On the Mount Vernon Statement

Every so often I suppose society feels the need to reinvent the wheel.

Much has been made of the recent resurgence of conservatism as a counterpoint to the statism being foisted upon us by those in power in Congress and the White House. In this instance, President Obama is just the head of the tiger but as a whole it remains a dangerous creature. Responding to this threat is a loose confederation of TEA Partiers who remain leaderless by instinct or by choice; regardless their influence has been credited with stopping the march leftward and winning elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

One thing they have not been is – for the most part – a creature of Beltway conservatives. But, in their effort to create order where they see chaos, a group of Washington-based organizational leaders got together to create the Mount Vernon Statement. They see this as a necessary update on the Sharon Statement William F. Buckley and a small group of like-minded conservatives put together a half-century ago.

But it’s interesting to see where the conservative movement has gone in the interceding fifty years. A brief history sees that it influenced Republican politics to one degree or another, but it hasn’t always been successful in convincing the American people of its merits. Barry Goldwater was a disciple, but he was shellacked in the 1964 election. (One caveat is that this occurred less than a year after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, so LBJ could burnish Kennedy’s memory as needed. A little-known fact about JFK’s trip to Texas was that he was worried about re-election and wanted to shore up his base.)

With the possible exception of Reagan, it seems Republican presidents who have ran and won as staunch conservatives moderated to various degrees upon taking office. Nixon started the Environmental Protection Agency and installed disastrous wage and price freezes for a time to combat inflation. George H.W. Bush told us to “read my lips” but knuckled under to Congressional Democrats who promised him spending cuts if he’d raise taxes – only Bush kept his end of the bargain. His son George W. Bush cut taxes but expanded the federal role in education with No Child Left Behind and created a new entitlement program with Medicare Part D.

In my lifetime, we’ve never had a conservative President and Congress simultaneously who have truly acted in concert to reduce the size and scope of the federal government. Consequently, we’ve never had a populace who’s seen the principles in the Mount Vernon Statement (or the Sharon Statement for that matter) put into action.

Yet Presidents when inaugurated don’t swear their fealty to any statement but to uphold the Constitution, which brings me back to the idea I began with of reinventing the wheel.

I have the utmost respect for those who put together the Mount Vernon Statement, just as I do William F. Buckley and those who participated in crafting the Sharon Statement. But in neither case did they pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor as our Founding Fathers did when they declared their independence from the Crown and later wrote the document our system of government is based upon.

A lot changes in fifty years, and even that is miniscule compared to changes in the whole of our rich history. While Buckley and his cohorts were rightfully concerned with the Communist threat from outside our borders, today we face the danger of statism from within our seat of government. More troubling is that neither political party is immune to causing the backslide toward tyranny to continue.

Instead of trying to restate the Constitution to the issues of today, we may need to work all the way back to a new revolution – a revolution which begins at the ballot box in November and continues through 2012. Obviously a Congress dominated by conservatives won’t get a lot past a statist President unless they can achieve a majority able to override his vetoes, and the situation with Senate elections makes that impossible to achieve. Even if Republicans achieved an unprecendented miracle sweep of every Senate seat available this year they wouldn’t even have a clotureproof majority – it would be 59-41 GOP.

Luckily in this case we don’t have foreign soldiers protecting the Crown, but this revolution won’t be swift nor will it be easy. The battle continues for the hearts and minds of America, and the future of the Republic depends on our success.

Author: Michael

It's me from my laptop computer.

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