By Matt Rooney
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Kentucky’s Rand Paul said what a LOT of us were thinking on Thursday evening when he helped bring about a mini-government shutdown (of about six hours in length) on Capitol Hill.
At the moment? Rand Paul is one of the only men in D.C. speaking my language.
In his remarks, taking square aim at the Republican Party’s distressing tolerance for spending and the correlating debt it correctly criticized during the previous Democrat regime, the conservative surgeon observed how “…the funny thing is you know so often in the media we hear ‘we want you to work together.’ They are are working together but working together to spend a ton of money.“
Amen, Save Jerseyans. That’s been a regular theme in my writing here at Save Jersey where we discuss New Jersey’s dysfunctions more regularly than Washington, D.C.’s own. Bipartisanship divorced from principle is about as useless as tits on a bull but far less benign. More often than not, it’s an excuse for bad behavior and conflict avoidance. We don’t send politicians to Trenton or Washington to make friends and fall in love; we send them to advocate. Take it from a lawyer: sometimes that means conciliation, but sometimes that means being able and willing to drop the hammer. No one hires me based upon my ability to give out hugs!
And hugs certainly aren’t going to fix the problem identified by Senator Paul. The colonists rebelled against Great Britain for, on average, far less government intrusion than modern Americans suffer on a daily basis.
Tyranny isn’t any less tyrannical simply because a majority votes for it! That’s the entire premise of our system, by the way, but most of our politicians no longer agree (or care). A lack of civics education in our schools and culture haven’t helped the populace learn what it needs to know to exert accountability.
Allow me to fill in the blanks: government is NOT our friend. It steals, controls, destroys… all to perpetuate itself. The real “1%” are living in Northern VA, Chevy Chase, Maryland and Georgetown; they prosper as the rest of the country suffers. Americans instinctively know that the status quo is INSANE. The public sector cabal treats our hard-earned paychecks like play money (e.g. our own Phil Murphy recently declared $200 million no big deal despite New Jersey’s worst-in-the-country fiscal health), and the results for the hard-working and hardly self-sufficient are equally terrible, so we want our money and our liberties back.
Now.
Did George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams tolerate going along to get along when their generation’s governing order turned predatory? Hardly. Thank God.
Will today’s GOP ever get around to picking this fight? Articulating how the debate should no longer be about WHO “controls” the beast but whether the beast needs to be tamed?
Or do we need to look elsewhere for our voice?
I’ll wait for my answer… but not much longer.
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