No Good Choices in Presidential Election

The excitement over the Democrat primaries in recent weeks marks the start of serious campaigning for the 2004 presidential election. No conservative could be very enthusiastic about any of the Democrat hopefuls. Each one favors more lenient immigration policies, higher taxes, even higher spending, abortion, gun control, more involvement of the UN in determining our foreign and even domestic policy…on and on, ad nauseam.

Unfortunately, conservatives have little to show for three years of the Bush administration either. Yes, he has made a start at cutting taxes, but there has been little else to recommend his policies. He is as little concerned as any Democrat about the immigration explosion. His tax cut has not been matched by even a small spending cut, much less a serious one. Even the National Endowment for the Arts, long believed by conservatives to be beyond the reasonable scope of federal spending, came in for a massive spending increase in the latest Bush budget.

The administration's attacks on civil liberties in the name of homeland security, made in cooperation with Congress, are even worse than those of his recent predecessors in office. The campaign finance bill signed by President Bush is the most serious blow to free speech in living memory – regardless of what a majority of the Supreme Court says about it.

The president's vaunted independence from the UN and our European "allies" is vastly overstated. His decision to "go it alone" in attacking Saddam Hussein was not a repudiation of the UN. It was the culmination of a long-standing project to get the UN to "fulfill its destiny" and take on international responsibility for preemptive war at the world's various hot spots. The ultimate result will be our crawling to the UN for help getting out of the mess in Iraq, and enhanced power and prestige for that organization.

Worst of all has been the response of the Republican-majority Congress to the president's agenda. Few Republicans have questioned any of his initiatives. They have, for the most part, confined their efforts to limiting extra spending that Democrat members wanted to tack onto Bush's proposals. They have blithely passed legislation for this Republican president that would have been dead on arrival had it been proposed by Bill Clinton or another Democrat.

Electing a president who will respect the constitutional limits on government power and spending isn't in the cards this year, and probably not for the foreseeable future. Nor can we expect to have a president who will reduce the foreign entanglements that dilute our sovereignty and stimulate terror attacks against our people; or who will enforce the security of our borders.

We must look elsewhere for help in accomplishing these goals: to Congress, especially the House of Representatives. A simple majority in the House can stop any legislation. It is required to start any spending bill on its way to passage. It can initiate the impeachment process against any federal official.

The House was meant by the Framers of the Constitution to be the most powerful institution in Washington, because it is closest to the people. 435 representatives are just too many for elite institutions – big business, big unions, big media – to wield the outsized influence that they have over the president and, to a lesser degree, the 100 senators. Ordinary people can and do have the ability to control those representatives' behavior in the House.

Republicans will reply, "but we do have a majority in both houses of Congress!" Yes, there are a majority of members of that meaningless agglomeration called the Republican Party. That's not what we need. Our country desperately needs to elect a majority of representatives who will take their oaths of office seriously; who will understand, obey and enforce the US Constitution.

Right now we have, being generous, about 75 such representatives; we need at least 218. Let's get busy in our congressional districts finding and supporting the missing 143.