Six Simple Rules For Dating My Vote

How about “Look after the best interests of the people you represent in Congress”?

The problem is that the members of both parties look out for their business buddies, and are indifferent or even hostile to the actual voters.

The GOP did not change in 2006 and they’re not changing now, because changing would make them unpopular with the type of people they socialize with. Better a lost election than to look conservative in front of their peers.

Reagans speech on a New Republican Party seems apt here.

And let me say so there can be no mistakes as to what I mean: The New Republican Party I envision will not be, and cannot, be one limited to the country club-big business image that, for reasons both fair and unfair, it is burdened with today. The New Republican Party I am speaking about is going to have room for the man and the woman in the factories, for the farmer, for the cop on the beat and the millions of Americans who may never have thought of joining our party before, but whose interests coincide with those represented by principled Republicanism. If we are to attract more working men and women of this country, we will do so not by simply “making room” for them, but by making certain they have a say in what goes on in the party. The Democratic Party turned its back on the majority of social conservatives during the 1960s. The New Republican Party of the late ’70s and ’80s must welcome them, seek them out, enlist them, not only as rank-and-file members but as leaders and as candidates.

The sort of people Reagan spoke of are no longer welcome among GOP decision makers. In fact, the party pretty much openly despises them. I’ve never heard of a party declaring war on its own supporters to the extent the GOP has done.

flenser on May 20, 2008 at 6:11 PM

democrat stuff gets done when they were in the minority but republican stuff didn’t get done when they were in the majority

Our Republican stuff did not get done. The Chamber of Commerce got their stuff done lickity-split. The GOP expended great effort on things like CAFTA and a new bankruptcy law.

The reason the party does the things it does, and the reason it does not do the things it does not do, is because of the people it considers its real base. And they are not us.

If you want a change you need to outbid the businessmen for the partys attention. We could start a “Conservative PAC”, raise fifty mill or. That would get their attention.

They look at voters the way a boss looks at employees – people to be managed and led, if possible, and replaced if not.

flenser on May 20, 2008 at 6:19 PM

I don’t agree with term limits, nor do I agree that the problem with the Republican Party is the business class. The problem with the Republican Party is it tried to out Democrat the Democrats

The reason they are doing that is because of the businessmen. In all the posts Morrisey does on earmarks, he never gets into WHY Congress likes them.

Take a look at a specific earmark.

Plum Creek Timber (PCL), with a market cap of $7 billion, began its corporate life in 1987 as Burlington Resources, spinning off of Burlington Northern to manage the railroad giant’s timber and mineral resources — some of which date back to the original railroad land grants of the Lincoln administration. In 1999, Plum Creek became a Real Estate Investment Trust, and began unloading its land holdings for high-end residential and recreational use. Today, with the real-estate and timber markets flat, Plum Creek has been looking to sell larger tracts of timberland to large institutional investors. The farm bill’s Qualified Forestry Bonds provision could provide up to $500 million to help sweeten such deals.

Plum Creek spent some $220,000 lobbying Congress in the first quarter of this year. Its PAC has spread $400,000 in campaign contributions between the parties in the last decade. PCL Employees have given $16,600 this cycle to Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance committee and the author of the bond provision. Baucus, whose staff did not answer inquiries, was enthusiastic enough about the forestry bonds that he put them into the Farm Bill (H.R. 2419), though they have nothing to do with agriculture. The bonds also didn’t have anything to do with energy when Baucus put them in last year’s energy bill.

We get earmarks because businessmen want them. We get these multiple attempts at amnesty because businessmen want them. We get affirmative action defended by businessmen because businessman want it. We get big government because businessmen want it. We get cultural and social liberalism because that is the way businessmen think.

Both parties cater almost exclusively to the business class. That is the problem, and earmarks are merely a symptom of it. Ban all earmarks today and by tomorrow Congress and the business class will have a found a new way to scratch each others backs.

flenser on May 21, 2008 at 10:45 AM

Milton Friedman pointed out repeatedly that a party of businessmen would not and could not be a free enterprise party.

“The two chief enemies of the free society or free enterprise are intellectuals on the one hand and businessmen on the other, for opposite reasons. Every intellectual believes in freedom for himself, but he’s opposed to freedom for others.…He thinks…there ought to be a central planning board that will establish social priorities.…The businessmen are just the opposite—every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that’s a different question. He’s always the special case. He ought to get special privileges from the government, a tariff, this, that, and the other thing…”

He always ought to get exempted from the laws which apply to everyone else.

flenser on May 21, 2008 at 11:07 AM