If you felt abandoned after the Democratic House of Representatives enacted its “stimulus” bill, 244-188, your number is legion. But you’re still a minority.
It was slim consolation that no Republican member voted with the majority or that 11 Democrats stood with them against an appropriation approaching a trillion dollars the government will tax away from your earnings.
The Democratic Senate has yet to be counted, but already its members can’t wait to sink a tooth into that forbidden apple of a stimulus. The majority leader is slithering up to Republicans-in-name-only with the tempting message that, trust him, no harm will come their way if they vote his way.
Did you cheer when the House bill was discovered to contain $4.2 billion — that’s billion with a “b” — that could be available for ACORN to use to elect left-wingers? And that was just for this year. They’ll find the need for more next year and the next election after that.
Were you proud when President Barack Hussein Obama on Islamic television assured potential jihadists they now have nothing to fear from you?
Did a warm thrill run up your leg when he ordered America’s combat troops and intelligence operatives to stop using the very anti-terrorism techniques that have thwarted terrorists from pulling off another 9/11 attack on this soil? Or when he announced he’s shutting down Gitmo — never mind he has not a clue what to do with or where to send its current residents?
When socialists now crawling out of the Capitol woodwork finish “reforming” healthcare so party hacks instead of doctors decide what’s good for what ails you, are you ready to turn your head and cough?
With leftists now in lock-down control of Congress, just how impotent do you feel? Is your honeymoon with the maestro of “change” over?
When some precocious telejournalist pokes a microphone in your face and asks, “How does it feel?” will you have the strength left to holler, “Help!”
By then, it’ll be too late. It’s already too late to un-elect this president. Or the Congress he rode in on. And if you’re hoping that a shallow Republican minority and merely one more than a minyan of uneasy Democrats can hold back the Obama ocean, forget that.
The stimulus giveaway illustrates the futility of scattered minority amendments that are sent to the legislative shredder before the ink is dry. They are no match for the flume of leftist legislation spewing out of the Democratic spillway.
By the very way Congress is structured — like a sack full of cats with their tails tied together — isolated members are in poor position to forge well-thought-out, clear-cut and compelling conservative, constitutionalist alternatives for the party out of power to put before the nation.
It’s heartbreaking to say so, but it appears that Congress, in which the Founding Fathers invested such hope, will become the agent of government that finally subverts the grand American experiment. To be more explicit, a compliant Congress is being tuned up as the instrument through which a radical chief executive can orchestrate both it and a teetering Supreme Court.
Right now, all that conservatives and other constitutionalists have going for them in Washington are the precious few of their tribe left in Congress. And there’s no way in this world Congress can save itself from itself.
Strong opposition will have to come from off the premises of Capitol Hill. Indeed, from outside the traditional precincts of Beltway conventional wisdom.
It will have to emerge from — you’ll pardon the politically incorrect expression — the private sector. That means, another hackneyed term, a think tank, but the kind that can forge the spearhead of intellectual defense of the republic.
Few among the usual cote of tank-thinkers have what it takes. If a bold, new, independent forum of conservative, constitutionalist thinkers isn’t up and running by this summer, you can bid that hope farewell.
John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer who served on White House staffs of two presidents, is a regular columnist for Newsmax.com. Read John Perry's columns here.
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