More Weirdness from Herman Cain

Here is another reason that you don't put someone up for President who has never held elected office. This new Herman Cain ad is just plain weird. Who puts his campaign manager in a testimonial ad? And if you did, why would you let him blow smoke at the camera? And then Cain's creepy grin? What was that supposed to accomplish?



Will the Tea Party do for America what they did for Nevada (nominate the erratic and unelectable Sharron Angle) and Delaware (nominate the utterly incompetent and unelectable Christine O'Donnell), giving us ruinous, far left government?

Mitch Daniels, where are you?

Left, Right and Occupy Wall Street

People are comparing the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street. Okay. Let's do that.

Tea Party people have jobs and families.  The Occupy Wall Street crowd is peopled largely by scruffy college students and full-time radicals with no clue as to how things really work. No one gets arrested at Tea Party rallies. There is no public copulation or distribution of condoms. I don't recall a theme of anti-semitism at Tea Party rallies. Not like this woman at an L.A. Occupy Wall Street west coast spin-off. 



Tea Partiers have no record of issuing death threats to their opponents. 

Like this:

we are going to sow the kind of choas [sic] you are unequipped to deal with,” the email said. “And you’re going to find yourself in a country where you and your wealthy friends are gonig [sic] to be hunted.”

...and...

“Let me slit your throat you corporate whore ... I would slaughter your family as well if given the chance.”

Now where were we? Oh yes...No one in the Tea Party wants to destroy the foundations of the country. They want to strengthen and return to them. The Tea Party also has a coherent and focused message: stop the spending and reduce the debt. Occupy Wall Street, by contrast, is a movement without a message. If OWS has any clear message, it's "I'm silly, young, and passionate. Co-opt me!"

On that subject, on HuffingtonPost.com Lisa Sharon Harper and I have dueling columns for the next few weeks. This week I wrote, "Dreamers at Occupy Wall Street."

I begin with the humorous tag line, "If Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" was the anthem for the 60s protests, the anthem for Occupy Wall Street has to be Harry McClintock's "Big Rock Candy Mountain." [Follow the link to the original video of McClintock singing the song]"

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
There's a land that's fair and bright,
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out every night.

I end with this surely-to-be-unheeded warning to the Evangelical left who are frantic with over-realized eschatology.

What I see in the Evangelical political left is a dangerous, and I believe unbiblical, combination of Utopian expectations for government combined with an unjustifiably optimistic willingness to empower government for this breathtaking work. They want the Kingdom of God on earth; they want shalom fully realized now through political and economic reform. But if they came into the power they would need for this, they would quickly find their own movement co-opted by opportunists and their beautiful new day turned into a nightmare.

The in my Worldmag.com column today, "The Occupiers and the National Divide," I lament that Obama's embrace of OWS will just further deepen our national divide. "It will further radicalize the division in our country between the Friends of ’76 viewpoint of standing by our founding political tradition of limited government and the 20th century progressive vision of benevolent, centralized, technocratic oversight of all things."


Obama came to office promising "hope and change" in connection with being a "post-partisan president" who would take us beyond left and right, liberal and conservative, red state and blue state. But he meant that in the same way the the Soviet Union said they wanted world peace, by which they meant world communism. Obama wanted to make political debate irrelevant in an administrative state when everything was decided by liberal technocrats. Hence, Karl Rove today with truth, that Barack Obama is "the most rigidly ideological modern president." He doesn't actually believe in politics, the essence of which is self-government among equals.


By the way, in the Worldmag.com column, I cite a Douglas Schoen OWS survey that revealed “nearly one-third (31 percent) would support violence to advance their agenda.” One of my students saw immediately that in the event of violence, much more than that would get caught up in the frenzy. Another WSJ article goes into the details of the survey to reveal subtleties in the data.

The Political Class Meets the People

2010 is indisputably "the Tea Party election." Who they are and why they've been able to turn politics on its head  has received many answers. I have offered a few myself.

In this column, "Bringing Down the Political Class," I summarize the point that pollsters Scott Rasmussen and Douglas Schoen make in their book Mad As Hell: How the Tea Party Movement Is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two Party System. 

According to the authors, the Tea Party has been a spontaneous, principled, and yet passionate response to a politically unhealthy divide in the country. That divide is not fundamentally between Democrats and Republicans or between liberals and conservatives but between what they call the American mainstream and the political class. ...Fundamentally, Tea Partiers are moved by the view that “the federal government has become a special-interest group that looks out primarily for its own interests.”

The Republican establishment opposed Ronald Reagan in 1980 because he was an outsider. Despite having been governor of California, he was not part of the political class, and by conviction as well as temperament would never be. Reagan was not an Ivy Leaguer. He went to Eureka College in Illinois. (Notice that you have to say “in Illinois.”) The establishment in general hates Sarah Palin for the same reason. The authors observe that, "the mainstream media and the political class seemed not even to attempt to understand what her appeal might be.” Instead, she “set off a trip wire within the political class regarding access to power: she didn’t meet their standards and they felt threatened by her” (p.98).

Rasmussen and Schoen explore many aspects of this divide, including the shrinking middle class and thus the growing gap between the rich-and-getting-richer and the poor-and-getting-poorer in this country, something that Republicans don't like to talk about, and that Democrats can't talk about without calling in the government to punish.

Shelby Steele has an interesting take on the Tea Party toward the end of his Wall Street Journal op-ed yesterday, "A Referendum on the Redeemer."

When bad faith is your framework (Michelle Obama never being proud of her country until it supported her husband), then you become more a national scold than a real leader. You lead out of a feeling that your opposition is really only the latest incarnation of that old characterological evil that you always knew was there. Thus the tea party—despite all the evidence to the contrary—is seen as racist and bigoted.

But isn't the tea party, on some level, a reaction to a president who seems not to fully trust the fundamental decency of the American people? Doesn't the tea party fill a void left open by Mr. Obama's ethos of bad faith? Aren't tea partiers, and their many fellow travelers, simply saying that American exceptionalism isn't racism? And if the mainstream media see tea partiers as bumpkins and racists, isn't this just more bad faith—characterizing people as ignorant or evil so as to dismiss them?

Peggy Noonan has had a couple of good columns too: "Why It's Time for the Tea Party" and "Tea Party to the Rescue." I'm sorry, but I have found all the critics on the left (Krugman, Rich, Friedman, Wallis) to be hysterical and just blind. Chuck Colson's criticism in "Channeling the Populist Rage" is neither hysterical nor blind but misplaced just the same, I think.

Tom Friedman to the Rescue

Thomas Friedman today in the New York Times tells us that there are two Tea Party movements in American : one is ultimately insignificant but drawing a lot of press attention; the other is ignored and leaderless, but will transform the country if anyone picks up on it. Former is what we call the Tea Party movement and the latter is the true Tea Party. ("The Tea Kettle Movement," September 28, 2010.)

Hey, Tom! The first step is obvious to everyone in the TPM. Stop spending! The best way to do that at this point is: vote the Democrats out of office. Stop the Obama addiction to zeros. Yes, the Republicans under George W. Bush's leadership had public money flowing like water from a ghetto hydrant. But Barack Obama broke the dam, and the Tea Party movement took off. It is what my fellow blogger, Harold Kildow, has pointed out, it's "the trouble with trillions."

In my Worldmag.com column today, "The Tea Party: More Than Steam," I look at the Tea Party agenda, such as it is, and how is does indeed promise to accomplish what Friedman says it can't: restore America to its vigor and preeminence.

Friedman says the real groundswell of popular unrest is unsettled by a different set of issues that go more the heart of our problems.

The issues that upset the Tea Kettle movement — debt and bloated government — are actually symptoms of our real problem, not causes. They are symptoms of a country in a state of incremental decline and losing its competitive edge, because our politics has become just another form of sports entertainment, our Congress a forum for legalized bribery and our main lawmaking institutions divided by toxic partisanship to the point of paralysis.

This true Tea Party Movement which, unlike the commonly identified but false one, has a substantive agenda that focuses on "America’s core competency and strategic advantage," which is "our ability to attract, develop and unleash creative talent. That means men and women who invent, build and sell more goods and services that make people’s lives more productive, healthy, comfortable, secure and entertained than any other country."

It's obvious that the people who make up this popular movement have spent a long time thinking through the details of what they want from government in response to our crisis.

Leadership today is about how the U.S. government attracts and educates more of that talent and then enacts the laws, regulations and budgets that empower that talent to take its products and services to scale, sell them around the world — and create good jobs here in the process. Without that, we can’t afford the health care or defense we need. This is the plan the real Tea Party wants from its president (emphasis added).

The Friedman gives us more details:

To implement it would require us to actually raise some taxes — on, say, gasoline — and cut others — like payroll taxes and corporate taxes. It would require us to overhaul our immigration laws so we can better control our borders, let in more knowledge workers and retain those skilled foreigners going to college here. And it would require us to reduce some services — like Social Security — while expanding others, like education and research for a 21st-century economy. 

Wow. This is a popular movement that only an ivory tower liberal can imagine. There are some good ideas mixed in here, but it strains credibility to suggest that there's an angry giant of American popular opinion ready to explode out there with all these ideas on his mind. Essentially, Tom Friedman has said that it's not the Tea Party movement that's going to transform American politics and save the country. Instead it's...Tom Friedman!

We'll be waiting for that, Tom.

Wallis and the Tea Party Infidels

In account of a recent writing project, I have been forced to pay attention to left wing Evangelicalism. Others also have been giving them new attention, from the Emerging church movement to save-the-planet young born again greenies to the religiously oriented in the Obama White House.

But Jim Wallis, one of the grand old men of the movement, seems anxious that Christ's little lambs not wander into what he sees as the hellish Tea Party movement, especially now that the pearly gates of access to his Progressive Kingdom are now flung wide. He gave voice to his frustration in his Huffington Post article, "How Christian is Tea Party Libertarianism?" I examine it in my WORLDmag.com column, "The Tea Party According to Jim Wallis."

To what I say at WORLDmag, I will add that he attacks the rights-oriented thinking that is the basis of our constitution. “Libertarianism is a political philosophy that holds individual rights as its supreme value and considers government the major obstacle.” But, of course, that’s what rights are: limitations on government. “Congress shall make no law…”

Especially disturbing is his charge that Tea Party supporters are racists in general, and in particular people who simply cannot abide the fact that our president is black. In lieu of actually engaging in a substantive debate over the merits of big government versus private initiative, the left is scolding their opponents with the racist charge. But the charge is baseless. A month later, a USA Today/Gallup poll showed that 23% of Tea Party supporters are Asian, Hispanic, and African-American.

But what if they weren’t? The best argument he can lob at the Tea Party itself is an ad hominem one, i.e., not an argument at all. The red elephant in the room, however, the subject he completely ignores, is the Tea Party alarm over stratospheric federal deficit spending, a concern that is reasonable, arguably Christian (eighth commandment), and fundamental to the movement.

I conclude,

Despite Jim Wallis’s self-presentation as a man who has thought through Christian principles and found himself in prophetic stance against what most Evangelicals hold to be just, his condemnation of the Tea Party movement (disguised as a conversation starter) is a muddled-headed confusion of terms and a battle entirely with straw men. I was hoping to be challenged. I was not.

Additional material:

Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy looks at the article here.

Timothy Dalrymple at Patheos gives us this.

Doug Wilson has not been silent. (That's a joke.) He weighs in here.

Prof. Craig Carter of Tyndale University in Toronto says this.

In a recent Washington Times article, "Netherlands Tragedy of State Compassion,"I argue that compassionate government (as if that were possible) makes people themselves less compassionate.

You might also consider Grover Norquist's book, Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government's Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives," (Harper Collins, 2008).

Also,

Anthony Bradley sees politically activist liberal Protestantism, with which leftist Evangelicalism seems to blend so easily, as understanding "one part of Christian engagement to be the whole of Christian identity," ("Progressive Christianity," WORLDmag.com, July 21, 2010).

Tea Party is No Moral Majority

The 1980 presidential election ended the way it did because Evangelical Christians got angry and got involved. In 2010, there is another very angry and highly organized movement that seems to be turning American politics on it's head: the Tea Party movement. Frantic liberals hate both of these popular revolts with such white-knuckled intensity that they easily identify them. (As in, "Oh, here come the backward, racist, Christian hillbillies again.") Jim Wallis, of Sojourners fame, seems particularly concerned that his secular leftist friends not get the idea that the Tea Party is Christian of any sort, so he tries to deep-six the idea in a Huffington Post article entitled, "How Christian is Tea Party Libertarianism?," (May 27, 2010).

In my WORLDmag.com column this week, "The Year of the Tea Party," I distinguish the Tea Party from the Moral Majority then show briefly that the Tea Party movement's much narrower agenda is arguably Christian at its core, or at least not unchristian.

The Moral Majority was intentionally a largely, but not necessarily, religious organization. It presented itself as a moral majority, not a Christian majority. Their concerns were threefold: family, foreign policy, and fiscal responsibility, if I may put it that way. Family issues included opposition to homosexuality, abortion, divorce, pornography, and feminism. Foreign policy concerns included standing effectively against world communism and supporting the state of Israel. To this they added a call for lower taxes and a balanced budget. The group’s agenda mirrored the GOP coalition of moral conservatives, foreign policy hawks, and fiscal conservatives, though the Moral Majority was chiefly concerned with family issues. There was an evangelical ministry called Focus on the Family, but nothing called Focus on Firepower or anything like that.

The Tea Party has a narrower agenda. It’s all about money. The movement was triggered by concerns over wild government spending, initially the implementation of TARP to stabilize the financial system, but then the group began to rally against various other stimulus packages, interventions, and pork barrel spending orgies that seemed to exploit the crisis to pillage several generations of taxpayers while the getting was good.

But money is not a dirty word. While balanced budgets are not the stuff of gospel preaching, financial responsibility is not an ungodly concern. In fact, concern for it is implied in the Eighth Commandment: “Thou shalt not steal!” Jim Wallis says, “[T]he Tea Party can legitimately be examined on the basis of Christian principles—and it should be,” then proceeds to attempt it. Yet he manages to overlook this feature that is arguably Christian and definitively Tea Party.

You can read more background on the Moral Majority in the WORLDmag.com column itself.

Tea Party 101

This is my "Understanding the Tea Party Movement" column over at WORLDmag.com, but with some extra information thrown into the middle.

*********************

You cannot understand American politics today without understanding the Tea Party movement. Especially after Tuesday's Republican primaries, everyone from The President and the House Speaker down to the voting citizen should get a handle on it. Get it wrong, and you get everything wrong. It is a truly American movement. It is popular in origin, protective of property, rooted in the Founding, and morally serious.

The movement began as a protest against exponentially-more-than-usual runaway government spending. The Washington Post's David Montgomery traces it back to Mary Rakovich, an unemployed middle-aged automotive engineer, standing outside a Fort Myers stadium in Florida on February 10, 2009, protesting the president's $787 billion stimulus bill that he was promoting at a "town hall meeting." It was just Mary and her husband, a handful of co-belligerents, and a cooler full of water. The sun was cruel, but providence was smiling. Fox News called to invite her to be interviewed on Neil Cavuto. Similar protests began budding in other cities.

About a week later, CNBC's Rick Santelli accidentally provided the movement with a name in a rant from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. This got an enthusiastic response from the traders around him.

"I have an idea. The new administration's big on computers and technology. How about this, president and new administration? Why don't you put up a website to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers' mortgages or would we like to, at least, buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have the chance to actually prosper down the road, and reward people than could carry the water instead of drink the water."

At the end of this clip, notice that Santelli refers to our nation's founders. "If you read our Founding Fathers, people like Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson, what we're doing in this country now is making them roll over in their graves." He claims that what the government is doing in its attempt to solve the current economic crisis is not only economically foolish, but also politically a betrayal of our founding principles.

In the middle of all this, Santelli mentions offhandedly, "We're thinking of having a Chicago tea party in July." From all that he says, it is clear that he has in mind a protest against not only the high levels of government spending by the new Obama administration, but also the counterproductivity, political infidelity, and moral injustice of it.

Michael Barone emphasizes the moral aspect of Santelli's founding document of rant in "The Transformative Power of Rick Santelli's Rant" (June 9, 2010).

A recent statement by Phillip Dennis, a Texas Tea Party leader and advisor to the National Tea Party Coalition ("Tea Party Leader: What We Want," CNN, April 16, 2010), gives some insight into what has developed in the following year.

"The federal government is addicted to spending, and the consequences are now staring us in the face." He cites two politically neutral and authoritative sources to underscore the dimensions of the crisis that has provoked the national Tea Party uprising. In July 2009, Congressional Budget Office director Doug Elmendorf described our current budgetary course as "unsustainable." On his Director's Blog, he wrote:

Under current law, the federal budget is on an unsustainable path, because federal debt will continue to grow much faster than the economy over the long run. Although great uncertainty surrounds long-term fiscal projections, rising costs for health care and the aging of the population will cause federal spending to increase rapidly under any plausible scenario for current law. Unless revenues increase just as rapidly, the rise in spending will produce growing budget deficits. Large budget deficits would reduce national saving, leading to more borrowing from abroad and less domestic investment, which in turn would depress economic growth in the United States. Over time, accumulating debt would cause substantial harm to the economy.

 In April 2010, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was also using the word "unsustainable."

To avoid large and unsustainable budget deficits, the nation will ultimately have to choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above.

He sees the protest as a response to “decades of irresponsible government fiscal behavior.” He does not say how many decades back he is thinking, but he echoes Ronald Reagan’s concerns when he says, “We have gone from a nation of self-sufficient producers to a nation divided between overburdened taxpaying producers and some nonproducers who exist on welfare from cradle to grave.”

But again, Dennis's focus is not simply economic. He makes reference to the Founding Fathers and constitutional principles. “America has moved away from the vision of our Founding Fathers who advocated for a nuanced balance between federal and state power. As America has drifted from constitutional values, federal power has grown.” He speaks not only as a fiscal conservative, but more importantly as a constitutional conservative.

When he moves from complaints to concrete proposals for renewal, he strikes a revolutionary (counter-revolutionary?) stance.

Federal spending must immediately be drastically slashed across the board: Abolish the useless departments of Education and Agriculture, among others; get rid of the EPA; and repeal the stimulus bill and other pork spending. These are millstones around the neck of the American taxpayer and our economy.

Send all responsibilities of these agencies back to the states where they can be better and more efficiently managed. Foreign aid and Pentagon spending must be equally constrained and reduced.

Second, the number of government jobs must be substantially cut, and those employees must return to the private sector. Overpaid bureaucrats with fat benefits and pensions not found in the real world are simply not needed. Or wanted.

Third, fraud and welfare waste must be eliminated. Welfare and unemployment benefits must be drastically cut.

Welfare, health and education services for illegal immigrants must be eliminated.

The Center for Immigration Studies recently reported that 33 percent of immigrant households use some kind of "welfare." Again, who pays? The American taxpayer!

Government must get completely out of the private sector. Market freedoms must prevail for America to be successful. Government control over our financial and insurance industries, major manufacturing, health care and energy is a sure recipe for disaster.

It would be interesting to know how much agreement each of these ideas registers among the 27% of the country that supports the Tea Party movement, according to an May Washington Post/ABC poll.

Anyone like Paul Krugman who dismisses Tea Party activists as "crazy" and an "AstroTurf" movement, i.e., a fake grass roots movement ("Tea Parties Forever," New York Times, April 12, 2009) is arguing away an incoming electoral missile and will likely soon be doing the same with his demise in the political hereafter.

Take It From a Better Man Than I

 Recently, I argued that what is fueling Tea Party anger is fear of tyranny and, thus, a vigilant defense of liberty. ("Political Evil This Way Comes," April 16, 2010.) Well, perhaps it's obvious, but it's not obvious to many who are reporting on the protests.

Michael Barone makes his own argument ("Tea Partiers Fight Culture of Dependence," April 19, 2010), much better of course, that the Tea Partiers are not fundamentally concerned about taxes. They are defending a culture of independence against a culture of dependence that has been rushing in on us with great force this past year.

The Obama Democrats see a society in which ordinary people cannot fend for themselves, where they need to have their incomes supplemented, their health care insurance regulated and guaranteed, their relationships with their employers governed by union leaders. Highly educated mandarins can make better decisions for them than they can make themselves. That is the culture of dependence.

The tea partiers see things differently. They're not looking for lower taxes -- half of tea party supporters, a New York Times survey found, think their taxes are fair. Nor are they financially secure -- half say someone in their household may lose their job in the next year. Two-thirds say the recession has caused some hardship in their lives.

But they recognize, correctly, that the Obama Democrats are trying to permanently enlarge government and increase citizens' dependence on it. And, invoking the language of the Founding Fathers, they believe that this will destroy the culture of independence which has enabled Americans over the past two centuries to make this the most productive and prosperous -- and the most charitably generous -- nation in the world.

This fire doesn't die over night.

Political Evil This Way Comes

The so-called Tea Party continues to make the news, recently as object of the mainstream media's vilification as just so many white, upper-income racists. Others focus on the vast government spending and corresponding public debt that provoked these ordinary people into active political involvement. I argue today on WORLDmag.com ("Tyrants Among Us") that while runaway government spending is a big part of what is driving Tea Partiers to revolt, underlying that is a more fundamental fear in the face of runaway government size and power and lawless intrusion. They see tyranny hatching out of Washington like a scaly thing, bigger and more sure footed than ever seen before, and they are fighting for the survival of liberty.

Here is the little more rambling, less politically restrained version of the published article:

***  **  *  **  ***

What angers Americans in the Tea Party movement is tyranny. And well it should. It is spreading in Washington even more than usual.

Our Declaration of Independence still speaks for us where it says:

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Lawless government is an unmistakable sign of tyranny, i.e., government that exercises power not under law or according to the authority given to it by consent of the governed, but on an authority it claims to have in itself.
The Democratic Party's health care reform legislation is an example of governing tyrannically. The law requires people to purchase health insurance who, perhaps because they are young and healthy, presently do not carry it. This is not a tax. It is the government just telling you to do something because they believe it to be good for the country. It is not conditional upon any other behavior. It says, "You will do this or we will punish you with a fine."

I have not heard a credible argument from any elected officeholder justifying this provision constitutionally. Even the president, who has taught constitutional law, made only a vague reference to the state requirement that people buy car insurance, which of course is different in that it is a condition of owning a car for use on public roads. If people take the bus or walk, they can decline the purchase. But this is government exercising authority beyond what the Constitution allows, authority the people did not entrust to it. This is power exercised tyrannically, and on a grand scale.

At a constituent meeting, Rep. Phil Hare, a Democratic congressman from Illinois, stated with unguarded candor (as though it were no big deal) his disregard for the constitutional limits of congressional power when it comes to providing for what he thinks is the public good.



When asked to locate in the Constitution where Congress gets the authority to require everyone to buy health insurance, his response was, "I don't worry about the Constitution on this...I care more about the people dying every day who don't have health care." In a half-hearted attempt to find a constitutional hook on which to hang the law after the fact, he cited the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, thinking that he was quoting the Constitution. When someone pointed out that these words are found in the Declaration of Independence, he expressed indifference to the distinction. "Doesn't matter to me. Either one."

In other words, when it comes to doing good, constitutional restraints are irrelevant. They don't apply. The legal constraints of the Constitution are, in the eyes of Democrats like Phil Hare and, apparently, the president, only for bad people. The goodness of the obviously good things that good hearted people do with government power is the ultimate foundation of public authority, transcending even the Constitution. Another way of stating this view is that moral progress is the fundamental law of the land. It is the unwritten constitution behind the written constitution. That is to say, the politically progressive use of power is self-authorizing. Every other exercise of civil authority must be subject to constitutional limitations because that is what a constitution is for.

This lawlessly self-flattering attitude seems to draw, but unfaithfully, from Cicero's maxim in De Legibus (3.3.8) that has echoed loudly through the centuries, Salus populi suprema lex esto, "the welfare of the people is the highest law." By salus, or welfare, he meant the well-being or safety of the people. The sense of the statement is that because the individual depends on the community for the enjoyment of his private goods, and even for his very life, his individual good must yield to the public good in general when the two come into conflict. No law needs to state this. It is in the nature of the political relationship. In that sense it is the supreme law that transcends even the most fundamental written laws.

Francis Bacon reiterated the thought in #56 of the Essays, "Of Judicature." Uttered by Cicero, the words are taken in their natural law context. But Bacon's view of justice is more conventional and mundane. He explicitly cautions his readers against laws that claim divine origin, saying, "laws, except they be in order to that end, are but things captious [misleading], and oracles not well inspired." In other words, judges should pay no attention to divine law and philosophic consideration of natural law. These only distract from civil business. John Locke used it as the epigraph for his Two Treatises of Government. Both of these men used a surface piety and respect for traditional views to direct people to a radically popular foundation of political justice. But they both advocated the rule of law, even of a fundamental law in a liberal, constitutional republic. What we see in Congressman Hare's words, and in the aggressive expansion of government by his party without regard to the enumerated powers of the Constitution is something that is neither Ciceronian nor Lockean, but rather Jacobin. Yes, Jacobin.

Cicero's maxim is one for emergencies. The Democrats in Congress, along with the president, are governing as though it were the ordinary basis for legislative activity, or, to speak more cautiously, as though the fullest and immediate expansion of the welfare state were a matter of national emergency.

But in the face of such tyrannical usurpation of authority, such an obvious design to reduce us under the absolute despotism of benevolent technocracy does not justify violence. It does, however, justify vigilance. Every patriot should exercise that vigilance at the ballot box in November, asking him or herself the question, "Does this candidate govern or promise to govern under the laws, or regardless of the laws as a law himself?" Will this candidate govern as a benevolent despot, or as a public servant under law?

Let me hasten to add in conclusion that Christians are substantially to blame for this state of affairs. The constitution for the Kingdom of God is the Bible. In the late nineteenth century, Christians started debunking and dismissing its authority, and substituting enlightened progressive morality and the latest developments of scientific thinking in its place. Today, even Protestant Evangelicals, who supposedly have a high view of Scripture, treat the details of its teachings with careless disregard, following instead all too often the fashions of Evangelical subculture.

Christians can be salt and light by conforming their convictions more conscientiously to the Word of God, and voting their convictions more faithfully on election days.