecutorial discretion… the dubious theory that President Obama has put forward to justify his illegal Executive Amnesty; where do you stand?
A: Lynch would give no limits to that theory.

Q: Can a subsequent President use prosecutorial discretion to order the Treasury Secretary not to enforce the tax laws and to collect no more income taxes in excess of 25%?
A: She refused to answer.

Q: Can a subsequent President use prosecutorial discretion to exempt the state of Texas, all 27 million people, from every single federal labor and environmental law?
A: She refused to answer.

Q: Do you agree with the Holder Justice Department that the government could place a GPS sensor on the car of every single American without probable cause?
A: She refused to answer.

Q: Do you agree with the Holder Justice Department that the First Amendment gives no religious liberty protection whatsoever to a church’s or a synagogue’s choice of their own pastor or rabbi?
A: She refused to answer.

Q: Do you believe the federal government can employ a drone to kill a US citizen on American soil if that citizen does not pose an imminent threat?
A: She refused to answer.

Q: Would you be willing to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate the IRS’ targeting of citizens and citizen groups for their political views? An investigator that was at a minimum, not a major Obama donor?
A: She refused to answer.

Our ‘functional Congress’ confirmed Loretta Lynch as our new attorney general, replacing Eric Holder, possibly the most lawless, racist and fascist AG this nation has ever seen. Lynch testified brazenly that she endorses and intends to facilitate the president’s lawlessness and constitutional violations. Having heard her testimony during the confirmation hearings, 10 Republican senators decided to vote for Lynch. Remember, the position of attorney general exists to ensure that the laws are enforced and the Constitution is preserved; and… each senator has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution. This should have been a no-brainer. Yet, Republicans sided with the Marxist Leftists and Lynch was confirmed. The ten Republicans who voted for confirmation were: Kelly Ayotte, Ron Johnson, Mark Kirk, Rob Portman, Thad Cochran, Susan Collins, Jeff Flake, Lindsey Graham, Orrin Hatch and Mitch McConnell. The Senate voted 56–43 in favor of Lynch.

Mitch McConnell bald-facedly lied in October. While he was wooing conservatives for the upcoming midterm election, he stated that any nominee that was going to replace Eric Holder as “the nation’s highest law-enforcement official” must, “as a condition of his or her confirmation,” avoid “at all costs” Holder’s penchant for putting “political and ideological commitments ahead of the rule of law” — including as it “relates to the president’s acting unilaterally on immigration or anything else.” He fibbed big time and betrayed conservatives nationwide. It was his wheeling and dealing that led to the deal that was struck with Harry Reid and that cinched Lynch’s confirmation.

Here’s Mitch McConnell’s deal: If Democrats agree to stop blocking a human trafficking bill over some boilerplate language regarding abortion funding — a position that made them look unreasonable — Republicans, with all the leverage imaginable, will help confirm another attorney general nominee who will rubber stamp the president’s many overreaches. So, you see in the end, the Republicans voted for the continuation of the abuse of Executive power. It’s really just that simple. The reasons given for supporting Lynch included that she was a black woman and the best so far to come out the Obama White House – those are two breathtakingly horrible reasons for Lynch to be confirmed. It’s absolutely shameful politicking.

If you didn’t think Mitch McConnell was a lying, conniving Progressive before… you should now. Once the November election was won and behind him, McConnell went to work behind the scenes to whip up support for Loretta Lynch. He wielded his power from the shadows and strong-armed others into supporting her. By voting for her confirmation, he summarily flipped off any conservative who had been foolish enough to believe his campaign rhetoric. Suckers.

But it is even worse than that. From Andrew McCarthy:

That doesn’t begin to quantify the perfidy, though. In order to get Lynch to the finish line, McConnell first had to break conservative opposition to allowing a final vote for her nomination. The majority leader thus twisted enough arms that 20 Republicans voted to end debate. This guaranteed that Lynch would not only get a final vote but would, in the end, prevail — Senators Hatch, Graham, Flake, Collins, and Kirk having already announced their intention to join all 46 Democrats in getting Lynch to the magic confirmation number of 51.

So, in addition to the aforementioned ten Republicans who said “aye” on the final vote to make Lynch attorney general, there are ten others who conspired in the GOP’s now routine parliamentary deception: Vote in favor of ending debate, knowing that this will give Democrats ultimate victory, but cast a meaningless vote against the Democrats in the final tally in order to pose as staunch Obama opponents when schmoozing the saps back home. These ten — John Thune (S.D.), John Cornyn (Texas), Bob Corker (Tenn.), Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), Pat Roberts (Kan.), Richard Burr (N.C.), Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), Cory Gardner (Col.), Mike Rounds (S.D.), and Thom Tillis (N.C.) — are just as willfully complicit in Lynch’s confirmation and her imminent execution of Obama’s lawlessness.

This is not a Senate back to regular order. It is a disgrace, one that leads to the farce’s final act: On Monday, Loretta Lynch will ceremoniously take the oath to uphold the Constitution she has already told us she will undermine.

This is not about immigration, amnesty, health care, and the full spectrum of tough issues on which reasonable minds can differ. It is about the collapse of fundamental assumptions on which the rule of law rests. When solemn oaths are empty words, when missions such as “law enforcement” become self-parody, public contempt for Washington intensifies — in particular, on the political right, which wants to preserve the good society and constitutional order the rule of law sustains.

Mitch McConnell and the other Progressive RINOs are responsible for destroying mainstream America’s faith in their government and the rule of law. Our contempt and disgust for those in DC is now complete. The last time out for a presidential election, millions of Republicans were so disillusioned that they stayed home rather than voting. Obama won a second term that way. It appears that the Republican Party is intent on losing the next presidential race as well… they obviously don’t give a flying crap about their base. Ask yourself this… would McConnell be doing anything differently if he were Obama’s insider in the Senate?

Mike Lee had this to say:

“I voted against her because even though I walked into her confirmation process with an open mind, hoping and even expecting to like her, I couldn’t vote for her because she refused to answer any of my questions about prosecutorial discretion and its limits,” Sen. Mike Lee, whose grilling gave Lynch the most trouble, told The Federalist. “Even as I made the questions more and more obvious, and gave her hypotheticals which I thought made the question clearer, she refused to answer. It’s not because she doesn’t have the capacity, it’s because she had concluded that she wanted to share as little information as possible and, apparently, she responded well to coaching. I found that troubling.”

Lee had offered a hypothetical scenario wherein a governor wanted to raise the speed limit from 55 miles per-hour to 75 but could not convince the legislature. Could that governor decide to unilaterally instruct his highway patrol to not enforce the speed limit? Could he issue permits to drivers who wanted to exceed the limits established by statute? “I thought that was a pretty reasonable hypothetical,” Lee explained. She refused [to] discuss the scenario.

And from TheBlaze:

Much of the GOP’s opposition to Lynch was due to her support for Obama’s executive action on immigration. During her confirmation hearing, Lynch said she believes Obama’s plan was consistent with the Constitution, drawing outrage from Republicans who have said it’s an end-run around Congress.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the most vocal Republican against Obama’s plan, said the Senate shouldn’t confirm Lynch to be the nation’s top law enforcement officer given her support for what he has called an illegal move by Obama.

“The Senate must never confirm an individual to such an office as this who will support and advance a scheme that violates our Constitution and eviscerates established law and congressional authority,” he said Thursday. “No person who would do that should be confirmed. And we don’t need to be apologetic about it, colleagues.”

Obstructionist and evasive doesn’t quite do Loretta Lynch justice here. In my opinion, she is an anti-Constitutionalist and certainly a Liberal Progressive. I am convinced that Lynch is not only a racist, she will be just as bad or worse than Eric Holder and you can thank, in large part, Mitch McConnell and the Progressive Republicans for it. She also has a very special enthusiasm for civil asset forfeiture that she will up the stakes on across the nation. The fact that she is black and a woman should have nothing to do with her confirmation – her adherence and stances on the law and the Constitution should be all that counts. We are definitely at a Constitutional tipping point and Loretta “I Refuse To Answer” Lynch may very well be the Progressive straw that broke the Republic’s back.

03/13/15

The Founders Didn’t Fail—We Are Failing The Founders

By: Benjamin Weingarten
The Federalist

Conservatives are understandably depressed in the wake of Speaker Boehner and the Republican-controlled Congress’ predictable caving on executive amnesty.

Let me stop right there by emphasizing that I only said conservatives. Were our republic healthy, every single American would be depressed that President Obama’s amnesty—which on dozens of occasions he said he did not have the authority to enforce—will continue apace to the benefit of lawbreakers at the expense of American citizens.

Americans would be further demoralized at the notion that our president politicized the sovereignty of our nation represented by failing to protect its borders, all in a transparent attempt to win a permanent Democratic majority—which the shortsighted Republican establishment seem perfectly fine with, since they want immigration and the idea of “those racist Republicans” to become non-issues.

Some are lamenting the cowardice of our representatives, and to that I quote a former NFL Coach: “They are who we thought they were!”

I have even seen one article arguing that the Constitution itself has failed. But the Constitution and our Founders did not fail. Human nature has not changed between 1787 and 2015. There were undoubtedly plenty of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century booze-swilling, cigar-smoking iterations of John Boehner lumbering around Capitol Hill.

What has changed is the size and scope of government, the number and composition of people who are voting, and the public’s general indifference to and acceptance of the greed, graft, lying, and all matter of corruption that have become commonplace in public life. There is also a heck of a lot more bread and circuses to keep us fat, happy, and distracted from what our supposed leaders are doing.

Government Is Too Big to Control

Entitlement reform is not going to capture the imagination of the American people like a llama chase or the color of a dress. And it bears noting that many of the Founders themselves were involved in sordid activities, and even willing to accept a king.

But that king’s powers would have looked downright puny compared to those President Obama wields today; and what corrupt politicians did way back when feels less offensive than the systemic abuse and political malpractice on display now, in part because the nation our founders—exceptional citizen legislators—entrusted us with was substantially smaller and less intrusive.

Today, when you have hundreds of agencies and millions of pages of laws, when the federal government is among the largest employers in the world, hyper-regulating almost every aspect of our society, creating arcane and byzantine rules designed to reward one set of constituents or another over and above the American people, not to mention the rule makers, rule interpreters and compliance officers themselves—this naturally creates not only an unwieldy and unaccountable federal government, but one that will invite and reward people willing to pull the kinds of shenanigans we see today.

To the percentage of the public that is actually informed as to what is going on in government, there are simply too many egregious things occurring on a daily basis, not to mention again the Siren song of bread and circuses, for anyone to keep track of it all or know where to focus one’s energies and pitchforks.

The Failure Is Our Fault

What defines an informed voter itself is of course open to interpretation, given what the majority of people are taught in our hallowed Democrat-controlled community organizing institutions, also known as schools; and given that one can read The New York Times, Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Vox, and watch “The Daily Show” each day to qualify as informed by today’s standards, without knowing anything about what the other half of the country thinks and believes.

On amnesty specifically, as a lame-duck president without control of either house of Congress, Barack Obama is completely unchained, simply running roughshod over our laws. That a supposed constitutional scholar is rendering the system of checks and balances and separation of powers meaningless; that the executive branch is usurping the legislative branch, while congressmen say one thing and stand by idly doing another, is not a reflection that the Constitution or founders failed.

Rather, these travesties reflect that the American people are failing the founders.

We elected Barack Obama twice, in spite of his words, actions, and associations, which have unsurprisingly led to these disastrous six-plus years. The presidents who preceded him were not much better, though no one would have posed the question of them as Mark Steyn recently dared: “If he were working for the other side, what exactly would he be doing differently?”

We elected the congressmen who with rare exceptions (see Lee, Sen. Mike) continue to stand by while Rome burns, and who are derelict in their duty to defend and protect the Constitution, including against its brazen violator who resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Welfare Versus Defense: Who Wins?

We have failed to persuasively enough make the case that we cannot thrive as a nation just by slowing government’s rate of growth and hiring smarter technocrats, but must literally be slashing the federal budget by 50 percent, abolishing agencies en masse, allowing Americans to opt out of the welfare state (including programs which can only pay my generation back in devalued dollars like Social Security), ensuring that we have not small deficits but massive surpluses to pay down our debt so the interest alone does not consume all the money we pay to the feds each year, and demanding a massive devolution of power back to the states and the people where it rightfully belongs.

And if our fellow Americans choose to live in socialist basket-case states, they are free to do so without reaching into your and my pockets at the point of a gun.

At root and underlying all of these issues, we have allowed the Left to control the media, academia, and the rest of America’s key cultural institutions, such that the vast majority of our fellow citizens are reflexively progressive and cannot even conceive of the types of changes I just mentioned. This is how the radical, morally and economically bankrupting leftist policies can be considered mainstream, while freedom can be considered fascistic.

This inherent progressivism narrowly underlies Republican acquiescence to the growing leviathan, and dictates the type of leaders that America broadly finds palatable, which has led us to this perilous place in our history in which all of our worst enemies are ascendant, while we are fast on the road to bankruptcy and serfdom, with our only choice between welfare and defense.

When entitlements and our armed forces are sitting side by side on the chopping block, which do you think a war-weary, economically pummeled American public is going to choose?

We Need a New Generation of Savvy Statesmen

No, the Constitution hasn’t failed, and our founders haven’t failed. We the people have failed during the hundred-year progressive march. So now we are burdened with the doubly difficult task of trying to win the long game of culture and the short game of politics.

I have much more faith in the latter over the former—that over time the chances are greater that we develop the strategy and tactics to beat an establishment incumbent class than win America’s cherished cultural institutions, which form our national soul.

Our national soul determines whether the Constitution is a piece of parchment or enshrines principles like equal rights for all and special privileges for none, that law resides above man, that men are not angels and that we must compel government’s non-angels to control themselves, and that the most important thing in America is protecting the rights of the minority, the most important of which is the individual.

And the inspiration for our national soul should reside not in our Constitution but in the Declaration of Independence that breathes life into it, a majestic document that we have ignored for far too long.

Don’t Blame Boehner—Blame Us

In any event, we the people have all the leverage in the world. The Boehners and Mitch McConnells will listen to us when the political cost of siding with the Chamber of Commerce is so great that their political lives depend on it.

Using the power of the purse as a lever to control the president, or threatening let alone bringing forth articles of impeachment are political remedies, and they are not being used not only because the Republican establishment that makes up the majority of the majority in Congress are risk-averse and often spineless, but because the majority of the American people are not demanding it.

That impeachment brings howls of racism alone shows a failure of our culture to separate the original sin of slavery from the demerits of the job done by this president, to separate identity politics from the individual.

Until and unless we devote all of our efforts to winning the long and short games with a constant, strategic, relentless full-court press, we are going to see amnesties ad nauseum, Obamacare not only not abolished but metastasizing, the federal budget and debt continue skyrocketing, comparatively small things like the Export-Import Bank chugging along and, yes, the welfare state expanding and our defenses shrinking while Islamic supremacists, Russia, China, and their proxies grow ever-bolder and more confidently bellicose.

We the people have much work to do if we want to keep any semblance of our republic, as Benjamin Franklin challenged us to do. And we hold the power in our hands.

But do we have the will and capability to exert it?

Ben Weingarten (@bhweingarten) is publishing manager and editor of TheBlaze Books. Ben is a graduate of Columbia University, where he majored in economics-political science and contributed to outlets including the Breitbart sites and the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

02/3/15

The Tea Party: Then and Now

By: Michael Johns

The largest and most impactful political movement, at least since the civil rights movement and perhaps in all of American history, originated in the minds and efforts of less than a dozen American citizens.

It was late February 2009, just weeks after the inauguration of Barack Obama, and there was every reason for conservatives to fear the worst: That we had elected a polarizing, far left and ultimately ineffectual president who would prove a threat to constitutional law, our economy and America’s global standing in the world. Most concerning was that he would gradually or even quickly erode our nation’s two centuries of respect for individual rights and liberties upon which America was founded, “fundamentally transforming” (as he promised) our nation in destructive ways.

On the morning of February 19, 2009, as was often the case, I had the financial media outlet CNBC playing on a distant television in my suburban Philadelphia home. This particular cold February morning, Rick Santelli, a Chicago-based CNBC reporter, was doing his usual stand-up reporting from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade (COMEX). Santelli began reporting on Washington’s federal subsidies of housing under Obama when mid way through his report his sense of outrage began to escalate passionately.

Santelli accused the Obama administration of “promoting bad behavior” in subsidizing mortgages then at default risk with a $75 billion housing program, known as the Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan. He then turned and, while still live on CNBC, stated assertively to COMEX floor traders: “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party!” Santelli’s suggestion of a Tea Party response to the federal government’s overreach was greeted with supportive applause and whistles of approval from COMEX traders. Santelli then said: “What we are doing in this country is making our founders roll over in their graves.”

I found Santelli’s Chicago comments accurate, inspirational and even bold for a mainstream reporter in a media world that really never challenged Obama on much of anything during or since the 2008 campaign. What I did not realize was that his remarks were viewed similarly by several other conservative-leaning Americans, who would go on to inspire a national political movement that would shake the nation.

Just a few days following Santelli’s rant, 12 or so conservative activists, including me, were invited to participate in a strategic organizing Tea Party conference call moderated by Nashville-based, Stanford educated conservative Michael Patrick Leahy. It was Leahy who earlier launched the now famous #tcot (Top Conservatives on Twitter) hashtag, where it remains today one of Twitter’s most commonly used hashtags and a key methodology for conservative communication.

Most on the call, unlike me, were new to political engagement. They had largely never worked in government, public policy or politics. Aside from Leahy and me, the others had never managed an organization either. They had largely never written or spoken on political or public policy themes, even though all of us would soon be called upon to articulate our Tea Party message nationally in the weeks to come. Most had never even worked on a political campaign. But the passion on that call was infectious. The 12 or so of us left it with a feeling that a potentially influential national political movement was emerging—and quickly.

Several follow-up calls were scheduled, and they led us to devise a now well-known plan for Tea Party protests across the nation on Tax Day, April 15, 2009. The aggressive six-week timeline, like much that the Tea Party movement has undertaken since its creation, was organized hastily, with a sense of urgency, and not without its errors. But April 15, 2009, is now a fairly notable day in American history in the sense that it was the physical manifestation of a national political movement, comprising tens of millions of Americans and quite possibly the largest in American history, that would go on to impact significantly the nation’s political debate.

The day of April 15, 2009, was a busy one. For my part, in the afternoon, on Boston Square in downtown Boston, just blocks from the original Sam Adams-led Tea Party on December 16, 1773, I spoke to a large and passionate crowd furious with Obama and the country’s direction. I then left Boston to speak that evening at one of the nation’s largest tea parties of the day, held in lower Manhattan, not far from the memorialized 9/11 attack location. Three days later, on the grounds of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, I spoke for a third time in just three days to a very large and vibrant Tea Party rally organized by the Independence Hall Tea Party Association, of which I was then an officer.

The years 2009 and 2010 were full of flurry and a sense of urgency for the national Tea Party movement, an urgency that has continued to this day. In 2010, in Quincy, Illinois, where Lincoln held his sixth debate with U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas on October 13, 1858, I joined Leahy and the late media personality Andrew Breitbart in addressing a large Tea Party crowd on the precise location where Lincoln pointedly articulated his anti-slavery message: “We (the Republican Party) also oppose it as an evil so far as it seeks to spread itself,” Lincoln said that day in Quincy.

By this time, the message of our movement was being refined and polished, comprised mostly of three universal themes that were and continue to be broadly popular with the American people: First, the federal government has grown too big and its taxes vastly too excessive. Second, the sovereignty of the United States—in controlling its borders, in developing its national security and foreign policies — must be defended at all costs. And third, that the U.S. Constitution was a document containing absolute truths to which government needed to adhere if it was to avoid lawlessness and chaos.

As I was in Boston and New York City, Leahy and others organized one of the day’s largest and most successful events in Nashville, drawing thousands. In downtown Chicago, just a couple blocks from where the Santelli rant heard round the world took place, another Tea Party founder organized a large and hugely successful Tea Party rally. His name was Eric Odom.

Quickly, the passionate and activism of this small cadre spread to thousands, then tens of thousands, and ultimately to millions of Americans who identified themselves as being supportive of the Tea Party movement. On November 2, 2010, a highly motivated Tea Party movement rocked the nation, sending 65 new Republican House members to Washington and thus forcing then Speaker Nancy Pelosi to surrender her gavel to new Republican John Boehner. Four years later, on November 4, 2014, the Tea Party movement again proved a huge difference maker, further increasing Republican presence in the U.S. House and increasing its U.S. Senate seats by nine, including pulling out wins in hugely contentious races in many states, including Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, and South Dakota.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. House of Representatives, a Tea Party Caucus, chaired by former Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, had been developed with the movement’s input to coordinate the Tea Party agenda in Congress. And the national strategy discussions continued. In Chicago, for instance, Odom and I spent three long days in detailed discussion on the movement’s strategy, messaging and allocation of limited resources.

In the months and years since, along with other Tea Party founders from the February 2009 conference call, we continued tireless efforts of what by then had become a vast, influential, though sometimes chaotically organized movement of political consequence. All the Tea Party movement founders from Leahy’s first conference call are impressive in their own ways, and have their own personal stories about what sparked their leadership in this now historical movement.

In the years that followed, along with other national Tea Party leaders, Leahy, Odom and I crisscrossed the nation articulating the Tea Party message and helped to organize the movement politically in order to prevail in elections.

In Dallas, Leahy organized a national Tea Party leadership meeting that included many of the founders from the original February 2009 call participated. “Let’s begin this meeting with a prayer to God for His guidance of this movement,” I suggested privately to Leahy, who agreed. We began the meeting exactly that way. Later, also in Dallas, we organized a two-day training course for regional and other Tea Party leaders on political and public policy activism.

One of those leaders was Chicago-based Eric Odom. In fall 2010, from Las Vegas, we poured ourselves into the campaign of Nevada State Senator Sharron Angle in hopes of replacing the Obama administration’s strongest U.S. Senate ally, Harry Reid. As the movement’s prominence (and the associated strategic questions facing it) evolved, Odom and I spent several days in Chicago asking and discussing those questions and developing our best answers. And there was the day in Philadelphia where I invited Odom to join me in addressing an important pre-election Tea Party rally held on the iconic grounds of Independence Hall in front of the very building where 56 founders of our nation pledged with a “firm reliance of the protection of divine providence,” their “lives, fortunes and sacred honor” to remove imperial British forces and rule and establish a self-governed nation rooted in liberty and the rule of law.

The Tea Party movement’s efforts, as even its detractors would concede, have since proven hugely consequential, ensuring that Obama, at least since 2011, was not given full reign of the legislative and executive branches of government. A Tea Party-influenced Republican House and Senate, along with our extensive grassroots efforts, have held liberal Obama’s agenda at bay, despite the Tea Party’s ultimate inability to defeat Obamacare.

Since that first February 2009 conference call, the founding and ongoing development of the historic Tea Party movement is one of many intriguing personal stories, and a singular collective story. Along the way, we have done many things well (removing Pelosi and then Reid as Speaker and Majority Leader, respectively). We have strengthened the Republican Party as a party that stands more than before for conservative principles expressed (but too often ignored) in the GOP platform. We also quickly obliterated the 2008 progressive political culture that maintained that Obama was a man who singularly held the answers for the nation. Time has proven those ideas were not at all innovative and were actually just a rewording of those from the liberal playbook of more government and more taxes. In all these ways, since those February 2009 planning calls, the national Tea Party movement has exceeded the accomplishments of the effective and well-constructed 2008 Obama for America campaign that ultimately propelled Obama to the presidency.

All this history is important because it reaffirms the veracity of Margaret Mead’s famous statement: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” It’s worth asking: If those first organizing calls had not been launched, would Republicans today control the U.S. Senate and House? If no, that means that Obama’s entire far-left political agenda would have been rubber stamped by an equally liberal Congressional leadership. Has the Tea Party movement saved the nation? I believe it likely has.

Yet, to be truthful about the inner workings of the Tea Party movement, we have done many things well, but failed in others. In 2015, the Tea Party and patriot movement’s top priority must be communicating and impacting public opinion and explaining why and how Tea Party principles can make America great again: creating jobs and economic prosperity, restoring rigid adherence to the U.S. Constitution, and restoring a strong America that can defeat serious national security threats.

With a reliance on divine providence again, let’s roll back this utterly destructive, unconstitutional government and welcome in a century or more of strong liberty leadership. Next step: We must explain our Tea Party vision and solutions for America.

02/3/15

The Other Cause of Terrorism

By: Alan Caruba
Warning Signs

I never fail to be astonished by the amount of corruption there is in the world. It is a very human trait whether it was royalty asserting that they ruled by God’s choice until their subjects rose up against them or modern day despots encountering the same fate.

Sarah Chayes has authored “Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security” ($26.95, W.W. Norton) and it is quite timely when you consider that corruption ignited the “Arab Spring”, first in Tunisia when a peddler grew so tired of the police asking for bribes that he set himself afire in protest. Its dictator’s wife openly displayed the nation’s stolen wealth for which they were driven from power. In Egypt there was a similar response when the public tired of the looting of the state treasury by Mubarak’s son. Revolts from Libya to Syria have been generated by the same cause.

Corruption in the Middle East has a long history, but it is worldwide and, depending on the nation, is either tolerated as part of the way the culture does business or resisted by governments who understand that it undermines their legitimacy. Throw a dart at the map of the world and you are likely to hit a nation where corruption is influencing current events. As Chayes notes, “Time and again U.S. officials are blindsided by major developments in countries where they work. Too often they are insensible to the perspectives and aspirations of population.”

A classic example is Afghanistan where both the Soviet Union and the U.S. ran into such ingrained corruption that it undermined their objectives, the former to turn it into a satellite and the latter to turn it into a modern, democratic government. Chayes cites Afghanistan as a classic example of why the Taliban emerged as a jihadist movement. Corruption in the form of bribes, kick-backs, cronyism, is so deeply engrained in Afghanistan that it generated a movement to replace it with sharia law by Islamists.

“If the very Afghan officials by whose sides they planned to combat extremists were generating those extremists themselves—by having men shake down travelers and taking a cut, or leaving bills unpaid, or by providing judiciously selected ‘intelligence’ to engineer a night-raid against a rival trafficking network—it was too big a paradox to take in. NATO officers,” said Chayes, “did not want to know.”

“The corruption networks” in Afghanistan, writes Chayes, “were just too vertically integrated: any move against any official, no matter how lowly, would reverberate all the way up the chain to Karzai.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, Afghanistan had been a constitutional monarchy with a national assembly and local elders affording a check on executive power. “Citizens expected a decent education from their government, health care, even employment in state-owned industries.” That changed when Hamid Karzai took over. At that point government became a criminal enterprise.

The 9/11 attack prompted the U.S. to invade to drive out al Qaeda, but it also led to its staying on to fight the perceived enemies of Afghanistan. They—otherwise known as the Taliban—were being generated in part by the desire to drive out the corrupt Karzai administration.

What we tend to forget about the “Arab Spring” was that “millions of Arabs chose a constructive way to force change. They chose political revolution—a peaceful, civic, inclusive, and responsible form of revolt—directed square at their own leaderships, not at Western countries, not even those seen as regime allies.”

This is not to suggest that Islamism hasn’t degraded from its opposition to widespread corruption into organizations seeking to take control over the nations where it has spread. It has and this is most evidence in the incredibly corrupt nation of Nigeria where since 2009 Boko Haram has developed terrorism to new heights of barbarity—if that is possible.

An oil-rich nation, the billions that it generates have gone missing thanks to the administration of Nigerian president, Goodluck Jonathan. The police in Nigeria are hated as much as Boko Haram and, as we have seen, have not demonstrated any ability to eliminate the terrorist organization.

Why would any police officer or member of the armed forces want to die for a corrupt, kleptocratic administration? This was true back in the days when the U.S. was fighting in Vietnam, true when the Iraqi armed forces fled from those of the Islamic State, and it explains why even the active participation of U.S. forces does not result in victory against the terrorist organizations.

Why then should we be surprised that many throughout the Middle East have turned to Islam to address the problems they encounter from the corruption of their governments? “Lured by militant advocates of a religious ordering of human affairs, they will seek to roll back four hundred years of political history.”

In the West, we regard those regions of the world where corruption is rampant as backward. We can be forgiven for forgetting that our ancestors in England, the Netherlands, and parts of France laid the groundwork for modern democracy by their efforts to curb the corruption of the monarchies that enjoyed the good life at the expense of their subjects.

By the time the Founders came together to create the U.S. Constitution, they had been well-schooled and experienced in what it would require to keep corruption at bay with a government whose powers were limited and divided among executive, legislative, and judicial branches.

We are their beneficiaries, but that does not mean we have defeated corruption. The vast entitlement programs are just one example of the way millions are secured illegally by deception and disbursement. Other forms of corruption are addressed in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that forbids the use of bribery by corporations doing business in foreign nations.

The U.S. is not alone, however. Just as occurred in 2008, the too close relationship of the banking community and government led to financial crises in Ireland and Iceland. The public’s rejection of corruption in Ukraine led to its current civil unrest.

The role of corruption in the nations experiencing Islamic terrorism cannot be underestimated. Its role in the conduct of the world’s affairs is huge and a constant threat whose many forms must be understood, addressed, and eliminated to the greatest degree possible.