TIME FOR A NEW REPUBLICAN PARTY

The hottest session at CPAC last week was the panel discussion entitled “Should we shoot all the consultants?”

Former Democrat pollster Pat Caddell lit up the room with a blistering indictment of the professional campaign consultants who have monopolized GOP strategy for decades.

He called them racketeers, interested only in making money from naïve business moguls, who think that elections can be bought by the highest bidder.

The message then, becomes whatever the campaign professionals tell the candidates they need to say to get elected.

A pretty cynical and inverted way to run for public office.

And an utterly anemic charter for a political party.

There’s lots of hand wringing about the Republican Party these days, not the least of which comes from well meaning citizens who believe a two party system is a good way to run a country.

Doesn’t matter what makes them different. Like a scrub basketball game between the skins and the shirts. Having Red States and Blue States is a good way to smoke out the best leaders.

Competition fosters excellence, they say.

Unhappily, that’s about what Presidential elections have come down to.

It’s National Socialism against National Capitalism.

It’s a choice between government running business or business running government.

Either way, it all happens in Washington, D.C. Either way, the money changers in the temple are the hustlers inside the Beltway.

For more than a hundred years, the Republican Party has been the Party of Abraham Lincoln.

Many historians believe that Lincoln’s successful defense of the Union actually changed the nature of our country from a union of sovereign states to a single national government.

Unfortunately he was assassinated before he could oversee the reconstruction of the South. Lincoln’s magnanimity was replaced by a vengeful Congress’s policies which diminished the sovereignty of the states.

Since then, Movies and mobility, travel and technology, cars and communications have all conspired to blur the boundaries of the fifty states.

Still, human beings may inhabit a planet, a continent or a nation, but they live in communities.

And the Constitution of the United States is premised upon the understanding that our people are citizens of sovereign states as surely as they are citizens of the nation.

It is time for the Republican Party to be inspired as much by Thomas Jefferson as by Abraham Lincoln.

There is no national economy in America. A minimum wage in New York City is different from one in Mississippi.

Kansas and Michigan run on difference economic cycles. The weather is different. The cultures are different. The accents are different.

People trust the government that is closest to home.

There are currently 30 Republican Governors. Not just red states. New Jersey, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin all have Republican governors.

It’s time for the GOP to become the party of popular sovereignty. The party that wants to get the national government out of education, health care, marriage, real estate, criminal law, welfare and local business and return the role of governing to the governors and legislatures of the fifty states.

A good place to start would be to endorse the non partisan Supreme Court Amendment.

More on that later.