The president, in his State of the Union address declared, “The problems we’re overcoming are not the heritage of one person, party, or even one generation. It’s just the tendency of government to grow. And there’s always that well-intentioned chorus of voices saying, ‘With a little more power and a little more money, we could do so much for the people.’ For a time we forgot the American dream isn’t one of making government bigger; it’s keeping faith with the mighty spirit of free people under God.”

If you don’t recall that opening line, it’s understandable, for it wasn’t in the latest State of the Union, and it wasn’t this president. The president was Ronald Reagan, and the year was 1984. Whether one agreed with him or not, there was remarkable consistency in what he said, and his message didn’t vary based on the venue, his audience, or the grandness of the stage. Even more remarkable was his policies and recommendations to congress and the American people were consistent, at least incrementally, with what he said. This is an increasingly rare commodity, especially in politics, as we observed firsthand this week.

In this week’s State of the Union we heard, “What’s at stake are not Democratic values or Republican values, but American values. We have to reclaim them.” I couldn’t agree more! But what does he think those values are? The historical version of those “American values” and Obama’s are not synonymous. For the rest of the speech the only words uttered with greater frequency than “fair” and “fairness” were “I,” “me,” and “my.”

From what Obama said Tuesday night, his notion of our “American values” is not based on freedom, liberty, pursuit of happiness, or any of the ancillary principles or traits that have made America great. His overarching theme was “fairness,” which is simply a euphemism for class envy, based on increased taxation of the most financially successful Americans, to pay for more regulation, agencies, and programs. This concept of “values” is very un-American. They are distinctly antithetical to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that encompassed the nation’s political value system for two centuries.

This contrast is observed even more starkly with the 1986 State of the Union address when President Reagan put the role of fairness in proper perspective. “Private values must be at the heart of public policies.” He elaborated, “Americans have always valued faith, character, hard work, personal responsibility, self-reliance, discipline, competition, charity, fairness, and achievement. Values originate from what people believe, especially what they believe about God.” Clearly, from Obama’s speech, those are not his idea of “American values.”

Editors at The Washington Post observed this as well, when they said of Obama’s speech, “None of the proposals constitutes a single bold stroke to revive the economy, but the heart of Obama’s message was that America’s wealthiest citizens must do more to cement the economic recovery and pull the country from its dire fiscal condition.”

We should, with every major speech like the State of the Union, assess the consistency in speech and actions. If one tells us one thing but does another, that’s not just duplicity, it’s hypocrisy and prevarication. Here’s a perfect example from Obama’s speech the other night, “But I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more.” He obviously doesn’t really believe that, since government now is expanding and encroaching into our lives more than ever before and he proposed even more government “solutions” in his speech.

In describing the period leading up to Reagan’s 1984 address, Reagan said, “There was a feeling government had grown beyond the consent of the governed. Families felt helpless in the face of mounting inflation and the indignity of taxes that reduced reward for hard work, thrift, and risk-taking. All this was overlaid by an ever-growing web of rules and regulations.” Sound familiar?

Every solution for Obama is another government program or more spending. This is clearly not an American value. But this one is, “I think the best possible social program is a job.” That, too, was Ronald Reagan. He also correctly assessed the relationship between expansion of government and individual liberty, when he declared factually, “As government expands, liberty contracts.”

For those of us who lived through the Reagan years, the contrast between our president from thirty years ago and our current incarnation could not be more stark. They are diametrically opposed in the role of government in our lives, the American values that define us culturally and economically, and in the inherent trust of people, versus a trust of the government.

History and our founding documents provide a documented transcript of what our “American values” are, and that transcript provides a narrative much different from what our current president portrays.

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After being in session for two days this year one of my colleagues told me it felt like we had been in session for two weeks already. I’m not sure what that says about how things went this week, but I would say that that the interim seemed to me like it went by rapidly.

I get asked a lot about what to expect this year, and if the first few days are an indication of what is to come, it won’t be dull by any means. Governor Otter didn’t hesitate to declare that we have weathered the storm and predicted almost a six percent increase in revenues but only wants to spend about five percent of that. I have been told that our forecasting committee is not quite so optimistic. The State of the State message was brief this year and he did not give many specifics for his budget requests.

The minority party has wasted no time posturing on several issues but the most drastic is a sales tax bill to increase revenues by a mere 400 million dollars. It would reduce the sales tax rate to five percent but would eliminate a list of exemptions. I haven’t had time to go through the specifics yet but the most glaring is that when you buy a new or used car you would be taxed on the gross sales price with no allowance for your trade in. It doesn’t leave much to the imagination to see what that would do to auto sales.

Then the bill goes after nine categories of services, professional, (attorneys, accountants, etc.) personal, (beauticians, barbers, house cleaning, etc.) business, construction, (building a house, repairing your house, etc.) and repairs of all kinds including getting your car fixed. The list is too long to go through here so I would suggest you take a look at the statement of purpose for House Bill 345 and let your imagination wander. And most amazing of all is that they think they will be taxing a whole new group of folks. But in reality it is you, the consumer, the ones who buy this stuff who would be footing the bill. Our housing industry is still in the tank and there is thought that this would help things by increasing the cost? I guess I don’t quite catch the vision of how this would help the taxpayers.

Another topic that will be debated extensively will be the Health Insurance Exchanges. Every state has been told that if we do not have an exchange in place, the federal government will set it up for us and we will pay the costs. The two schools of thought on this matter are that it would be better to have a state program than a federal one and we would pay the costs, and if federal government sets it up for us, we will be required to do what we are told to do and we will pay the costs. Looks like we get soaked either way. Oh, I almost forgot. If the plan we come up with on our own is not acceptable to the federal government, they will require us to fix it to their liking and we will pay the costs. Confused yet? I’m sure you can see how much debate this will generate.

So it looks to be another busy session with a dab of controversy mixed in. My only hope is the session goes by as quickly as the interim seemed to escape. We’d be done in record time. What a dreamer I am.

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Black Friday occurs the day after Thanksgiving, and signifies the day when most retailers go into the “black,” or profitability, for the year. For understandable reasons, it’s a day highly anticipated by retailers, and by consumers, for there are typically “killer deals” offered to draw traffic into the stores.

If national governments weren’t so dysfunctional, every nation would have a Black Friday equivalent, when revenue would catch up with expenditures, and there would be no budgetary deficit. European countries right now have to be wishing they could celebrate such a day, as several European countries are currently undergoing the equivalent of a fiscal colonoscopy being by exogenous institutions, the European Union and the European Central Bank, because they cannot get a handle on government spending. Many European nations have expenditures far outpacing their tax revenue, but the most pressing to the EU now are Greece and Italy. Their appetite for spending has pressed the EU to the verge of collapse.

Here at home, we find our own country sprinting toward the precipice of fiscal collapse with yearly spending at $3.7 trillion exceeding tax receipts of $2.2 trillion by 60%. We’re just $500 billion short of spending twice as much as we receive in tax revenues. In July, congress infamously raised the debt ceiling from $14 trillion, and in just four months, we’ve already surpassed $15 trillion. Anyone with any cognitive capacity can clearly see this is unsustainable. At what point such debt causes financial implosion is unclear.

But we may be getting the signals that we’re not that far away. China is the number one buyer of U.S. debt, in the form of bonds, notes, and bills. This week, after the “Super Committee” of twelve congressmen and senators was unable to reach any compromise on reducing spending, Xinhua, the official state news source had some unusually harsh words for our lawmakers. “Washington’s political elites … are obligated to muster the courage to defuse the ticking debt bomb and start to show the world they have the wisdom and determination not to further jeopardize the fragile global economic recovery,” Xinhua said. I’m inclined to think they chose their words carefully, especially in reference to “the ticking debt bomb.” Implosion could well occur when the Chinese are no longer willing to take the risk associated with buying our debt.

And no wonder they’re so concerned. Just four years ago our total debt (not counting unfunded entitlements) was at $7.2 trillion, with a budget of $2.5 trillion and a deficit of $252 billion. Even while fighting two wars, the projections indicated the deficit would be erased by 2011. Now, at $15 trillion of debt, a yearly budget of $3.7, and a deficit of $1.4 trillion, our “leaders” have dug a fiscal hole so deep it is questionable if we can ever climb out of it.

Just since 2008, the five largest growth areas in spending have added significantly to the total debt and the yearly deficit. Spending has increased by 30% in federal pensions; 50% in health care; 30% in national defense; 60% in federal welfare; and 50% in discretionary spending. And we should not forget that former Speaker Nancy Pelosi failed to even pass a budget for two years, as required by law. That’s like giving a spend-thrift spouse a no-limit credit card and telling her or him to go buy all the influence and power a limitless credit line can buy!

Yet with all that spending, the super committee couldn’t come up with $1.2 trillion savings over the next ten years. The Congressional Budget Office projects from 2012-2021 government spending will total $46.05 trillion. That means they couldn’t agree on a nickels worth of spending cuts!

Tax increases are economically unviable in our present condition. Peer reviewed research by former head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, Christina Romer, illustrates how an exogenous tax increase of 1% of GDP reduces real GDP by 2-3%. With our real GDP at under 3%, we can’t afford tax increases to reduce economic growth any more. We need jobs more than anything, and a contracting economy is decimating to job growth.

According to IRS data, 1.93% of Americans make over $250K per year. If we taxed 100% of their income, we could generate $1.41 trillion, which would be enough to cover the deficit. But that would be fiscal suicide, for that revenue would be nonexistent for all future years.

It wasn’t lack of revenue that got us into the problem we’re now in, it was a lack of discipline on spending. If the country is fiscally salvageable, it will come from a serious attempt to unwind some of the recent spending increases, and then look at potential revenue “enhancements” to make up some of the difference if necessary. We cannot tax our way out of the problem without destroying job growth, but we can, with discipline and some backbone, cut our way out of it.

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Much appropriate attention was given to the great solons of Indiana when they stepped-up to block taxpayer funding of America’s largest abortion business under the guise of providing “health care” to women. The new legislation, signed into law by Governor Daniels, would go beyond the Hyde Amendment. Indiana would ban any Medicaid funds from going to Planned Parenthood in the great State of Indiana.

A huge victory for the nation’s pro-Life movement.

However, on June 1, the hardcore abortion champion leading Obama’s Department of Health & Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, issued an order explaining to Indiana that such a move would not be allowed by the federal government.

If Indiana does not change its law, it faces penalties from the feds. Ultimately, Sebelius may force legislators in the Hoosier State to choose between principle and watching its share of federal monies under Medicaid held hostage.

Planned Parenthood operates 28 “clinics” in the state, four of them perform surgical abortions – though we don’t have information on how many others commit chemical abortions.

Several members of Congress from Indiana, including Mike Pence, had written a prior letter to Sebelius, arguing that Indiana had the right under existing law to target Planned Parenthood. The ideologues running our federal regime ignored their views.

Is this how our system of government was designed to operate?

The real problem here, of course, is that for many decades state powers have been practically undermined by the “largesse” of federal funds. All those “free” goodies come with a huge price, as the present situation well illustrates.

We pray that Governor Daniels and legislative leadership in Indiana have the guts to fight this thing for as long as they are able. The protection of Indiana’s prerogatives will ultimately depend on the outcome of next year’s elections. We need a transformation in the way Washington operates in order to begin a restoration of constitutional government.

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The media reports that a slew of San Francisco businesses received special relief from the burdens of ObamaCare. Clearly it is good to be Nancy Pelosi’s friend.
Of the 204 new “waivers” granted by the Obama Administration last month, 38 are for nightclubs, swanky restaurants and hotels in Nancy’s district. Given Pelosi’s penchant for the privileged life, it is easy to imagine that she traded guaranteed seating for a little influence with her pal, Kathleen Sebelius.

But that is all vanity and petty corruption.

What should be obvious here is that we are witnessing another element of why ObamaCare is so dangerous for the nation and the cause of liberty. Buried in the thousands of pages of this law are heretofore unknown powers delegated to bureaucrats to dispense favors, like medieval barons with the power to terrorize or lift burdens. This is dangerous. This is not America.

The monumental achievement of the Founding Fathers was to place all men under the rule of law – written law. Rich, poor, bright, dumb or powerful: All would be subject to the written constraints and protections of the Constitution. The immense and arbitrary powers granted an unelected bureaucracy sorely undermines those historic principles and jeopardizes the liberties of every American.

Let us continue to pray for relief from this whole mad scheme.

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As the nation engages in an unprecedented discussion about fiscal disaster and spending priorities, Planned Parenthood is front and center.

How much of our national treasure should be devoted to destroying our very future?

The House of Representatives provided rational leadership by asserting that funding Planned Parenthood is not only an expense we can’t afford – it is practical insanity to do so. For the first time in many years, the Conservative Majority has asserted crucial moral values into the nation’s fiscal debate.

Planned Parenthood has responded to this dire threat by staging a powerful and expensive public relations effort. Like any evil enterprise, its immediate goal is to obscure its mission and hide its ugly truths behind bumper stickers and slogans.

We urge pro-Lifers to arm themselves with the facts by reading a powerful article now running on the National Review: Five Truths About Planned Parenthood.

Please join us in praying for those courageous members of Congress who are fighting to end our unwanted partnership with Planned Parenthood.

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I’ve been trying to come up with a way to describe the 2011 session of the legislature. I have decided to leave the discussion of how well we did to others, and I know you will be hearing plenty of negative comments and self praise from those directly involved. I’ll try to stay away from that.

It was the most difficult session of all the time I have observed there. To say that there was a lot that went on behind the scenes would be an understatement. It’s hard to describe the new process of legislating in Idaho. Part of that has come because of the culture change that has occurred because of the renovating of the capital. We used to run across each other quite frequently and now in order to talk to someone you have to search hard to find them. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad but I can tell you that it has changed the way we deal with each other and how we talk about the issues.

We passed a lot of legislation, some good and some not so good. The variety of topics is the largest I remember and those matters were more difficult to deal with than ever before. The numbers of people coming to the capital was remarkable. It seemed more like a pressure cooker at times than an honest discussion of the issues. It was a time of attempted political maneuvering coupled with parliamentary wrangling. The last two weeks of any session are tense but these last two weeks are sure to go down as a record for rancor. Most of the time we are able to overcome some of the problems in the place with a little bit of humor, in an effort to not take ourselves quite so seriously. During the final meeting in State Affairs the other day in an effort to lighten the mood a bit I made a comment that didn’t receive even a smile from anyone in attendance. Smiles were hard to come by at the end of this session.

You may ask, what took so much time? Here’s a short list of the things we talked about: Primary election law, video services act, horseracing, conscience law, fetal pain, concealed weapons, nullification of national health care, legislative legal services, wind moratorium, wind siting, just to name a few. And that’s just a partial list of the matters we dealt with in the State Affairs Committee in the House.

Then there was Health and Welfare with the most prominent topic there being Medicaid reworking and how services will be delivered in the future. Also in Health and Welfare a two-day discussion took place on medical marijuana. Then, there was education with a multitude of bills, the effect of which will not be known for quite some time. I don’t want to leave out all of the talk surrounding a potential cigarette tax increase, wind turbine sales tax rebate, or the taxing of Internet sales.

Now that it’s over my Duramax will get a little rest, with emphasis on little. Sitting on the house floor the last day of the session I composed this little ditty as a very brief synopsis of the session.

As Sessions Come, Sessions Go

We came to the capital with a flurry of snow
With hopes that debate would warm winter air.
Though the heat came about as the winds of time blow,
In spite of Spring coming the weather’s not fair.

So now the time comes for the process to end
And we get back to things of tractor, rake and a hoe.
The weather outside has not made much of a bend
And it looks like we’ll get home with a flurry of snow.

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Late one afternoon during the week several of us in the House were sitting around the desk of Representative Bateman from Idaho Falls. He was in the House long ago and has come back this year after a 20+ year absence. He was reminiscing over some of the crazy things they used to do in the House. Some things may not have been crazy but the parliamentary maneuvering in those days seemed to be quite different than it is now. He told us about some of the old-timers who really knew the process and how it worked best.

One of the things that has been used effectively over time is reading the bills at length on the House floor. Starting on Wednesday the minority party decided to have us read bills because of a couple of issues that they want to have discussed around this place. Neither of the measures that they seek have enough votes to come out of committee. We read a lot of bills the last three days of the week but one of them was of particular interest. The bill was one updating some provisions of the sex offender law. I was talking to one of the attorneys around here about the sad nature of having such graphic terms in state law. The bill is about 28 pages long and the reading of all those terms being broadcast over the Internet did not seem appropriate. One gentleman of the majority party finally stood and pleaded with the minority to stop sending all that kind of language out over the airwaves. They finally relented.

In spite of reading bills we made some fairly good progress in clearing off our third reading calendar in the House. It took some long days to accomplish. Another bill that was read at length on the floor was the third piece of the education “reform” effort. I studied the matter at length and there are several things in the bill that I don’t like. The most glaring problem that I see in the legislation is that the money for “mobile computing devices” comes from the top of the appropriation for schools. Another part of that formula would be taking the merit pay for teachers off the top as well. What that means is that after those things are taken out of the budget to begin with, only what is left can be used by the school districts at their discretion.

Some districts, like Westside School District, who have already made great strides in using technology in the classroom could be penalized. If I read the legislation correctly, if they are unable to utilize the funding for things that they already have in place, they would lose those funds. The school districts like to call that the use it or lose it method. There are so many other things that come from the top of the appropriation that I think it punishes those districts who have already used their initiative in developing technological advances in their classrooms. I voted no. Representative Bateman gave the best debate of the day. He said that the use of technology in the classroom was already well underway in Idaho. “You can’t stop the advance of technology in the classroom anymore than you can use a pitchfork to stop the tides of the ocean,” is how he put it.

We still have a few budget bills left to pass and some other issues that remain bottled up in one place or another in the process. But if all goes well this could be our last week for this session. That of course is assuming that we don’t get any of those 50 page bills to read at length in the House. At least we’re getting in some reading practice.

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James Madison, the “Father” of the Constitution, said, “I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.” His statement seems prophetic when we assess the encroachment on our individual liberty by what we could broadly classify as “well-intentioned” government officials.

This gradual elimination of personal choice and liberty, as well as our concomitant individual accountability, was partially delineated last week in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Kathleen Hogan, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency at the Energy Department was testifying to the committee when Senator Rand Paul inquired, “I was wondering if you’re pro-choice.” Hogan responded, “I’m pro-choice of (light) bulbs.”

The Senator responded, “Well, actually, that’s the point. The point is that most members of your administration probably would be frank and would be up front to characterize themselves as being pro-choice for abortion. But you’re really anti-choice on every other consumer item that you’ve listed here. Including light bulbs, refrigerators, toilets, you name it, you can’t go around your house without being told what to buy. You restrict my choices, you don’t care about my choices.”

“You raise the cost of all the items with your rules, all your notions that you know what’s best for me. Frankly, my toilets don’t work in my house. And I blame you and people like you who want to tell me what I can install in my house, what I can do. You restrict my choices. There is hypocrisy that goes on when people claim to believe in some choices but don’t want to let the consumer decide what they can buy and put in their houses. I find it insulting.

“I wish you would come here to extol me…to try to convince me to conserve energy. But you come instead with fines, threats of jail. You put people out of business who want to make products you don’t like. This is what your energy efficiency standards are.

“I find it really appalling and hypocritical and think there should be some self-examination from the administration on the idea that you favor a woman’s right to an abortion but you don’t favor a woman or a man’s right to choose what kind of light bulb, what kind of dishwasher, what kind of washing machine.

“I really find it troubling, this busybody nature that you want to come into my house, my bathroom, my bedroom, my kitchen, my laundry room. I just really find it insulting and I find that all of the arguments for energy efficiency you’re exactly right we should conserve energy – but why not do it in a voluntary way? Why do it where you threaten to fine me or put me in jail if I don’t accept your opinion. In America we believe in trying to convince our neighbors and but not trying to convince them through the force of law. I find this antithetical to the American way.”

The dichotomy presented by the Senator is significant: the freedom to choose to end a life while in the womb is sacrosanct while the freedom to choose what kind of light bulbs to use is trumped by government mandates. It’s okay to kill an unborn child but heaven forbid that we choose to use a 100 watt light bulb instead of a 95 watt bulb. This is not only inane and sheer lunacy, but it, pardon the pun, illuminates the morally bankrupt status of our steadily growing “nanny state.”

Someone once said, “Men fight for freedom, then they begin to accumulate laws to take it away from themselves.” And Louis Brandeis declared, “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” Yet that is precisely what is happening as government mandates reduced freedom and choice in health care, health care insurance, energy consumption, use of salt and trans-fats in food preparation, proscribing the proliferation of fast-food restaurants, disallowing the distribution of toys with children’s meals, and dictating standards for appliances, toilets, and light bulbs. With every government statute and mandate, individual freedom is sacrificed anew.

Freedom is usually characterized as something fought for against tyrannical ideologies and totalitarian regimes. We arguably have a totalitarian state emerging right before our eyes where our individual freedom is steadily eroded by self-supposed elitists who think they’re better equipped to make all of our decisions for us.

There is a moral imperative to freedom that allows us individually to make decisions and to be accountable for the consequences of those decisions. Perhaps it’s time to introspectively assess if we’re still the “land of the free and the home of the brave,” or if we are now the land of the oppressed and the home of the nanny state.

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The House State Affairs Committee took decisive action on Wednesday morning to prevent abuse of a state law restricting tax funded abortions.

In 2001, the Legislature enacted the Davis/Loertscher Amendment to restrict Medicaid abortion to those involving a threat to the mother’s life or in cases of rape or incest. However, in 2007 the Department of Health & Welfare maneuvered a rule change will basically created an exception that ate the law:

The way we read their rules implementing the 2001 law, any teenage girl in Idaho would be eligible to have a “free” abortion so long as she could prove that she was 18 or younger at the time the baby was conceived. That rule certainly violates the intent of the key law. But it also compromises the spirit of Idaho’s Parental Consent Law.

Fortunately Health & Welfare Chairman Janice McGeachin and members of the State Affairs Committee have ridden to the rescue of taxpayers and these girls – so susceptible under H&W rules to manipulation by Planned Parenthood & Co. And fortunately Idaho allows for the Legislature to override agency rules which violate the intent of statute.

The House Concurrent Resolution was sent directly to the House floor – which greatly increases the odds that we can get this abusive rule stripped from the playbook before the end of this legislative session.

This may well be the important pro-Life issue of the session. The latest figures available indicate that there are about 300 abortions done in Idaho on girls under 18. No doubt many of those were the direct result of this back-door funding scheme, by which Planned Parenthood could offer troubled girls a “free” abortion to solve all their problems.

As important as the abuse of tax dollars is in this matter – witness the wrenching stories of families impacted by proposed cuts in Medicaid dollars – the most important element of this outrageous rule is the implied sanction of abortion as a morally acceptable choice for girls in crisis. After all – if the taxpayers of Idaho are willing to pay for it, it must be right – right?

We ask for your prayer support as we work to ensure this rule rejection is adopted by the full House and then in the Senate.

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