The most enduring legacy of President Barack Obama is going to be a new generation of leaders standing up for liberty.
For nearly fifty years after the release of “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine,” Americans fought back against the statism that Reagan feared. Jimmy Carter’s efforts failed in the 1970s. So did Hillary Clinton’s in the 1990s. But in 2010, despite overwhelming opposition from the American people, President Barack Obama found just barely enough support in Congress, both houses of which were controlled by Democrats, to pass Obamacare.
But one cannot negotiate from weakness – especially with bullies and tyrants.
It was too much. I raised my hand and said, “There’s no universe in which I can consent to that.” I had spent two years promising Texans that if they voted for me I would fight with every breath in my body to stop the out-of-control spending and debt that is bankrupting our kids and grandkids. I.
Abraham Lincoln. He was the first president elected to office under the Republican Party’s new banner – a party established to oppose slavery and defend human freedom.
But how would the American people have reacted if President Obama had said, In order to extend insurance to 14 million people, we’re going to jeopardize the health insurance of about 200 million Americans? Many of you will lose your policies, and your doctors. Others will see your premiums skyrocket. That is the absurd bargain at the heart of Obamacare. That’s why Gruber noted, rightly, that it could be passed only through deception.
Fifty-six Democratic senators proposed repealing the free-speech protections of the First Amendment. The media were silent, and yet the American people deserve to know that a majority of their senators were so afraid of political opposition that they wanted to empower the federal government to police who can speak, and when, and for how long – and on what subjects. That was a radical break from the vision of our Founders.
It’s very hard for Hollywood celebrities to understand this. They have no need to own a firearm, because typically they retain armed bodyguards who travel with them. Likewise, other liberal elites living in wealthy suburbs have the resources to hire out their self-protection to the local police through higher property values and property taxes. The threat to their lives, to their property, and to their families is minimized.
But those in poverty don’t have that luxury. They are often surrounded by crime, traveling alone late at night, and the Second Amendment is a vital tool to protecting their safety.
In its perpetual role as the praetorian guard of the Obama presidency, the New York Times has helpfully explained that President Obama simply “misspoke” when the falsehood was revealed. But one does not misspeak twenty-eight times. Nor is it “misspeaking” to deliberately and repeatedly state something that you know to be false.
Campaigns are no place for candidates who think they walk on water.
An individual’s life prospects increase dramatically with each successfully completed phase of education.
The president also unilaterally repealed a key provision in the welfare-to-work reform that President Clinton signed into law in 1996. The premise of welfare reform in the 1990s was that those who benefit from our social safety net should be required to prepare for work, look for work, or work. But in 2012, the Obama administration announced that it would issue waivers of this work requirement.
We should set an audacious goal of enacting policies to encourage the private sector to create 10 million new jobs. Enough for full recovery. Good, blue-collar jobs with strong wages and work with dignity. High-paying white-collar jobs in expanding technologies. Full-time jobs, not people trapped in endless part-time positions. Multiple, exciting job opportunities for young people coming out of school. Get government out of the way and unleash the creativity of millions of small businesses.
Conservatives are wary of big union bosses. We need to explain why: because unions confiscate wages to fill their own coffers and pursue their own agenda. By demanding costly regulations on growing businesses, the union bosses make it harder for low-skilled workers to get jobs.
Conservatives favor educational reform, such as vouchers and scholarships and charter schools. Again we need to explain why: because education reform empowers parents and expands opportunities for kids struggling to get ahead in schools that have failed them. It is at its core a civil rights issue, and it is fundamentally unfair to trap kids in bad schools because of their race, ethnicity, income level, or simply because they live in the wrong zip codes.
As Reagan said, “individual freedom and the profit motive were the engines of progress which transformed an American wilderness into an economic dynamo that provided the American people with a standard of living that is still the envy of the world.
It is astonishing that President Obama’s conception of federal power is so vast that four liberal justices on the Supreme Court have joined their colleagues in unanimously ruling against the president more than 20 times in five and a half years – double his predecessor’s rate of unanimous defeats and 25 percent greater than President Clinton’s.
The real war on women today can be found in the policies that have resulted in 3.7 million more women living in poverty under President Obama, and the median annual wage for women dropping $733 over the past six years.
Senate Democrats introduced an amendment to the Constitution that would have amended the Bill of Rights to give Congress broad authority to regulate political speech. Sadly, tragically, astonishingly, every single Democrat in the Senate voted to repeal the free speech provisions of the First Amendment.
In the 1990s, the Clinton administration followed the same pattern, leading the world in relaxing sanctions against North Korea; as a result, billions of dollars flowed into that country, and they used that money to develop nuclear weapons. Ironically, the Obama administration recruited the very same person – Wendy Sherman – who had led the failed North Korea talks to become our lead negotiator with Iran. But here the results are likely to be far worse.