A Baby Born Alive Is a Human Being

As a people, we’re polarized. In the Spherical Model, that means some of us prefer freedom, prosperity, and civilization, while others surprisingly prefer tyranny, poverty, and savagery. This is not an exaggeration.

This week Democrats in the Senate voted against protecting the life of babies after they are born. 

Ben Sasse, screen shot from here

There’s a history here for Democrats. The Born-Alive Infants Protection Act has been law since 2002. It had been debated since 1999 or earlier. It says what law and most people already agreed on: a baby born alive is a human being, with all the rights and dignity of any other human—regardless of an intention to kill that baby before it was born. It didn't change existing law; it just defined "born alive" to mean a human person.

In 2002 it was a bi-partisan bill. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-NY, called it unnecessary, but would support it anyway. He said, “The courts have been clear. There is no such thing as a right to a live-birth abortion. A baby born alive is a baby, a human being under the terms of the law in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. This bill merely restates that, so we have no problem with it.”

The term “live-birth abortion,” referred to by Nadler, was a term used for a procedure in which labor was induced, typically before viability, to cause the birth and subsequent inevitable death of the infant. Because this involved an actual born-alive infant, the preferred procedure became “partial-birth abortion.”

The Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, 2000 version, describes the history and necessity of the bill in the “Purpose and Summary” section:

It has long been an accepted legal principle that infants who are born alive, at any stage of development, are persons who are entitled to the protections of the law. But recent changes in the legal and cultural landscape have brought this well-settled principle into question.

In Stenberg v. Carhart,[i] for example, the United States Supreme Court struck down a Nebraska law banning partial-birth abortion, a procedure in which an abortionist delivers an unborn child’s body until only the head remains inside of the womb, punctures the back of the child’s skull with scissors, and sucks the child’s brains out before completing the delivery. What was described in Roe v. Wade as a right to abort ‘‘unborn children’’ has thus been extended by the Court to include the violent destruction of partially born children just inches from complete birth.

The Carhart Court considered the location of an infant’s body at the moment of death during a partial-birth abortion—delivered partly outside the body of the mother—to be of no legal significance in ruling on the constitutionality of the Nebraska law. Instead, implicit in the Carhart decision was the pernicious notion that a partially born infant’s entitlement to the protections of the law is dependent upon whether or not the partially born child’s mother wants the child.

Following Stenberg v. Carhart, on July 26, 2000, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit made that point explicit in Planned Parenthood of Central New Jersey v. Farmer,[ii] in the course of striking down New Jersey’s partial-birth abortion ban. According to the Third Circuit, under Roe and Carhart, it is ‘‘nonsensical’’ and ‘‘based on semantic machinations’’ and ‘‘irrational line-drawing’’ for a legislature to conclude that an infant’s location in relation to his or her mother’s body has any relevance in determining whether that infant may be killed. Instead, the Farmer Court repudiated New Jersey’s classification of the prohibited procedure as being a ‘‘partial birth,’’ and concluded that a child’s status under the law, regardless of the child’s location, is dependent upon whether the mother intends to abort the child or to give birth. The Farmer Court stated that, in contrast to an infant whose mother intends to give birth, an infant who is killed during a partial-birth abortion is not entitled to the protections of the law because ‘‘[a] woman seeking an abortion is plainly not seeking to give birth.’’[iii]

The logical implications of Carhart and Farmer are both obvious and disturbing. Under the logic of these decisions, once a child is marked for abortion, it is wholly irrelevant whether that child emerges from the womb as a live baby. That child may still be treated as a non-entity, and would have not the slightest rights under the law—no right to receive medical care, to be sustained in life, or to receive any care at all. And if a child who survives an abortion and is born alive would have no claim to the protections of the law, there would, then, be no basis upon which the government may prohibit an abortionist from completely delivering an infant before killing the infant or leaving the infant to die. The ‘‘right to abortion,’’ under this logic, means nothing less than the right to a dead baby, no matter where the killing takes place.

Back when this was being debated, the arguments were little different from today. Even though this Act concerns only babies born alive, opponents argued either that it was irrelevant, because nobody wanted to kill live babies, and/or the bill was intended to curtail women’s rights by limiting Roe v. Wade.

Roe never concerned itself with viable fetuses. At the time, that was roughly considered the third trimester of pregnancy. So, according to Roe, states were always allowed to set restrictions on third-trimester abortions. The third trimester begins around 28 weeks. However, with improved technology and treatments, babies born at 24-25 weeks survive at much higher rates than they used to. And there’s a story of a baby born at 21 weeks who is now doing well at age 4.

That means states often base their abortion restrictions not on the strict date given in Roe, but on the general principle of viability. And further, many have recognized that the growing fetus experiences pain by 20 weeks, so that is a frequent line used in state abortion laws.

Roe was never intended to deal with live-born infants who survive abortions, so it has nothing to say about that.

The other argument, that it was irrelevant, wasn’t so then, and it isn’t so now.

There’s an exchange in the Senate, back in 1999, between Republican Senator Rick Santorum, who had sponsored the bill that year, and Democrat Senator Barbara Boxer. He is trying to get her to define “born,” and where that line is. What about if there’s still a foot inside the birth canal? She refuses to define, saying it’s obvious when a baby is born or not. After stonewalling multiple times and repeating that she supports Roe v. Wade, which was irrelevant, she finally claims to support a born-alive baby’s right to life:

Santorum: Good! All I am asking you is, once the baby leaves the mother’s birth canal and is through the vaginal orifice and is in the hands of the obstetrician, you would agree that you cannot abort, kill the baby?

Boxer: I would say when the baby is born, the baby is born, and would then have every right of every other human being living in this country. And I don’t know why this would even be a question, to be honest with you.

It was a question, and continues to be a question, because abortionists, regardless of the law, go ahead and kill born-alive babies. That was brought to our attention with Virginia Governor Northam’s description last month. While he has attempted to clarify, his clarifications do nothing to convince listeners that he wasn’t talking about infanticide; he seems tone deaf to the idea that people might object to killing a baby after birth that was intended to be killed before birth.

Senator Sasse referenced Governor Northam’s statement when proposing the new version of the law. His bill proposed rules and penalties, to define what care should be given and what penalties should ensue if care is not given. Because, how can a doctor who was moments before trying to kill a baby be trusted to give the newborn the utmost care?

As it was two decades ago, opponents insistently repeat that they support Roe v. Wade, which is still irrelevant to born babies. And they claim this is a non-issue that never comes up.

Except that testimony comes from actual survivors. One survivor, Melissa Ohden, now age 41, survived a saline abortion—in which there’s an injection of saline intended to burn the unborn baby inside and out, to kill it within 24 hours, after which the dead fetus is to be expelled from the body. Ohden survived that attempt to kill her. She is the founder of Abortion Survivors Network. There are many.

Melissa Ohden, abortion survivor
screen shot from here

If Northam is any clue, there would be many more, if they weren’t killed.

In a Fox News interview with Ben Sasse, interviewer Martha MacCallum referenced a young man she had interviewed a week or so earlier. He was born without arms. The doctor turned to the parents and said, “What do you want us to do?” meaning, should they go ahead and put him down, like you would a dog. The parents wanted him alive, and he lives a productive life today.

The question is, how much has this killing of live babies been done behind closed doors, without anyone speaking up? The Gosnell case was supposed to be an anomaly; Northam speaks about the things Gosnell was prosecuted for as simply a day’s work.

Senator Sasse said those who argued against the bill claimed it eroded a woman’s “right” to abortion and stood between her and the doctor. But, as with the 2002 Born-Alive Protection Act, it did nothing to touch abortion, because it was about born babies. The original 2002 bill defined “born alive,” and this bill defined penalties for failing to care for babies born alive.

While this was a pro-life bill, it was not an anti-abortion bill. But pro-abortionists are the ones who fear it. Everyone can see that the moment of birth doesn’t actually change the fetus into a baby, except by legal definition. That means the pro-abortionists have been pro-baby-killing all along.

The bill was defeated in the Senate in a 53-44 vote against cloture, which was short of the 60 votes needed to move the bill along.

Whatever the excuses, those voting against it were voting in favor of infanticide. They want a woman and her doctor to have the power to put to death an infant that has already been born and is alive. That idea was horrifying to both Democrats and Republicans back in 2002. Now the Democrats openly fight protecting infants who are born, alive, and breathing.

If there is something about the Democrat party philosophy that insists on baby killing as a basic tenet, then it is not possible to be a good person and be a Democrat. If any good people are still voting Democrat, they’d better step up and change their party, or leave it for good.

---

[i] 120 S. Ct. 2597 (2000).

[ii] 220 F.3d 127 (3rd Cir. 2000).

[iii] Id. at 143.

A Schoolhouse Rock Style Civics Lesson

Senator Ben Sasse gave the country a nice civics lesson last week, as his opening statement at the Judge Kavanaugh confirmation hearing for Supreme Court Justice.

Senator Ben Sasse, opening remarks
at the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings
screen shot from C-SPAN3

First, he made it clear that the hysteria surrounding a well-qualified judge with bipartisan support among his colleagues has nothing to do with Brett Kavanaugh. It has to do with a misunderstanding of—and a corruption of—the balance of power laid out in our Constitution.

This is not something new. He says,

These confirmation hearings haven’t worked for 31 years in America. People are going to pretend that Americans have no historical memory, and supposedly there haven’t been screaming protestors saying women are going to die at every hearing for decades. But this has been happening since Robert Bork. This is a 31-year tradition. There’s nothing new the last 18 months.

It's ideological, and it’s political. And unfortunately it's treated like team sports:

Our political commentary talks about the Supreme Court like they’re people wearing red and blue jerseys. That’s a really dangerous thing.

He suggests that a better use of these hearings would be to do some Schoolhouse Rock civics lessons for our kids, to give them the opportunity to understand our government better:

We should be talking about how a bill becomes a law, and what the job of Article II is, and what the job of Article III is. So let’s try just a little bit. How did we get here? And how do we fix it?

And then he spends a little time going over some constitutional basics.

The Constitution’s drafters began with the legislature. These are equal branches, but Article I comes first for a reason. And that’s because policymaking is supposed to be done in the body that makes laws. That means that this is supposed to be the institution dedicated to political fights.

If we see lots and lots of protests in front of the Supreme Court, that’s a pretty good litmus test barometer that our republic isn’t healthy. Because people shouldn’t be thinking of protesting in front of the Supreme Court; they should be protesting in front of this body.

The problem is that Congress (he refers to the legislative body using the general term Congress, comprised of the House and the Senate) has abdicated its responsibilities. The founders believed that the desire for power—generally a bad human trait, but nevertheless part of human nature—could be harnessed to have three separate but equal branches of government all jealously maintaining their power from overreach by the other branches. The founders would be surprised to see what has actually happened.

Here’s his description:

How did we get to a place where the legislature decided to give away its power? We’ve been doing it for a long time, over the course of the last century, but especially since the 1930s, and then ramping up since the 1960s—a whole lot of the responsibility in this body has been kicked to a bunch of alphabet soup bureaucracies. All the acronyms that people know about their government, or don’t know about their government, are the places where most actual policymaking—kind of in a way, lawmaking—is happening right now.

This is not what Schoolhouse Rock says. There’s no verse of Schoolhouse Rock that says “give a whole bunch of power to the alphabet soup agencies, and let them decide what the governance decisions should be for the people”—because the people don’t have any way to fire the bureaucrats.

And so, what we mostly do around this body is not pass laws. What we mostly do is decide to give permission to the secretary or the administrator of bureaucracy X, Y, or Z to make law-like regulations. That’s mostly what we do here. We go home, and we pretend that we make laws. No, we don’t. We make giant pieces of legislation, 1200 pages, 1500 pages long, that people haven’t read, filled with all these terms that are undefined. And we say, the secretary of such and such shall promulgate rules that do the rest of our dang jobs.

from Schoolhouse Rock video
Three Ring Government

That’s why there are so many fights about the executive branch, and about the judiciary, because this body rarely finishes its work.

He admits there’s a rationale, flawed though it may be, for the regulatory system:

The Congress can’t manage all the nitty gritty details of everything about modern government. And this system tries to give power and control to experts in their fields, while most of us in Congress don’t know much of anything, or, about technical matters, for sure, but you could also impugn our wisdom if you want. But when you’re talking about technical, complicated matters, it’s true that the Congress would have a hard time sorting out every final dot and tittle about every detail.

But the real reason is more self-serving. Legislators don’t want to take responsibility for difficult or unpopular decisions.

If people want to get reelected over and over again, and that’s their highest goal—if your biggest long-term thought around here is about your own incumbency, then actually giving away your power is a pretty good strategy. It’s not a very good life, but it’s a pretty good strategy for incumbency.

In the abstract, maybe it doesn’t seem so awful. But it has real life consequences to the people. Sasse offers an example of his fellow Nebraskans:

When Congress neuters itself and gives power to an unaccountable fourth branch of government, it means the people are cut out of the process. There’s nobody in Nebraska, there’s nobody in Minnesota or Delaware who elected the Deputy Assistant Administrator of Plant Quarantine at the USDA. And yet, if the Deputy Assistant Administrator of Plant Quarantine does something to make Nebraskans’ lives really difficult—which happens to farmers and ranchers in Nebraska—who do they protest to?

As the senator points out,

Almost all the power right now happens offstage. And that leaves a lot of people wondering, “Who’s looking out for me?”

He does offer a solution. It’s one of those simple but not easy things, but it beats what we’ve been doing:

The solution here is not to try to find judges who will be policy makers. The solution is not to try to turn the Supreme Court into an election battle for TV. The solution is to restore a proper Constitutional order, with a balance of powers. We need Schoolhouse Rock back.

We need a Congress that writes laws and then stands before the people and suffers the consequences and gets to go back to our own Mount Vernon, if that’s what the electors decide. We need an executive branch that has a humble view of its job, as enforcing the law, not trying to write laws in the Congress’s absence. And we need a judiciary to trust to apply written law to facts and cases that are actually before it.

This is the elegant and the fair process that the founders created. It’s the process where the people who are elected—two and six years in this institution, four years in the executive branch—can be fired. Because the justices, and the judges, the men and women who serve America’s people by wearing black robes, they’re insulated from politics.

So, we need to stop playing the decades-long game of politics surrounding the Supreme Court. Maybe we can get that if Congress will take back its power. There are hints that that could happen. The rolling back of regulations is a start. Making sure any new legislation is simple, straightforward, and necessary, based on the proper role or the federal government would help.

And—as it appears is a possibility at last—we can have a majority on the Court that know the limits of their power and abide by the law, instead of making it up as they go.

If you’ve got a young person around who isn’t getting taught this kind of civics in school, share Senator Sasse’s lesson with them. The whole 15 minutes is below. And for younger kids, maybe you should look up some of those old Schoolhouse Rock videos online. It’s amazing how the tunes—and the messages they carried—can come back decades later.

Self-Evident No Longer

The Constitution doesn’t grant us rights. It’s the other way around. We, the People, grant certain limited, enumerated powers to the federal government.

There’s a reason we need to limit government power. Mainly, it’s because governments have a long and storied history of tyranny. In other words, governments can’t be trusted to limit their power.

The first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, were added before the Constitution itself was ratified. The original Constitution didn’t include them, not because there was any question about the importance of those rights. It didn’t include them because they were self-evident; they were so widely understood to exist that they went without saying.

Then the representatives of several of the states spoke up. What if there came a time when these things weren’t still understood? Maybe some of them needed to be spelled out, just as an additional guarantee. This included Virginia’s George Mason, who had proposed major portions of the Constitution, but was suddenly saying he wouldn’t vote for the Constitution unless it contained these guarantees.

What is a right? In the context of the Bill of Rights, we’re talking about natural rights. That means the rights you’re born with. You’re granted these by God, because you are a human being.

There are five listed in the First Amendment. Most of these have to do with freedom to think, or express ideas: 

·         Right of Freedom of Religion

·         Right of Free Speech

·         Right of Freedom of the Press

·         Right to Peaceably Assemble

·         Right to Petition the Government for redress of grievances

    

So, you can believe what you want, and live your religion, even in public. You can say what you believe. You can publish what you believe. You can gather together with other like-minded people. And, if there’s any disagreement about government infringing on your rights, you can sue to hold the government accountable.

We’ve had plenty of contrasting evidence, much of it in the past century, showing what harm comes to the people when government tyranny steps on these rights.

The Second Amendment concerns the right to protect yourself. The main proper role of government is to protect us—our lives, liberty, and property. We hire government to take on this role so that we don’t have to spend all our time and energy protecting ourselves. But that doesn’t mean we give up our right to protect ourselves as well.

It’s like any other service. If you hire someone to clean your house, that relieves you of much of the need to do it yourself, but you don’t give up the right and ability to do some additional cleaning yourself whenever you feel like it. If your kid spills cereal all over the floor, you’re not required to leave it there until the cleaning service arrives.

If you’re receiving particular threats, you might hire your own extra security team, in addition to the local, state, and federal police forces. They’re busy spreading their protective force across the whole population, so you might not feel confident they’ll be on hand when you’re vulnerable. You retain the right to protect yourself. If someone tries to attack you, physically or with a weapon, you have a right to protect yourself—even physically or with a weapon.

There’s an extra, historical meaning attached to the Second Amendment. It has to do with defense against government. The founders knew, because they’d had to break free from tyranny, that they needed weapons to prevent that tyranny from coercing them into submission. The Constitution prevents government from getting out of hand—but only if government is held to obedience. Government could come and threaten your life, liberty, or property as easily as any thug. Maybe easier, since a thug may have to face prosecution. Who do you appeal to if government is the perpetrator?

Anyway, foreseeing the possibility, because they’d lived through it before, the founders guaranteed the right to self-protection from both outlaws and government.

We could go through the rest of the amendments as well. But let’s summarize by pointing out that the Ninth Amendment says that, just because it isn’t enumerated here doesn’t mean the people don’t have other rights. And the Tenth Amendment says those powers not delegated to the federal government are still held by the states and the people.

It’s troubling when people, in ignorance, start saying things like, “They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment,” as former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens said a couple of weeks ago. Is a former justice ignorant? Apparently. Did he fail to read the Ninth Amendment? Because we would still have the right to self-defense whether it is written in the Constitution or not.

Pretending that “common sense gun laws” that restrict law-abiding citizens doesn’t interfere with the right of self-defense is disingenuous. It’s not a matter of weapon availability. People have said, partly in jest, that if they took all our guns (if they even could), murderers would still get them. And if, in an invented world, criminals couldn’t get guns, they would use knives. What are you going to do, outlaw knives?

And then, following a series of knife attacks in London, Mayor Sadiq Khan outlaws knives. He tweeted, “There is never a reason to carry a knife.” 

I can think of reasons. Like, if I’m going to a friend’s house to help cook. (I have better cooking knives than most of my friends.) I carry a knife with me when I travel, because I have to take care of most of my own food because of allergies. If I were going to do a project at a charity that required opening boxes, I’d consider bringing my own box cutter. If I were going fishing, I’d carry a knife for gutting the fish. If I went shopping and found an excellent cooking knife, I’d need to carry that home. So, those are all logical and common reasons to carry a knife. But, being who I am, no one around me would be less safe because of my carrying a knife.

Oh, one more reason: if you’re living in a city where they’re having a spate of knife attacks, and you weren’t allowed to carry a gun, you’d want a knife for self-defense.

Remember that moment from the movie Crocodile Dundee, when he’s in New York and some thug mugs them at knife point? And Dundee says, “You call that a knife?” And then he pulls out his own, bigger near-machete, and the thug runs off. No one is injured. No one is robbed. That’s what non-criminals can do with a weapon. It’s not the weapon that is the problem; it’s the person wielding it. And if it’s a bad guy, you need a way to defend yourself.

Back to that First Amendment. We’ve been listening to Senate hearings with Mark Zuckerberg, about Facebook’s use of private information, and about its policies to prevent conservative messages from getting through.

In his questioning of Zuckerberg, Senator Ted Cruz asked him about purposeful and routine suppression of conservative ideas from trending stories. And he listed CPAC, Mitt Romney, Lois Lerner and the IRS scandal, Glenn Beck, Chick-Fil-A Customer Appreciation Day page, a Fox News reporter’s page, more than two dozen Catholic pages, and Diamond and Silk’s page (two sisters, black, who support Pres. Trump). Diamond and Silk were told their content—which is clean and pro-American—is dangerous to the community.

Cruz went on to ask if he was aware of any suppression of stories for Planned Parenthood, MoveOn.org, or any Democratic candidate’s page. 

Zuckerberg claimed to be unaware of any of these. He claimed his personal goal was to have a free place for all these ideas—with exceptions we can all agree on such as terrorism, self-harm, or human trafficking. I want to believe him. But, if his company is doing this censoring, he’s responsible whether he’s personally aware of it or not.

In Cruz’s list was the IRS targeting. I got an update email this week from Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote, which trained me in poll watching here in Houston. She brought us up to date on recent results. Besides the nonprofit being held up illegally by the IRS—even though it was what ought to be considered politically neutral, in favor of free and fair elections—her personal business was targeted by the FBI and multiple other agencies, preventing her and her family from making a living. This week things were supposed to have been settled finally. But the result has been essentially nothing. No one is held accountable. And anyone in those organizations just got carte blanche to target anyone they want in the future. And we’re left wondering what good it does to oust a corrupt regime if the new regime is too timid to stand up.

Senator Ben Sasse, in his questioning of Zuckerberg, asked about the definition of hate speech, which Zuckerberg was hard pressed to define. There are large categories we can agree on, such as calling for violence. But Senator Sasse was more concerned about the “psychological categories.” 

Sasse: “You use language of safety and protection earlier. We see this happening on college campuses all across the country. It’s dangerous. 40% of Americans under age 35 tell pollsters they think the First Amendment is dangerous, because you might use your freedom to say something that hurts somebody else’s feelings.

Those are frightening and discouraging statistics.

YouTube is another supposedly neutral online platform—i.e., a non-news site, accepting all views (with the exceptions of those terrorist, violent, or other illegal activities we already agree on)—that has been censoring content based on political leanings. PragerU is involved in a lawsuit because YouTube deemed a number of their short information videos “unsafe for the community.” No profanity. No sketchy images. Nothing that couldn’t safely be watched by a 10-year-old. There seemed to be no standard by which certain videos were disallowed, so there was no way to “correct,” if there had been errors. But in the end, it looks like they were censored for having conservative political views.

Conservative comedians Steven Crowder and Owen Benjamin have been YouTube censored for much the same reasons. Owen Benjamin was on with Andrew Klavan today, and he quoted comedian George Carlin as saying, “Political correctness is fascism disguised as politeness.”

Fascism is statist tyranny. Snowflakes worried about hurt feelings need to get a clue: they’re line of thinking is what led to millions of people being killed by their own governments in the last century. But, then, I also read this today:

According to a new survey released on Thursday by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, fully 41 percent of Americans don’t know what Auschwitz was, including two-thirds of Millennials. Approximately 22 percent of Millennials had not heard of the Holocaust, and 41 percent of Millennials thought 2 million or fewer Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.

Ignorance is probably the result of “political correctness,” or, if you will, fascism, running amok in our education system. But it’s no excuse. We don’t have to get along with people who want to tyrannize us; we just need to stand up to the bullies. And educate them if there’s any openness in their minds to allow for it.

Why were those first Ten Amendments put in the Constitution? Because the founders had the foresight to envision a time such as ours, when people have forgotten what was supposed to be self-evident.

Restoring

This past Saturday, at our senatorial district convention, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick dropped in to say a few words. He used to be our state senator, so he’s at home here. He’s been on the road, helping with the Ted Cruz campaign, seeing people around the country. He told us, “There are lots of people who love the country like we do, and they want it to be restored.”

My blurry phone photo of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick
from the Senatorial District 7 Convention, March 19, 2016

I’ve been thinking about that lately. Last week I watched an Uncommon Knowledge interview with Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, a Constitution lover frequently coming to my attention lately. This was the longest interview I’ve heard with him. He had more time to give context and background. I recommend watching the whole thing, but I thought I’d quote a few things here today. 

The overarching question here is, how bad are things, and how can we get back to the constitution? Peter Robinson is the interviewer:

PR: How recently did Congress work?

Sasse: Well, let’s define what work meant. In the mid-1960s there was a radical revision of what the federal government’s role was in the 1964, 1963…

PR: Great Society.

Sasse: Right. So we should celebrate the Civil Rights Movement at the same time. But in the Great Society program, there was a radical expansion of the federal government’s role in life. And it begged all sorts of questions about why we have limited government. We have limited government for a whole bunch of reasons that I hope we talk about some today. But after the 1960s, promises that were obviously bogus when they were made were never really revisited. The Medicare expenditure, the Congressional Budget Office equivalent from the mid-1960s, that projected what will Medicare cost from 1965 to 1975, was off by 1100%. What Medicare as of 1975 was costing—the original projections had been that it would be 9% of what it was actually costing. Where are the adults that have tackled that problem? It was a mess, obviously. But the mid-1970s—all sorts of things have been on autopilot since those mid-60s, and big problems are not being addressed.

So the deviation from the Constitution has been going on for a while, and seriously awry for half a century. Some of it has to do with a loss of understanding about what philosophy is behind out Constitution:

Sasse: If you sort of tried to think about, let’s teach the American Revolution to the present day, and create the sort of arc of what it means to have this really breathtaking experiment in self-governance, this idea—this big, anthropological claim that humans are created with dignity, and government doesn’t give us rights, but government is a shared project to secure those rights—that idea has really been under assault in certain ways since the middle of industrialization. It’s true that there was lots of complexity as the economy shifted from mostly agrarian to mostly urban and industrial.

I didn’t know, until this interview, much of Senator Sasse’s background. He graduated from Harvard, got a doctorate from Yale, worked at the Boston Consulting Group. He held a job at the Department of Justice, a job that was once held by Antonin Scalia. Then he taught at the University of Texas, and if I understood right, he was President of UT. 

Then he moved back home to Nebraska, a small-town suburb of Omaha, to raise his children. And run for the Senate. He’s still young. Very energetic. Very down-to-earth for someone that academically qualified. He has the valuable skill of being able to talk about important, deep, philosophical ideas in simple words that any thinking person ought to be able to understand.

I am beginning to think that simplifying skill, because it is too rare, is extremely valuable. Especially in our day, when clarity, and getting the message through in a few short words, is needed to match how information gets exchanged. 

He even uses Twitter to good effect. He was asked about a recent Twitter exchange with Donald Trump. Among other things, he connected Trump’s infidelity—and in fact his bragging about having sex with married women (who brags about that?)—with a failure to understand and keep his oaths.

There was also a challenge to Trump’s penchant for executive unilateralism. Here’s the Tweet, followed by Sasse’s explanation:

  

@realDonaldTrump  The President’s job is NOT 2 “run America.” This is precisely Obama’s error….   

Sasse: Yeah. We believe that all three branches are separate but equal, but the Article 2 branch, the executive—I mean, in some of the founders’ deliberations, president wasn’t even the term they used some of the time; they talked about the administrator. And president really just means presiding officer of the executive branch, and it’s supposed to be somebody who takes an oath to faithfully execute the laws that were passed by the Legislature.

PR: Donald Trump displays no evidence that he has any constitutional understanding?

Sasse: It is really hard to find him ever saying anything about limits and restraint, and executive restraint, which…  I’m not going to have accused him of any of these particular, you know, ugly analogues, but, man, of the things that he says about winning and power.…

The Senator tries to understand those who approve of Trump. Some of that comes because of the feckless president we’ve had on foreign policy—unfortunately combined with unilateral executive overreach. Sasse is kinder than I would be about Trump, but he says,

He’d be great to have a beer with, and he’s funny, and he’s got charisma. I get all that. Where does he ever articulate a constitutional sense of the limits of the executive branch?

Looking at solutions, he offers this:

Sasse: So, first of all, let’s just recognize that America is much much much bigger than the federal government. And so let’s not start by identifying the two. Washington that thinks it can solve every problem caused far more unintended consequences errors, mistakes, new troubles, than anything they’ll possibly solve. So first of all, we should have an American vision that can transcend what we think the federal government can get done.

Then, inside the federal government, we should want all three of these branches to all be vigorous defenders of a constitutional system of limited government.

But then, underneath that, policy initiative should ideally be coming—in the domestic policy space—should ideally be coming from the Article 1 legislative branch….

We should yearn for more deliberation that can bring us together as a people. And the supermajoritarian requirements of the Senate, to go back to your opening questions about the differences between House and Senate, we should desire solutions that can bring along a lot of the America people. That happens in dialogue. That happens among people over dinner tables. And a hundred people who should get to know each other in the Senate trying to not always put the worst construction on your policy opponent’s position. You should actually try to understand it before you reject it.

This is from his consultant background. He spent his first year going around to meet and talk with each of the other senators, to get a full view of the system, including its culture and problems.

He’s asked to explain this quote from his maiden speech in the Senate, this past November:

“While I am in favor of more civility, my actual call here is for more substance. This is not a call for less fighting [in the Senate]—but for more meaningful fighting.”

It’s the meaning—the understanding of the Constitution, and the very idea of limited government—that needs to be explained, taught, and defended. As Reagan said, in his farewell speech, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

Restoration and preservation are about culture. At the 33-minute mark, Sasse makes this brilliantly simple point:

Sasse: It’ll sound too romantic, but I believe we’re incredibly blessed. We live in the most exceptional nation in the history of the world, and it’s based on an anthropological claim about the dignity of people. I really believe that people are created with dignity—the world is fallen; we need government to restrain certain kinds of evil, and to create and maintain a framework for ordered liberty.

But life is lived in neighborhoods, in our cities, and in small towns across cattle country. The center of the world is the Rotary Club in my town; the center of the world is your listeners, churches, and synagogues, in the small businesses that they’re founding, and the little league, and the PTA, and the fire department.

That is where life is lived, that textured, meaningful life.… and I want your and my grandkids to grow up in a nation that believes in limited government, because we believe in the nearly limitless potential of humans who have dignity.

He answers questions about Justice Scalia—because the interview was recorded the week after his death—and that he wasn’t “conservative”; he was about the written law.

Sasse: I read my Constitution; I see no party affiliation in the Supreme Court justices. And even progressive and conservative is wrong, because there are progressives and there are people who believe in doing their job, which is to hide anything about their own policy preferences.

The job of a Supreme Court justice is not to be a super-legislator. That would be an anti-democratic attack on a constitutional system where we the people are supposed to be in charge and be able to fire the legislators. And so if the court is going to be super legislators, they surely shouldn’t have lifetime appointments.

And so to call Scalia conservative, as the papers have done all this week, misses the fundamental point. His job was to protect the rights of the people against bad laws that overreached. He was an originalist. He was a constitutionalist.

One last section I want to share. Peter Robinson asks the senator about a quote from conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt:

“We may be seeing the eclipse of the Republic. I’m not an alarmist. It’s not the end of the world. But even as the ancient republic of Rome became a more imperial structure, our government has grown so large, its responsibilities so immense, under the burdens of the modern world, that it will be impossible to take it back.”

And then Sasse is asked, is it too late?

Sasse: We need a constitutional recovery. And we need to bring along the republic, which is three hundred and twenty million souls.

This is where he offers the Reagan quote, and reminds us that Reagan also used to say this while running for governor of California, teaching these truths to labor movement people along the railroad tracks. Then Sasse says:

It only goes on if you teach it. And I do think there is an obsession of the 535 [US legislators] to think their job is small-ball legislating. A huge part of our job is to be advocates and defenders and teachers and lovers of the constitutional system.

And we have to teach that system to the next generation. So I’m with Hugh, in that you can’t talk about the decline of self-governance as the only thing that possibly matters in a world where the reason we believe in the American system of government is because of all these other aspects of what make full lives well lived, what define human flourishing outside of government.

But I think we would be really naïve to not be having the kind of conversation that he wants to have about the risk of slipping from Republic to Empire.

PR: It’s not too late?

Sasse: It’s not too late. But, we need to recognize this president has repeatedly talked like an emperor. We have a president who says it isn’t that big of a deal “if the Congress doesn’t pass the laws I want them to pass—I have a pen, and I have a phone, and I can just make it up as I go along.”

That sounds like something that you might have heard at a certain moment in Rome’s decline. And we now have a front-runner in the Republican Party who says maybe president Obama has paved a new way, as far as its executive unilateralism goes.

If you talked constantly about power and strength—and, let’s be clear, our foreign policy needs to be defined more by power and strength, and when you make political promises you should keep your word with power and strength—and yet George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison didn’t believe when they became president that their aspirations should look like King George III.

They believed they had a servant leadership responsibility underneath the Constitution…. If you go back and read Washington’s farewell address at the end of his eight years as president, he worried that the constitutional system was in peril.

So we’re in uniquely troubled times, but not totally unique, because, in our system, you always need to teach it to the next generation. And we’ve not been doing that.

On Sunday I listened to a rebroadcast address on BYUTV, Lawrence C. Walters spoke on “Citizenship,” April 1, 2014, telling us how to incorporate being good citizens into the various aspects of our lives. Also worth hearing in full. But we're over our limit for today, so, he says there are five things we can make part of our lives as citizens, rather than as consumers or subjects.

Five Essential Attributes of Active Citizens:

1. Accept responsibility.

2. Do their homework.

3. Engage with others.

4. Take action.

5. Learn from their experiences.

I experienced these things in action the past week, culminating (so far) in Saturday’s district convention—even more than in past years, because I was on the resolutions (platform) committee. So, after all the work last week, we took additional resolutions and testimony, finalized our recommendations, and presented them before the body (about 375 attendees). I got to see first-hand how someone’s idea at a grassroots precinct meeting makes its way into the platform, which will be considered by legislators this coming session.

What we do really matters. I have hope that there are enough of us who love our Constitution to do this.

The Choice Between Two Evils Dilemma

A hypothetical situation has been coming up in conversations lately—a hypothetical I hope never happens, but that media keeps telling us is inevitable. That is, a boorish egomaniac with lots of money is lying, deceiving, and bovine-excrementing his way to the nomination of a party that used to stand for freedom through small government and strong defense, prosperity through free markets, and civilization through decent people living good lives. So the hypothetical situation is, “If the election comes down to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, who will you vote for?”

The answer is neither. I’ve said this before. I’ve had conversations with people who, while they support Ted Cruz and hope for a miracle, are aware Trump might be shoved down our throats. But they would vote for him to prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming president. And they are shocked that I would not. I do not think Trump is the lesser of two evils in that case; I can’t be sure he is not a worse evil. Either one would mean ignoring our Constitution and our rights, and damage our great nation for at least a generation and possibly beyond repair. I will not vote to condone either choice that leads to that same end.

I was encouraged when I had this conversation with son Political Sphere, who agrees with me, and has a good way of putting it:

Say someone’s pointing a gun at my head, and they say, “You have to choose, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, or I’ll shoot you.” I’d say, “Then shoot me now.”

Yeah. That’s how I feel.

Over the weekend, I was surprised to learn we are far from alone. Apparently there were protesters at the Houston debate last Thursday, with signs representing their campaign: “I don’t know, not Trump, though.” (You can buy yard signs and T=shirts.) And over the weekend, a top trending hashtag on Twitter was #NeverTrump. It means people are refusing to vote for this man, no matter what.

Product image, from here

I’ve read a couple of good explanations of this viewpoint. One is from a blog called RhymesWithRight, which appears to be written by a social studies teacher in Seabrook (between Houston and Galveston). He titles his piece “Why #NeverTrump Is the Only Moral Position.” He starts out acknowledging that Republicans are having this conversation: “What do we do if Donald Trump is the Republican nominee in November?”

This question probably comes up in some form every election cycle, but the overwhelming answer in the past has always been to go ahead and support the nominee, however imperfect. That even included John McCain in 2008, and Bob Dole back in the 90s. But this time it is coming at us as a moral dilemma.

RhymesWithRight says,

It is a fundamental tenet of traditional Christian moral teaching that one may not choose to commit an objectively immoral (malum in se) act. If an act is gravely and objectively morally evil, one cannot do it, even if the result of doing it might be good or better than the alternative.

He gives an example of what that means. Then he applies it to the election:

When approaching the ballot box, one has the obligation to vote in a manner that is objectively moral. In most elections, this is an easy task, for there is usually at least one non-corrupt candidate whose positions and promises are, if not perfect, within the realm of moral acceptability. If there is more than one acceptable candidate, it is acceptable to vote for any one of them—though the more virtuous act is to vote for the greater good. If there is not such a candidate, it is the obligation of a moral person to abstain from voting for any candidate—a vote for the lesser evil is still a choice to do evil, and the choice to do evil is always objectively wrong. The utilitarian argument that one should choose the lesser evil must be rejected.

And he explains why Trump is an unacceptable evil:

Why can't a Christian—or any individual with a functioning moral compass—vote for Donald Trump? That's easy—Trump combines the hostility to freedom displayed by both Democrats with Hillary's personal corruption and Bernie's totalitarian tendencies. Add to that a thin-skin and personal vindictiveness that rivals the character flaws of Barack Obama and you have a perfect storm of political evil. Many commentators—not just on the Left, but also on the Right—have called Trump a fascist…. At a bare minimum, it is fair to label Trump a proto-fascist. On that basis alone, it is morally unacceptable to vote for him, because the racism, support for violence against opponents, and efforts to intimidate and control the press are objective evils which we cannot legitimately support.

What is the voter to do? The options are, leave that race blank on the ballot, or vote third-party or write-in. Hopefully, good options will occur before we’re faced with such an eventuality.

If you want someone more well-known, let’s turn to Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska. I’m really beginning to like this guy. He was having this very discussion on Facebook and Twitter over the weekend. Yesterday he did a long Facebook post explaining his position. He acknowledges the frustration of the voters. He then makes sure they know how he got to the Senate, and why no one should say he is “establishment.” Then he says,

My current answer for who I would support in a hypothetical matchup between Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton is: Neither of them. I sincerely hope we select one of the other GOP candidates, but if Donald Trump ends up as the GOP nominee, conservatives will need to find a third option.

And he explains why. Here’s the introductory essence:

Mr. Trump’s relentless focus is on dividing Americans, and on tearing down rather than building back up this glorious nation. Much like President Obama, he displays essentially no understanding of the fact that, in the American system, we have a constitutional system of checks and balances, with three separate but co-equal branches of government. And the task of public officials is to be public “servants.” The law is king, and the people are boss. But have you noticed how Mr. Trump uses the word “Reign”—like he thinks he’s running for King? It’s creepy, actually. Nebraskans are not looking for a king. We yearn instead for the recovery of a Constitutional Republic.

He gives some good teaching about parties, about the Constitution, and about the president’s job to “Preserve, Protect, and Defend the Constitution.” About the meaning of America, in words Christians and other religious people understand, he says,

Government exists only because the world is fallen, and some people want to take your property, your liberty, and your life. Government is tasked with securing a framework for ordered liberty where “we the people” can in our communities voluntarily build something great together for our kids and grandkids. That’s America. Freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of speech—the First Amendment is the heartbeat of the American Constitution, of the American idea itself.

Then he asks, “Do you believe the beating heart of Mr. Trump’s candidacy has been a defense of the Constitution? Do you believe it’s been an impassioned defense of the First Amendment—or an attack on it?” which he follows with numerous examples of Donald Trump’s public statements that show he’s in attack mode on our rights.

What will Senator Sasse do in this hypothetical? “If Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee, my expectation is that I will look for some third candidate—a conservative option, a Constitutionalist.”

I’m with him on that.

There are more #NeverTrumpers. Hobby Lobby founder David Green, whose company is under duress by the Obama administration to go against religious beliefs, says he will never vote for Trump. And Senator Marco Rubio began using the hashtag. Poor Donald had to face this while the news that he wouldn’t denounce David Duke and the KKK went viral, and suspicions about his fraud case, his refusal to reveal his taxes, and some unsavory, possibly mafia business connections have been bubbling up. Not a good weekend for him.

There are also comic sources of #NeverTrump. One is comedian John Oliver, on Last Week Tonight. In his 21-minute monologue, Oliver expresses what many of us feel:

At this point, Donald Trump is America’s back mole. It may have seemed harmless a year ago, but now that it’s gotten frighteningly bigger, it is no longer wise to ignore it.

Yes. Why didn’t we do something long before the weekend before Super Tuesday? (Oliver adds information about the Trump name, being changed at some point from Drumpf--which he thinks we should return to, just for the sound and look of it, in case you're interested.)

Most of us (the roughly 70-75% of Republican voters who vote against Trump in primaries) are stunned that there is support—in the party supposedly of good guys who love freedom, prosperity, and civilization—for this corrupt crony capitalist with a potty mouth and nonexistent moral compass. We’re in shock that he’s not just laughed off the political stage. Especially when we have had an array of not only acceptable but even exemplary candidates. Especially Ted Cruz, who was born and raised for such a time as this.

How can we even be in a position where we have to worry about this dilemma?

Angry, unthinking, uneducated voters who watch too much reality TV, is the answer.

But since it’s close enough to cause grave concern, it’s a good time to go through the thinking—before we feel like a gun is pointed at our heads. What will we do? What line will we not cross? How firm are we in our principles?

I pray this hypothetical never materializes. But it’s good, right now, to think things through. Party loyalty is only valuable if it gets us to our goal—back to the Constitution. But we will not sacrifice our beloved, inspired Constitution for someone who recently, temporarily, claimed to belong to our party while mocking who we are and what we stand for. I won't be "guilted" into party loyalty under these circumstances.

So, in short, #NeverTrump!

What Is It We Conserve Again?

The world at large seems to have an inaccurate definition, at best, of the word conservative. They would say conservative means unwilling to change, stodgy, boring, stuck in the past, overly careful. And in the political world, the way the media (aligned with Democrats/ liberals/ progressives/ socialists) defines conservative as racist, bigoted, jingoistic, stingy, as well as unwilling to change, etc.

It’s always better to define your own terms, rather than to have enemies define who you are.

Back in October I wrote a piece called “What We Conserve.” I said then that I’d like to ask presidential candidates, “Are you conservative—and, if so, what is it you want to conserve?” In Saturday’s Republican debate in New Hampshire there was a question that came close, asked of three candidates in different forms. So I’d like to take a look at how they answered, and then compare to the standard I was looking for. (I’m editing Kasich for length, but trying not to cut anything essential to the meaning. You can get the entire transcript here.)

The moderator here is ABC’s David Muir. He asks John Kasich first:

MUIR: We’re going to turn now to what it means to be a conservative, and I want to turn to Governor Kasich.

Governor, while campaigning here in New Hampshire, you were already asked about groans from some conservatives after your endorsements from the New York Times, and the Boston Globe. You said, quote, “What conservatives have to know is they have to say, look isn’t it nice to have a conservative like me liked? And, maybe they ought to think about it because if I get elected president, the Republican party and the definition of conservatism is going to change.”

How would you change conservatism?

KASICH: Well, first of all, look. As the New York Times said, he’s certainly not a moderate, but he can bring people together to solve problems. The fact of the matter is I’ve cut taxes more than anybody in the country this year. I have balanced budgets, the federal budget, the state of Ohio budget…

But, here’s the beauty of it, it’s not just balancing a budget, it’s about jobs….

We have to have economic growth, but once we have economic growth I believe we have to reach out to people who live in the shadows. I believe we need to help the mentally ill, the drug addicted, the working poor. We need to help the developmentally disabled to rise, and we need to help our friends in the minority community develop entrepreneurship.

In other words, in America, conservatism should mean not only that some rise with conservative principles, but everybody has a chance to rise regardless of who they are so they can live their God given purpose. That’s what conservatism should be.

OK, to summarize, conservatism means solving problems, cutting taxes, balancing budgets, jobs, economic growth, and then helping the disadvantaged to rise.

I don’t want to quibble over words, but conservatism might lead to those things, but it isn’t those things without a context of some philosophy.

Next David Muir turns to Donald Trump:

MUIR: Mr. Trump, you’ve heard the argument from many of the candidates on this stage that you’re not a true conservative. Tell the voters watching tonight why you are.

TRUMP: Well, I think I am, and to me, I view the word conservative as a derivative…of the word conserve. We want to conserve our money. We want to conserve our wealth. We want to conserve. We want to be smart. We want to be smart where we go, where we spend, how we spend. We want to conserve our country. We want to save our country. And we have people that have no idea how to do that and they are not doing it, and it’s a very important word and it’s something I believe in very, very strongly.

He does approach this as a word definition question. What we conserve is money, wealth. Conservatives are smart about spending, about economic issues. And we conserve, or save, our country, unlike the incompetents failing to do that now.

So, it’s a conservative approach to money, not defined, and saving our country, not defined. If this were a high school answer, I’d give it a B-. Not completely wrong or irrelevant, but very surface. If this were a college answer, I’d send it back for a rewrite, with some details, and more than just “conserve money and country” without showing anything concrete about what that might mean.

Next David Muir asks Marco Rubio to respond to Trump’s answer, which he uses it to give his own definition:

US Constitution
image from Wikipedia

MUIR: Senator Rubio, you have said yourself that you don’t think Donald Trump is running as a conservative. Did he convince you?

RUBIO: Well, I think conservatism is about three things and Donald touched on one of them, but it’s about three things.

The first is, conservatism is about limited government, especially at the federal level. The federal government is a limited government, limited by the Constitution, which delineates its powers. If it’s not in the Constitution, it does not belong to the federal government. It belongs to states, local communities, and the private sector.

It’s about free enterprise, which is an economic model that allows everyone to rise without pulling anyone down. The reason why free enterprise is the greatest economic model in the history of the world is because it’s the only economic model where you can make poor people richer without making rich people poor.

And it’s about a strong national defense. It’s about believing, unlike Barack Obama, that the world is a safer and a better place when America is the strongest military and the strongest nation on this planet. That’s conservatism.

I didn’t cut any of his words. When you only have a minute or two, you have to be concise, and he was. Three parts: limited government, free enterprise, and strong national defense. That is close to being the complete three-legged stool of conservatism, except that he separates out small government and strong security, along with free enterprise. Those three are considered the basics by many. But small government and strong security both apply to the Political Sphere. So what's missing is the social/civilization sphere—which Rubio in general is strong on. So although his answer misses that, he’s pretty  good.

I’m always looking for better, shorter, more direct ways to say things. So I was interested in an interview Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse did on MSNBC with Chuck Todd in late January. 

Here's the transcript:

CHUCK TODD: What is a conservative, in your view, today? Define conservatism in the 21^st Century, via Ben Sasse.

BEN SASSE: Thanks. That is a great question. America is the most exceptional nation in the history of the world, because the US Constitution is the best political document that’s ever been written. Because it says something different than almost any people and any government has believed in human history. Most governments in the past said might makes right, and the king has all the power, and the people are dependent subjects. And the American founders said, “No. God gives us rights by nature, and government is just our shared project to secure those rights.”

Government is not the author or source of our rights, and you don’t make America great again by giving more power to one guy in Washington, DC. You make America great again by recovering a constitutional republic where Washington is populated by people who are servant leaders, who want to return power to the people and to the communities. Because what’s great in America is the Rotary Club, it’s small businesses, it’s churches, it’s schools, it’s fire departments, and it’s little leagues across this country.

What makes America great is not some guy in Washington who says, “If I had more power I could fix it all unilaterally. That’s not the American tradition.

So, we conserve the Constitution. It’s about government preserving our God-given rights. To recover the Constitution, we need servant leaders. America is great because of good American people and local organizations.

He covers the political and social sphere, but the economic sphere only by inference. Still, in a brief minute he nails it. “Government is just our shared project to secure those rights” is a sentence worth memorizing.

I still take longer than a minute to get the ideas out. But here’s a review of what we conserve in each of the three spheres, from the October piece: 

     Political: If we’re going to conserve our liberties, that means government does nothing to infringe on our God-given rights….

If you’re listening to candidates, see if they have a commitment to conserving/restoring our Constitution, and can enumerate some of these limited duties of the proper role of government.

     Economic: There’s a simple way to prosperity: those who earn wealth get to decide how to spend it.

Government doesn’t have much business being involved in the economy, except to protect our property….

So, a conservative not only wants small, limited government, but limits spending to the proper role of government, leaving the largest portion of income to the people who earn it.

This conservative approach to the economy is the engine behind thriving prosperity and unlimited innovation. A conservative gets out of the way of a productive people, and does nothing more than protect the people’s wealth and their freedom to pursue their work.

     Social/Civilization: Civilization requires a people accountable to God. Such people value family, innocent human life, property rights, and truth. Such people respect one another and generally live together in peace despite differences in belief and culture….

A conservative leader recognizes that religion is… an essential institution helping us understand what our rights are, and what our obligations to one another are….

A conservative leader lives a life that shows commitment to family. Such a leader would have no sexual scandals coming up from the near or distant past. Such leaders would be so consistent that all those who know him/her would stand up to defend against such an accusation, because they would know such an accusation is inconceivable.

A conservative leader gives charitably, privately. He/she tithes (ten percent of income) plus more, regardless of income level.

A conservative leader is honest and consistent, so that his word is his bond, and everybody knows it. He doesn’t make behind-the-scenes deals in darkness. He doesn’t engage in crony capitalism, either receiving “bribes” or offering them. He’s not beholden to donors; anyone who would donate to him does it with the clear knowledge that as an elected official he will vote based on principle.

We can sum this up the same way we did in October:

The answer to what we conserve ought to include clear evidence of understanding of the Constitution and its purpose, strong commitment to the free market and property rights, and strong personal religious practice that values family and marriage, innocent life, and truth. And the answer must come naturally, as part of the basic vocabulary, because the person is a natural conservator of freedom, prosperity, and civilization.