Populist, “pragmatic” conservative Bill O’Reilly warns the GOP that trying to repeal ObamaCare is not what voters want (some of that 2700-page assault on personal liberty is, you see, “good for the folks”) — that instead, what voters want is for the new Congress to focus on the economy. Thus, per O’Reilly, a push to rollback ObamaCare is “a classic trap,” one that the GOP would do well to avoid. Behold:
To which I say, simply, this: f@#k you, Bill O’Reilly. And f@#k any so-called “conservative” who thinks like you do.
Leaving aside the obvious fact that the fate of the economy is tied inextricably to the mammoth spending required should ObamaCare take hold; and leaving aside the fact ObamaCare is designed to kill private sector jobs, and therefore strain the economy in that way, as well; the idea that the GOP need be cautious and pragmatic in their approach to dealing with potential Democrat “traps” is yet another iteration of the losing-more-slowly refrain we’ve been hearing from the establishment GOP for years.
Even if the GOP can’t fully repeal ObamaCare, the fact is, they need to be seen trying to do so. And as they make the necessary legislative moves, they need to be at the forefront of the messaging, explaining to the American people — most of whom dislike the massive federal takeover of health care— precisely why they are doing what they are doing.
This is about first principles. And it was a newly energized segment of the electorate — legal conservatives, classical liberals, constitutionalists, libertarians, and Reagan Democrats (many of whom fancy themselves “independents” these days) — that, acting as a singular voting bloc, expressed their overwhelming desire to see the government constrained by those very principles set out by the founders and framers.
The Democrats and progressives are moving full-bore ahead with their memetic push to either marginalize the Constitution as a binding document, or declare its “vibrancy” as a living document — one that “means” new things in new contexts, with the document’s meaning dependent upon the whims of those reasonable people currently charged with interpreting it.
This is, as I’ve been at pains to point out over the years, a coup of sorts — a takeover of the country by way of a deconstruction of the rule of law, checks and balances, and representative republicanism through an institutionalization of linguistic incoherence: if the civil and legal contract represented by the Constitution can’t be understood as having an original meaning and intent, it is of necessity acontract whose provisions are ever malleable and determined by the whims of a judges in an increasingly politicized judicial climate.
If the GOP isn’t willing to fight for the first principles that undergird the rule of law as the founding idea of our representative democracy, the country, as it was envisioned and designed, is all but dead.
You can’t pick and choose which constitutional principles to fight for. You either believe in the Constitution or you do not.
And those who do not need to get out of the way — regardless of whatever political base they pander to.
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