They. Don’t. Care.

It’s the summer of 2006. Congress is considering “comprehensive immigration reform” – a euphemism for giving nothing more than lip service to the fence and amnesty to over 12 million illegal aliens. Talk radio is in an uproar. Glenn, and Rush, and Sean, and Mark are all loudly protesting this attack on our nation’s sovereignty and security, and though they are working independent of each other, the message is the same: it’s up to the American people to put a stop to it.

And the American people took up the cause with vigor and passion. We made the phone calls, we wrote the blogs, we wrote the letters to the editor, we talked to friends and neighbors. “Stop,” we said. Enough. Quit playing identity politics – it’s insulting, and, for conservatives, entirely ineffective. We knew what Bush and Rove and McCain couldn’t see past their party to realize – that no matter how much you pander to a specific group, you will never ingratiate yourselves to them. The liberals own identity politics, and every time you stoop to playing the game their way, you lose and we lose. Stop sucking up.

And they listened. Congress and the President backed down. They promised a fence first. (We didn’t get it but that’s a topic for another day). The talk of amnesty died down. We won the day. Talk radio rang the bell – but it was the American people that heeded the call, did the hard work, and won the day.

Fast forward three years. It’s June 26th, 2009, a Friday, and nothing good ever happens in Congress on a Friday until they leave for the weekend.

Americans are again up in arms. It’s not amnesty for illegals, but it’s worse. It’s cap and tax. Talk radio is as loud as ever, and Americans are burning up the phone lines, Facebook and Twitter. We’re angrier than ever – and our sentiment is unmistakeable: the American people do not want Cap and Tax. We do not want Congress to cripple our economy for the sake of saving a planet that isn’t in peril from a gas that isn’t a pollutant. We are appallled at the backroom deals and unread bills, and we Want. This. Stopped. Now.

But this time, the outcome was different.

This time, it didn’t matter.

This time, we lost. This time, the House – with the help of eight traitorous CapandTax Republicans – passed CapandTax. True, we may yet win the war, but we lost this battle, and it’s good to pause for a moment and ask a simple question: Why?

I believe the answer is as simple as the question is straightforward: They. Don’t. Care.

Why not? Why don’t they care?

I believe there are many of reasons for this, and the answers you come up with may not at all agree with what I expound upon here, but that’s OK. We can both be right. Here, I’d like to analyze two answers, one tactical, the other much more strategic. And ominous.

Elections Don’t Matter Anymore

For Congress, and especially for the House of Representatives, elections don’t matter anymore. That is largely our fault, and it can be changed, but right now, it’s true. On October 21st, 2008, two weeks before the general election, do you have any idea what the Real Clear Politics average congressional approval rating was?

Fourteen percent.

Fourteen percent! Fully 86% of Americans said they disapproved of the way Congress was performing it’s job, and yet two weeks later on election day, we reelected our representatives at a rate of 94%!. That doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t add up. I truly believe Congress’ incredibly low approval rating, but the numbers on election day don’t lie – across America we sent 19 out of every 20 of these twerps right back to Congress with a victory speech and a pat on the back.

It doesn’t make any sense.

Now, I know that the liberals ran the House, and that may cause you to say “well, it just wasn’t the conservatives’ year. That explains a lot of it.” I’d accept that, but history doesn’t agree with that assessment. Want to know the re-election rates for the previous four election cycles dating back to the turn of the century? 94. 98. 96. 98. Take all five cycles together and you’ve got an average reelection rate of 96%. Wow. Breathtaking.

And disheartening.

So what does this have to do with the Cap and Tax vote? I think that enough of the representatives have figured it out: Elections don’t matter – the American public can think Congress is doing an atrocious job – the people in your district can disagree vehemently with votes you may cast, but odds are, no matter the sentiment, you’re getting reelected. The hard part – as the numbers indicate – is unseating an incumbent. Once you do that, you’re in. You’re in for good, or until you do something incredibly stupid and incredibly public and you happen to be a Republican, whereby your personal honor demands that you abdicate your throne.

Still don’t believe me? I submit to you the poster child for irrelevancy in elections: Jack Murtha; personal airport lover and military basher. Even with a strong opponent last year, one of the least deserving among them got to notch another victory for the entrenched establishment.

Strategically Scary

So, I say they don’t care because elections don’t matter anymore. But the other reason is more ominous. I believe that the final intent of modern progressives is to fundamentally destroy what’s left of the republic and seize vast amounts of power, control, and wealth for their own selfish ends. I believe that they are using every tool at their disposal – an ignorant public, white guilt, milquetoast opponents, state run media, a loose interpretation of a Constitution they disdain, a corrupted election process, and useful idiots otherwise known as rank-and-file democrats and republicans, to accomplish those means. I believe that, to the few controlling elite – any means justifies their ends.

I know that that sounds like the stuff of black helicopters. I know that I sound like an alcoholic rodeo clown; I get that. But these are observation-based beliefs, and I will not apologize for them. What I will do, however, is back them up. And to do that, we need to go back to the turn of last century, in the first of three Waves of Presidential Progressivism that swept our country.

The First Wave: The Wilson Era and Constitutional Disdain

I ran Princeton, so that makes me super-smart.

Barack Obama’s got nothing on Woodrow Wilson. While it took almost 15 years for Barack Obama’s official political career to culminate in the presidency, it took Wilson only three to advance from the President of Princeton to New Jersey Governor to President of the United States.

Obama and Wilson are as alike as they are different – they both embrace a philosophy that has disdain for the Founder’s Constitution; Wilson considered checks and balances to be a Constitutional defect; Obama puts sympathy ahead of rule of law in his list of Supreme Court nominee criteria. They both also share a love for internationalism – Obama leans on European thinking and the United Nations, while Wilson introduced and advocated for the League of Nations, the precursor to the UN. Ironically, on one key point they would differ: Wilson would never have brooked a black President, since he was a white supremacist, KKK apologist, and introduced segregation in the federal government for the first time since the civil war. But I’ll bet they’d still have a beer together.

But enough about his Presidential timber. Aside from creating the fed, the Wilson era ushered in two fundamental Constitutional changes: the 16th and 17th Amendments:

The Tax on Liberty

The Congress shall have ower to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration;

A short amendment that can be further shortened to three sinister letters: I. R. S.

Now, I’m not going to go down the road of whether or not the 16th Amendment was actually validly certified. That’s a distraction from my main point and almost always invites those black helicopters to not just buzz overhead but go on ahead and just land on the front lawn. You lose people when you start down that path, regardless of how valid the point may be.

And I’m not going to content that without the 16th Amendment Congress doesn’t have the ability to lay and collect taxes, because they do. That right is granted to them through Article I, Section 8:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare
of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform
throughout the United States.

So, if Congress has the power to lay and collect taxes even without the 16th Amendment, why bother with the Amendment at all? The reason is reflected in the last portion highlighted above. The “uniform throught the United States” was an onerous requirement for the federal government to meet, and the Pollock Supreme Court case made it clear that Congress had to be very careful in ensuring that uniformity. The Pollock ruling created something with which we are all too familiar: a crisis. It ran the risk of driving the federal government into insolvency, and only an amendment to the Constitution could avoid national destitution. Sound familiar? Congress acted, the states followed suit, and while Wilson was still President-elect, it was ratified.

A tax on income is a tax on liberty, and the higher the tax, the less liberty we have. For what is income, in a capitalist society? Income is a measure of worth. A measure of the value of what you, through your time and talent, contribute to the cause for which you are being paid. In order to make that contribution, you must expend something of yourself – time, or energy, or perhaps even property. You don’t come by any of those three easily, and you can’t freely give any of them without the liberty to make that choice in the first place. So, to tax the income you receive from the contributions you make of the things you possess is indeed a tax on liberty. It cannot be any other way.

Now, I’m not an absolutist in this regard. I don’t ignore that in order for a government of the people to perform its legitimate duties proscribed to it by those people it must be given the wherewithal to function. This cannot be denied. But I am not likely to ever be convinced that the government’s legitimate role in a limited republic is so vast as to require more than a pittance from each able citizen. And I do not define a pittance as 20%, much less 94%. As such, one of my biggest problems with the amendment isn’t what is written in it, but what isn’t – there is no limit, and as a matter of fact it goes to great pains to ensure that a limit cannot be construed out of it. The 16th Amendment is as close to a blank check from the citizen’s wallet as there ever was.

The second problem that I have – and this goes to the heart of the attack on the idea of a republic – is that it effectively and exclusively addresses not states, but citizens. States are left out of the conversation, states have no say. Now, when it comes to defining certain liberties that individuals have, I have no problem with states being bypassed (see: 10th Amendment). But when it comes to defining duties and responsibilities, to cut out the state is to weaken the Republic and have it totter either toward tyranny or democracy. I contend neither is healthy and often, there is a distinction without a difference.

Shortly after the Amendment’s ratification, Wilson introduced a national income tax. As with all liberal income taxes, it was a progressive one, and as with all liberal schemes, it was accompanied by a promise destined to be broken and believed only by those who wanted to believe: the top tax bracket would never exceed 10%. It was 7% in the initial legislation. Wilson got his way, and Americans started paying federal income taxes in 1913.

1916? 15%.1917? 67%.

By 1918 the top bracket had risen to 77%. Liberals – now and then – may look at that and have the same analysis: Well, 77% is a good start. And indeed it was that – just a start. Because it rose to as high as 94% in 1944-45, and didn’t drop to lower than 50% until the ’80s. Isn’t ironic that the two decades of the 19th century that were noted for their prosperity were the 20s and the 80 – where the top tax bracket was the lowest of all the decades in the IRS era?

Well, I’m sure that’s just dumb luck. Move along now. Nothing to see.

The 17th Amendment: Nationalism of the States

And we do move along, this time to the 17th Amendment, the relevant portion quoted here:

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each state, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each state shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the state legislatures.

What many don’t know – including, I suspect, a majority of our high school seniors – is that until the turn of last century, Senators were chosen not by popular election, but by the legislatures of the several states. What changed that? Why, that which always precipitates progressive change: a crisis. Congress struggled with a number of problems with the Senatorial selection process, including delayed appointments as legislatures sometimes deadlocked on who to send, corruption in the selection process, and some states having prolonged (sometimes by years) vacancies.

So, in the effort to clean up the mess, the Senate – led by a number of Senators whose state legislatures had adopted popular election for the Senators in their states – proposed that Senators be elected by popular election, and the states soon followed suit.

Ironic that now, decades later that we still contend with corruption and delayed appointments in the Senate. The more things change…

I understand that on the surface, this change may seem minor, especially considering that over half the states had switched to some sort of state referendum selection process, but the amendment robbed states of yet more of their sovereignty. As with the sixteenth amendment, the states were bypassed as the federal government went directly to the people. This change in dynamic removed an important voice from the legislation process. Now, both houses of the legislative branch were elected by the people – with no room for the states to have a say. The distinction between the states has become increasingly less important ever since, and populist whims have been catered to. An emotional electorate will, over time, vote more and more of its liberties away.

The Second Wave: the Great Depression and FDR

What Wave I proved to progressives more than anything is that they could do it. They could effect big, Constitutional, structural change. And belief in oneself is a powerful thing indeed. We now move a couple generations forward. America has come down from the Roaring 20’s and they have a President in Hoover that does not have a firm grasp on the economics required to steady the ship. What starts as a recession teeters on depression, and Hoover loses to FDR as a result. Elected on the promise of a New Deal and inheriting a crisis, he didn’t let the moment go to waste. He combined two tactics that should be familiar to all of us now: villainize industry in the name of justice, and aggressively institute social programs in the name of fairness.

Nothing to fear but...massive social programs

So the question was, what industry to villainize? Well, FDR didn’t restrict himself to just one, but the centerpiece then, just as now, was the energy industry. Roosevelt believed that power companies just weren’t doing enough to service the poor, especially the rural poor, and a powerful few were getting rich at the expense of the downtrodden. Never mind that one of these titans – Samuel Insull – pioneered the power utility we now take for granted and was the first to figure out how to deliver affordable energy to the masses. None of that was important as FDR and his czars (back then they were called dictators) demonized Insull. They went after him, nationalized parts of the industry, and put him on trial.

Insull fled the country for a time, then came home to stand trial. The verdict? Not guilty. Ultimately vindicated but utterly broke, the man who brought power to the masses died penniless and unknown in a Paris subway. FDR’s brand of justice.

But it wasn’t enough to go after industry titans – FDR felt compelled to go after the rest. Taxes on the rich went up, subsidies were doled out, and Social Security – the third rung – promised that which it has yet to deliver on some seven decades later.

But for all Roosevelt’s progressive vision, one problem remained: the depression drudged on. Unemployment got worse. People went hungry. So how, after four years of malaise, did he get reelected?

The first reason is that it is with FDR that class warfare – heretofore deemed utterly un-American even by democrats – was a keystone to FDRs strategy. Farmers with the farm omnibus; seamstresses in the Northeast, and the Wagner Act that ushered in modern day unions. Sure, America may be struggling, but look what FDR did for us.

The second reason is that in ‘36, Republicans did then what they do now: they nominated someone from the mushy middle, someone who agreed with FDR more often than he disagreed. What is true now was true then: if you give Americans a choice between a democrat and a liberal Republican, they’ll choose the democrat every time. The more things change…

By the end of the second wave, class warfare and social programs were a fundamental part of American politics. Progressives succeeded in their efforts at creating dependency classes. More building blocks in the decay of the Republic were firmly in place.

The Third Wave: Obama and the Politics of Change

Between the end of World War II and now there have been steady, incremental liberal advances – accomplished by democrats and republicans alike. Johnson introduced Medicare in the ’60s. Nixon gave us the EPA in the ’70s and Communists immediately hijacked it. George W. Bush introduced Medicare Part D as part of his compassionate conservatism mantra and saddled the country with yet more debt and obligations in the process.

As big, and as detrimental to liberty, as each of these changes are, they are still incremental, not revolutionary. Progressives have been content chewing the apple a bite at a time. Biding their time. Waiting for their moment.

Their moment is here.

"Do I look angelic enough?"

In Obama, many progressives see a chance to accomplish liberal paradise on earth. Perhaps one who believes that more than any other is Barack Obama himself. He isn’t the least interested in incremental change. He is intent on seizing the moment, capitalizing on the crisis, and making the most of the progressive domination of the federal government. His yearning to usher in fundamental Constitutional change at such a pace and with such breadth would make Jefferson spin in his grave and Alinsky beam like a proud papa.

Obama likes to say “the stars are aligned,” (almost as much as he likes to say “I’m the President”) but that the starry night won’t last forever. Obama is shrewd – scary shrewd – and he knows that, sooner or later, the American people will wake up and catch on. When they do, dawn will rise quickly. That’s why everything’s a crisis. That’s why he’s trying to do so much so soon – from stimulus, to CapAndTax, to universal healthcare, to granting illegal immigrants the right to vote to well, who knows what’s next.

If only he could just get his changes in place before the giant awakens, it’ll be too late. The beauracracies will already be in place, the dependency classes already bought off, the illegals already voting, and the liberties already stolen away.

Because he knows that once it’s done, America isn’t likely to undo it. Once it’s done, America isn’t likely to be recognizable to the Greatest Generation, much less the Founders.

So, I think that that is the strategic, ominous reason why they don’t care. This is their End Game – this is their go-for-broke moment. They’re all in on the destruction of the American dream. Maybe some don’t realize that’s what it is, but not all. I believe that the powers behind the power know exactly what their plans amount to. And I believe they embrace it.

It’s up to us to stop them. We’re the sleeping giant. We can, and must, awaken. Will we succeed in beating back the third wave? I don’t know. But we owe it to both the founders and posterity to rise up and fight.