A dissection of the Nebraska 2015 legislative session
What will become of us? As the world shuffles mindlessly toward Gomorrah, will there yet remain a place for the righteous? Will there be space for those who revere God and respect each other; those who recognize the value of individual freedoms not tied to some collectivist vision of identity politics?
If the Left continues to dominate the political landscape, the answer is sickeningly clear…
Six years ago people would’ve stared at you like you were in a test tube had you suggested that the President (and his administration) would have so egregiously abused the Constitution without consequence.
Targeting of Tea Party groups by the IRS; horrifically swollen intelligence gathering programs directed at our own citizens; unprecedented use of executive authority to make law rather than facilitate the application and enforcement of law.
All these civic insults (and hundreds more!) warrant an appropriate response from Congress, yet they remain not only supine, but in many instances act as active enablers of the usurpation of their Constitutional authority. Our world is indeed changing, and not for the good.
Government is a necessary evil. There is a distinct and vital role for government – this is not in dispute – but when government fails to respect the limits wisely placed on it by our founding documents, then government becomes much more than troublesome…it becomes insatiable.
Bureaucracies exist to grow themselves. Programs and agencies multiply with the fertility of Pan. Hundreds of billions are spent to justify spending hundreds of billions more as our governments do what all governments do best when unmoored from a limiting document like the Constitution – they gorge themselves at the public trough.
It happens at all levels of government; from the tiniest homeowner’s association to the federal behemoth in Washington DC, the status quo is forever insufficient.
Like a dog, for whom a door is something they are perpetually on the wrong side of, so it is with government and power. They cannot exercise enough of it to satisfy. There is always one more issue, one more regulation, one more constituency to purchase with the largesse of the people’s money and liberty.
“But we know all this…why harp on it now?” you might ask. My response is as simple as it is disconcerting – because it may already be too late to halt the destruction. The Obama administration’s lawlessness has set a precedent, consequently emboldening all the would-be tin pot dictators in state and local governments to follow suit.
Government has grown dramatically less responsive in recent years. While bureaucrats were never known for prompt responses to the concerns of citizens, many now exert no effort at all, knowing that their union or supervisors will shield them from any real consequence for their poor performance or surly behavior.
Political party identification is increasingly meaningless as the machine of government swallows the newly elected. A culture unique to government “service” has elevated elitism to an art, enabling all but the most self-assured to join their fellow Epicureans at the trough while simultaneously convincing them that their abandonment of both campaign promise and long-held principle is indeed the “way things get done.”
Last year, after fighting battle after battle against the growth of government in Nebraska, those of us involved in the fights saw a glimmer of hope twinkling on the horizon – eighteen legislative seats in the Unicameral coming open due to term limits or retirements.
Conservatives running in nearly every district gave rise to the hope that finally the balance of power in our one-house system would shift toward the people. The leviathan of government would be slowed in its relentless march to hegemony over all aspects of society. Perhaps, with the right people and a little nudge from our Creator, we might even redirect the leviathan from its feast and put the damnable thing on a life-saving diet.
Hundreds of good people worked so hard in this last election cycle to make this vision a reality. I personally endorsed many of these candidates and wrote thousands of words in support of their campaigns. Tens of thousands of phone calls, followed by nearly as many knocks on doors resulted in an election night euphoria…we took nearly every seat. The stage was set and statism would no longer play the leading role.
Then the legislative session began and we soon discovered that the spell of government was in fact far more powerful than we imagined. Men and women we knew well began to behave strangely, enchanted perhaps by the culture of status and power. We watched as a conservative Senator traded support for the repeal of the death penalty in return for a tax increase!?!
Minimum sentencing guidelines relaxed for even violent crimes. No reform of the tax code. No reductions in the 2nd highest per capita tax burden in the nation. These failures combine with many more not mentioned here to result in the most left-wing Unicameral session in decades.
Positions once considered anathema to conservatives were embraced wholeheartedly as the newly-minted Senators joined with the incumbents to provide an intimately accurate imitation of a legislature more appropriate to Massachusetts than Nebraska.
Regardless of one’s individual position on an issue (even the most insane of positions can be justified if one is willing to torture the logic sufficiently) the overall tone and product of this legislative session cannot be a source of pride to those we elected last year, yet this product has their fingerprints all over it.
Many people are understandably upset with these Freshmen Senators (as well as the incumbents who used them) and are accusing them of being Republicans in name only, but they are incorrect in that assessment.
These Senators are indeed Republican and are indeed conservative to varying degrees. What they are not, is immune to the seduction of power, money and influence. They are not immune to the attraction of “belonging.”
We shouldn’t be challenging their conservative bona fides, but rather their belief in themselves and the wisdom of the positions they championed in their campaigns and promptly abandoned once elected.
It takes a strong sense of self and personal conviction to stand in opposition to a majority, especially one that has so many carrots and sticks to employ. This legislative session proves that electing conservatives isn’t enough to stem the tide of statism; we must elect conservatives who are themselves immune to the fawning masses who will turn their heads as would a handsome suitor or a beautiful siren to the betrothed.
It is to character we must speak, not to ideology. Ideology is nothing without the backbone to hold fast when the floodwaters come. Remind your Senators that even the best can get rolled, but only the worst fail to learn from their mistakes.