Ryan further misleads readers by asserting, "Left-of-center politicians stopped calling themselves 'liberals' and started calling themselves 'Progressives.' I can't say precisely why they made this switch." That is factually incorrect. Liberals and progressives are distinct factions in the Democratic Party, akin to libertarians vs. Christian conservatives in the Republican Party. Hillary Clinton represented the liberal faction in 2008; Barack Obama represented the progressive faction.
We're rapidly approaching a point of no return; a tipping point after which we become a country most Americans have never dreamed we would be. If we keep spending like we're spending, American will become a place where unprecedented levels of debt overwhelm the budget, smother the economy, weaken our competitiveness in the twenty-first-century global economy, and threaten the survival of programs for the truly needy. Worse yet, we wil become a culture in which self-reliance becomes a vice and dependency a virtue; a place where so many American are dependent upon government that our country comes to reject individual initiative, entrepreneurship, and opportunity that made us great.
Americans today are being asked to subscribe to an ideology that is against the American idea. It's an ideology that says that government creates rights--and government takes them away. This ideology rejects the goal of government as securing equal opportunity; it demands that government create equal results. It is an ideology that treats citizens like children and politicians like divinities. It is not an ideology that need prevail in American life. Not on our watch.
It was this relentless pressure to bring home the bacon that was the undoing of the Republican majority that came into office in 1994. They allowed their limited government principles to be overtaken by the pressure to appease voters and donors. The Republican majority succumbed to the earmark culture.
They continued to get reelected until the corruption of the process caught up with them; until the people got wind of the Bridge to Nowhere and rightly asked why they were being asked to pay for such things; and until their colleagues and associates started going to jail.
In short, the defining feature of the new Washington Way is that it strips the power of making law away from the people. This new Washington Way is designed to transfer lawmaking to a small elite group who know what is best for us. And from start to finish, the way President Obama and the Democratic majority went about supposedly fixing our health-care system has been conducted in the new Washington Way.
In the Senate, that meant employing the "nuclear option". This process known as budget reconciliation, requires only a simple majority of 51 votes to pass a bill. It had never been used--never--to push through a $1,000,000,000,000 expansion of government and to seize control of one-sixth of the economy. In the House, a process called "deem and pass" was essentially the same thing.
The ugly health-care debacle finally came to an end with final passage of the overhaul in the House on March 21, 2010. 219 House Democrats voted for the bill, 34 opposed it. No Republican, in the House or the Senate, voted for the bill. For the first time since before the Civil War, the minority party was so completely excluded from the shaping of major reform legislation that it voted unanimously against the final bill.
Through a combination of tax credits, high-risk pools, transparency, regulatory reform, and information technology, patient-centered reforms would foster a vibrant health-care marketplace. In stark contrast to Obamacare, my plan unapologetically seeks to apply our nation's timeless principles--our Founders' commitment to individual liberty, limited government and free enterprise--to today's challenges.
In "The Weekly Standard", they appeared on the cover in a photo taken on a Capitol balcony overlooking the Mall. They kne each other as members of the embattled Republican caucus that had lost control of the House in the disastrous 2006 mid-term election. But they hadn't realized their individual skills were remarkably complimentary: Cantor the leader, Ryan the thinker, McCarthy the strategist. Some of us at "The Weekly Standard" had noticed this. Thus the cover story.
In a sense, their alliance and the creation of Young Guns was a revolt against the older, established Republican leaders in the House. The party establishment was dedicated to protecting incumbents at all cost. With money, manpower, and advice, Young Guns supports challengers. Young Guns is not for "me-too" Republicans, those comfortable with a scaled-back version of the Democratic agenda.
Progressivism is actually an old political movement in America, going back before the beginning of the 20th century. Progressivism marked the point at which some politicians and intellectuals began for the first time to question the meaning of the Constitution, that the Constitution should be a "living" document whose meaning had to "keep up with the times." Suddenly government could create "rights"--and just as easily as it could create them, it could take them away.
The Progressivist vision is to create a new American person who no longer strives to better oneself but accepts one's station in life--and looks to the government to help cope not only with difficulties but with every important personal decision.
[This statement is factually incorrect; see OnTheIssues.org FactCheck --ed.]
The problem, in a nutshell is this: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, three giant entitlements, are out of control. Expanding costs will drive our federal government and national economy to collapse.
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The above quotations are from Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders, by Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy. Click here for other excerpts from Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders, by Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy. Click here for other excerpts by Paul Ryan. Click here for a profile of Paul Ryan.
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