Posted on 07/24/2002 3:47:01 PM PDT by Jim Robinson
REPUBLICAN LIBERTY CAUCUS
POSITION STATEMENT
As adopted by the General Membership of the Republican Liberty Caucus at its Biannual Meeting held December 8, 2000.
WHEREAS we believe that government has no money nor power not derived from the consent of the people;
WHEREAS we believe that people have the right to keep the fruits of their labor; and
WHEREAS we believe in upholding the U. S. Constitution as the supreme law of the land;
BE IT RESOLVED that the Republican Liberty Caucus endorses the following principles:
1.0 FEDERALISM
1.1 The power of the federal government should be limited, as per the tenth amendment to the U. S. Constitution.
2.0 EDUCATION
2.1 The U. S. Department of Education should be abolished, leaving education decision making at the state, local or personal level.
2.2 Parents have the right to spend their money on the school or method of schooling they deem appropriate for their children.3.0 HEALTH CARE
3.1 Free market health care alternatives, such as medical savings accounts, should be available to everyone, including senior citizens.
3.2 The federal entitlement to Medicare should be abolished, leaving health care decision making regarding the elderly at the state, local, or personal level.4.0 TAXATION
4.1 The tax system of the United States should be overhauled.
4.2 There should be a national debate discussing various alternative means of taxation including but not limited to a single flat income tax, repealing the income tax and replacing it with a national sales tax, and reducing spending to the point where the income tax can be repealed without the need to replace it with a national sales tax or any other form of taxation.
4.3 The capital gains tax should be *eliminated*.
4.4 The inheritance tax should be *eliminated*.
4.5 The new tax system should be implemented *promptly*.5.0 WELFARE
5.1 The U. S. Department of Health and Human Services should be abolished, leaving decision making on welfare and related matters at the state, local or personal level. All Americans have the right to keep the fruits of their labor to support themselves, their families and whatever charities they so choose, without interference from the federal government.
5.2 All able-bodied Americans have the responsibility to support themselves and their families.6.0 CRIMINAL JUSTICE
6.1 Every American has the right to keep and bear arms. We affirm our support for the second amendment of the U. S. Constitution.
6.2 All people, regardless of position in the public or private sector, should be held equally accountable under the law.
6.3 The *only* litmus test for Supreme Court or other judges should be their determination to accurately interpret, not amend, the Constitution. Judges have *no* authority to make new law.7.0 CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM
7.1 Election campaigns should not be subsidized by tax payers.
7.2 No individual should be compelled to support a political candidate he or she does not support. Government should not empower trade unions to collect funds from their members for use as political contributions without their members' expressed consent.
7.3 All limits on campaign contributions should be eliminated.
7.4 There should be full and timely public disclosure of all the sources and amounts of all campaign contributions upon their receipt.8.0 FEDERAL BUDGET
8.1 There should be an amendment to the U. S. Constitution to require a balanced budget, provided it includes a supermajority requirement to raise taxes and provided it does not empower the judiciary to unilaterally raise taxes.
8.2 Honest accounting dictates that all federal expenditures should be on budget.
8.3 Each budget should be derived based upon the justification for and needs of each program, with no program being either budgeted for or increased automatically.9.0 GOVERNMENT REFORM
9.1 The U. S. Department of Commerce should be abolished, per the tenth amendment of the U. S. Constitution.
9.2 The National Endowment for the Arts should be abolished, per the tenth amendment of the U. S. Constitution.
9.3 The National Endowment for the Humanities should be abolished, per the tenth amendment of the U. S. Constitution.
9.4 The U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development should be abolished, per the tenth amendment of the U. S. Constitution.
9.5 Subsidies to agricultural and other businesses should be eliminated.
9.6 Corporate taxes should be eliminated simultaneously and proportionally with the elimination of subsidies to businesses.
9.7 Recommendations by the Grace Commission and the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW) should be reviewed and implemented, where possible, beginning immediately.
9.8 Privatization of government assets, management and services should be implemented for cost-effectiveness wherever applicable.10.0 TRADE
10.1 The U. S. government should inhibit neither the exportation of U. S. goods and services worldwide, nor the importation of goods and services.
10.2 The United States should not be answerable to any governing body outside the United States for its trade policy.11.0 DEFENSE
11.1 U. S. military should be deployed only where there is a clear threat to vital U. S. interests and only with the consent of the U. S. Congress.
11.2 It is the duty of the federal government to provide a system to defend against missile attacks.
11.3 No branch of the military should be put in harm's way without a clear entrance and exit strategy and a goal, which when achieved, constitutes victory.
11.4 U. S military personnel should always be under U. S. command.
11.5 U. S. armed forces should be all-volunteer.
11.6 Military draft registration should be eliminated.
11.7 Foreign aid is often more harmful than helpful and should be curtailed.12.0 PROPERTY RIGHTS
12.1 The government should not take private property without just compensation.
12.2 All unconstitutional regulation of private property should be repealed.13.0 DRUGS
13.1 While recognizing the harm that drug abuse causes society, we also recognize that government drug policy has been ineffective and has led to frightening abuses of the Bill of Rights which could affect the personal freedom of any American. We, therefore, support alternatives to the War on Drugs.
13.2 Per the tenth amendment to the U. S. Constitution, matters such as drugs should be handled at the state or personal level.
13.3 All laws which give license to violate the Bill of Rights should be repealed.
Entered into the record December 8, 2000
The topic must be embarrassing to many people.
Of course it is. Refuting this party's stances requires logic and thought. Something that is in very short supply nowadays.
Keep up the good work, we love ya!
Well said!
Fine by me. On Constitutional questions, I am an Anti-Federalist first and foremost; a Libertarian only secondarily.
No, no... you misunderstood my question. "Annihilation if an adversary also develops nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction". WHAT Adversary?
If we are not meddling in Foreign Nations' domestic politics, are not basing US Troopse on Foreign Soil, and are not attempting to play "winners and losers" via Foreign Aid policy... then WHAT Nation intends to attack us?
I am all for National Missile Defense as opposed to MAD, but I see that as a simple matter of Principle... always have a Good Defense.
But Principle aside... If we are not basing US Troopse on Foreign Soil, and are not attempting to play "winners and losers" via Foreign Aid policy... then WHAT Nation intends to attack us??
Details, please. Thanks.
I agree in so many other areas. My disagreements in areas other than defense are more questions on new procedures than they are disagreements with the ideas. For example, you have Medicare becoming a state program instead of a federal program. Why not get government entirely out of the business EXCEPT FOR QUALITY CONTROL LAWS to see what happens in the market place when providers have to deal directly with consumers.
Actually, I agree totally; but as an incrementalist political tactic, the RLC favors turning these programs over to the States first (they can then be abolished by those States which are Smart enough and Capitalist enough to recognize the drain on the State Economy).
As I said, Anti-Federalist first, Libertarian second.
I believe it was BenGurion or Meir who said something like, "nations don't have friends; nations have interests."
That nation intends to attack us that has an interest that is advanced by attacking us.
Currently, China is at the top of my list as most lethal. Second is Islam. Third is Russia for its remaining nuclear attack capability. Fourth is N. Korea. The monetary unit, the Euro, signals a new power group that has a huge combined miliatary and extensive nuclear capacity.
Nations have interests. When their interests coincide with a military attack, they WILL attack. Dec 7, 1941.
As you can see, I'm simply not a non-interventionist. I'm a 20+ year career military retiree. Contingency planning is conducted for contingencies.
Better put the asbestos underwear on now, 'cause there are a bunch of newbies that will immolate you for this post....
;^)
How would that impact upon corporate contributions? Just curious.
That being evident we need to look to see how the Life Issue applies to the Federal Government and where the current political process went wrong and gave us this unsettled area of great conflict. During the Primary while there was discussion of the planks possible withdrawal, I posted the following Thread/Vanity lead comment:
HERE IS THE PROBLEM AS I SEE IT HOWEVER.
Judge Bork, after losing the nomination for the Supreme Court, wrote a fine short book about the experience and also about the issues that caused the Liberals to rally to his opposition. That book, The Tempting of America, exhibited the manner in which conservatives should explain their constitutional opposition against Roe v. Wade. I bring this up because it appears that this issue will be the rally cry of the opposition to Bush (or Pat in the Reform Party) in a way it never was with Reagan. We must remember that as conservatives of various stripe, we rarely hear the voices of the, so called, moderates. We listen over their heads, hearing the rabid Pro-Choice activists and gain false confidence that they sound to the electorate as hollow as they do to us. They don’t; they’ve had their ear on this issue for forty years.
Reagan ran in a time where the left and middle voters had no idea that the activist court tradition could ever be reversed. Their entire concept of legal scholarship at work in our largest law schools had convinced them that the lie of the Living Constitution had been adopted universally. Hence, little fear of fatherly Reagan on that issue.
Knowledge of the continuation of a fine tradition of Original Intent and a non-activist judiciary was not even on the radar screen of the media and the voters outside the conservative tradition. Also remember that this was the time of the rising of the Neo-Conservative faction, many of whom, at that time, were laissez faire about the abortion issue, much as many Libertarians are today. With Bush and the 2000 election, main-stream electorate voter’s now see the Republicans as ready, willing and able to do away with this touchstone decision in a way they never feared that Reagan would, or could. They will be galvanized with fear by this prospect in a way we are choosing to ignore.
As conservatives, wanting to communicate with and convince our fellow citizens, we must understand the context of the moderates’ allegiance to this decision. It certainly isn’t, in their minds, the support of the ungodly path, the love of the abortionist agenda or the thought of the unborn as worthless. Arguments and appeals that do not understand their internal context for this decision will never sway them.
Much of our rhetoric is too like Alan Keyes’s sound ethical argument against this vile procedure, and not enough like Judge Bork’s judicial and constitutional opposition. The ethical and moral battles will be won in peoples’ hearts, not in their elections. We Conservatives have lost patience too early with the judicial and constitutional arguments and have taken up the ethical and moral cudgel that divides rather than persuades. With a good group of conservatives on the court and in the legislative offices, that judicial and constitutional argument is the appeal we should be making to the moderates, citizens no less than we, and citizens who are not craven to the issues of our nation’s founding and heritage as embodied in those principles.
What then is their internal context for support of the Roe v. Wade decision? I believe I have the answer.
Remember back to the sixties and early seventies; remember when this issue was captured by the activist judges. Remember that the liberal-left could not win this issue legislatively and so saw their open path to win by the judicial fiat of a court decision, what they could not win in State or Federal legislatures. Judicial fiat, lacking the legitimacy of legislative compromise, left a festering divide on this issue in a way that the Civil Rights Act and other such issues of the Sixties never did. How was the appeal made by the liberal-left to the electorate of that day? What was the context? I’ll refresh your memory.
Unformed reform tradition, of a good and valid conservative context, did not exist and was not given a voice in the major parties. The sixties were a time when all citizens recognized the injustices that were contextual within our social, business and governmental institutions. Women, in particular, achieving higher education as never before, began to realize that the vestiges of old cultural traditions were being used to unjustly subjugate them in many ways.
1.) They did not have equal pay for equal work. They were of lesser worth.
2.) They were subjugated by good Judeo-Christian doctrine to a subservient role in marriage that often put them at the mercy of spouses unchecked by the same Judeo-Christian community.
3.) The paternal medical community, predominately male, held one set of standards for male contraception, disease and behavior, and another for female options. Women, accepted into the electorate and property holding class were still not “in charge” of their own bodies in a way that any male took for granted.
4.) Church, social and governmental arguments all tried to free mankind to be “self-actualized” but continued to define and limit the options open to women due to the child-bearing function of their sex. Well you might be able to practice the rhythm method for avoidance of children this year, if you are married, if your husband goes along, and if you realize that when (not if) it fails you are going to be pregnant and then all society, medicine, spousal and parental forces have an over-riding say in your pregnancy.
That is a poorly worded, but memory invoking, context of the world where women and men found the plight of women-kind in the sixties. The advent of easy birth control, equal pay provisions and access to fair treatment under marital laws was then all bound up in the last Trump Card condition of pregnancy that spoke its way to the condition of every women and many men of that day. The activist liberal-left took advantage of that open fear and with the seemingly benign “first trimester” wording of the Roe v. Wade rationalization following the addition of privacy rights into the federal constitution what was never there before.
Doing away with the Roe v. Wade decision on the ethical grounds, so clear to many of we conservatives who have thought of this question for decades, will be a terrible uphill fight we may lose, and losing may lose all. As you can see above, in the moderates’ mind the Roe v. Wade “freedom” (though false) is inexorably tied up in all the reform that moderates feel women have achieved in the last forty years. Should we not make the fight? Certainly, we should, but on the legal, constitutional and judicial grounds that Bork used so well.
The only appeal that can sway the moderate voter is to our common heritage and respect for the principles we hold in common.
1.) The Constitution has been trivialized by the activist court. They have manufactured false “rights” and remedies that were never intended.
2.) The nation wrenching division on this issue is due to the status quo being defined by judicial fiat and without the working of our laboratories of democracy, the state governments.
3.) The first trimester sales job of the proponents of Roe v. Wade is not the test that laws its supported have been held to: Abortion-on-Demand and abortion by tax payer and abortion as contraception have been the goals of the proponents.
4.) Legitimacy is the goal of all citizens for all of our laws and institutions and that will only be won through legislative prudence at the proper level of government designed to deal with complex issues. There the issues of rape, incest, abuse and subjugation that lurk in the back of the mind of all moderates can be put to rest, just as the absolutism on our side must be held out for the ethical and moral context and not the complex civil society.
Fellow Conservatives, we wanted this context to our campaign and plank in our party(s) we support, but we must wage the fight on the political and legal issues or we will not deserve to win. Our moral and religious standards, and rigor, we must hold for our own actions or we will never be entrusted with the confidence of the broad electorate.I apologize on the length of the comment required to make my point and while I know there are those who agree and disagree, I would appreciate thoughtful comments.
The RLC could have a unity of Pro Life libertarians and conservatives if the issue of the Judicary writing law through Judicial Activism was properly addressed.
Because he is neither Bush nor Gore nor Nader nor Buchanan, of course. ;-)
But, in the end, I decided to be intellectually consistent. I am opposed to Abortion because Abortion is Murder; Murder Law is administered by the States; Murder Law is not administered by the Feds. This was Harry Browne's argument, and I found it to be logically sound.
The same would apply to thieves (plural), including entire National Armies of marauding thieves. It is Moral for a defender to smite them.
Please don't insult post readers' intelligences, by claiming Korea, Vietam, the Gulf War, Kosovo, etc., were wars involving "defense of family"...
I wouldn't dream of it. On what conceivable theonomic basis do you imagine I could possibly see those Wars as being Biblically justified?
Probably better to just write "crap". ;-) It's a pretty minor curse word by any measure.
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