Give Us Liberty (15 page)

Coming into work on Election Day, we noticed that something about Washington felt different. There was an undeniable excitement in the air. After proponents of smaller government had suffered major defeats with TARP, the bailouts, and the stimulus bill, we knew that we finally had an opportunity to send a message: No more. No more frivolous spending and bureaucratic waste. No more lack of transparency and backroom deals. No more failed promises. No more tax increases. No more assaults on our freedom. But it wasn't up to us to send that message. It was up to the voters of Massachusetts. All that we could do was sit and wait for the results to come in.

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, the final push was on. Clemente sent e-mails and text messages to everyone he knew reminding them of the importance of their vote. Every town in the area had Brown supporters waving signs and directing people to the polling places. After months of tireless work, activists pushed on, making phone calls, walking door-to-door, and driving those who were unable to drive themselves to the ballot box. It is easy to grow restless over the course of a long election cycle. It is easy to become complacent and assume that victory is at hand, but the Massachusetts grassroots community did not give in to such temptations. From the minute they became involved with the campaign until the final vote was counted, the Tea Partiers gave Scott Brown everything that they had.

The impossible happened as a result. The state of Massachusetts rejected big-government liberalism and voted a Republican to the United States Senate: a Republican who explicitly campaigned on being the decisive vote against the massive health care overhaul so closely tied to Ted Kennedy. And former Kennedy voters were making this happen.

That night, as the FreedomWorks D.C. staff gathered at a local bar to watch the vote results come in, we received an e-mail to our cell phones. It was from Matt Clemente and the subject read,
YOU'RE WELCOME
. The message simply stated,
FROM ALL YOUR FRIENDS IN MASS
.

We had done it.

The Tea Party community had come together around an electable candidate and had worked vigorously to get him into office. We clearly were now a true political force with the power to affect elections and influence policy. On January 18, we had gone to sleep in a country in which big-government politicians and Washington elites shouted over the voices of the American public. On January 19, we awoke to a revitalized America. We had awoken to a country in which the voice of the people still mattered, a country in which a group of individuals united by a common cause could still make a difference, a country in which anything was possible. The media and the powerful in Washington had no choice but to take notice.

After the election was over, Matt Clemente told us about his eighty-seven-year-old Aunt Ginny. She was a lifelong Democrat. In her first presidential election she, like Max's grandmother Mary Anne, voted for FDR, and she, like many Massachusetts residents, adored the late Ted Kennedy. She had never voted for a Republican and Matt was under the impression that she never would. But in Scott Brown she saw more than just another Republican candidate. She saw the same thing that led grassroots activists to drive cross-country and the same thing that led Tea Partiers to dedicate months of their lives to one man's campaign. In him she saw a much needed check on one-party domination and the corrupting influence such power can have on even those with the best intentions. In him she saw the future of America, the future of freedom, and a return to sanity in Washington. That is why she, like 52 percent of Massachusetts voters, cast her ballot for Scott Brown.

To earn the grassroots support, Republicans will have to be bold on policy that will get to the heart of the problem: Americans think government has grown too big and spends too much. Our job as the voters in this country is to supply the boldness for party leaders by making it clear we'll be participating in November for those who are as bold as we are in our desire to limit Washington's power.

That is how we exert our influence over the Republican Party.

A C
ONTRACT
FROM
A
MERICA

G
RASSROOTS ACTIVISTS HAVE ALREADY
presented great ideas we will push aspiring politicians to embrace—for their own good, and for the country's sake. One of the best ideas comes from Ryan Hecker, a Tea Party leader in Houston. Ryan realized the Republicans, having so recently failed to govern as fiscal conservatives, didn't have the credibility to present their own Washington-created contract to the American people. So he set out to build the infrastructure that would enable the American people to offer one themselves for politicians to sign on to. Ryan launched a Web site in mid-2009 called ContractFromAmerica.com to gather ideas from across the country for a new contract, a Contract from America.

Over several months he received thousands of ideas from every corner of the country, boiled them down to twenty-two by combining the most commonly submitted points into coherent policy positions, and then put the list out for a national online vote. He received hundreds of thousands of votes from grassroots activists on his site and presented the final ten as the Contract from America before forty thousand activists at our Tax Day Tea Party held on April 15, 2010, in front of the Washington Monument.

T
HE
C
ONTRACT FROM
A
MERICA

We, the undersigned, call upon those seeking to represent us in public office to sign the Contract
from
America and by doing so commit to support each of its agenda items, work to bring each agenda item to a vote during the first year, and pledge to advocate on behalf of individual liberty, limited government, and economic freedom.

Our moral, political, and economic liberties are inherent, not granted by our government. It is essential to the practice of these liberties that we be free from restriction over our peaceful political expression and free from excessive control over our economic choices.

The purpose of our government is to exercise only those limited powers that have been relinquished to it by the people, chief among these being the protection of our liberties by administering justice and ensuring our safety from threats arising inside or outside our country's sovereign borders. When our government ventures beyond these functions and attempts to increase its power over the marketplace and the economic decisions of individuals, our liberties are diminished and the probability of corruption, internal strife, economic depression, and poverty increases.

The most powerful, proven instrument of material and social progress is the free market. The market economy, driven by the accumulated expressions of individual economic choices, is the only economic system that preserves and enhances individual liberty. Any other economic system, regardless of its intended pragmatic benefits, undermines our fundamental rights as free people.

P
ROTECT THE
C
ONSTITUTION.
Require each bill to identify the specific provision of the Constitution that gives Congress the power to do what the bill does.

R
EJECT
C
AP
& T
RADE.
Stop costly new regulations that would increase unemployment, raise consumer prices, and weaken the nation's global competitiveness with virtually no impact on global temperatures.

D
EMAND A
B
ALANCED
B
UDGET.
Begin the constitutional amendment process to require a balanced budget with a two-thirds majority needed for any tax hike.

E
NACT
F
UNDAMENTAL
T
AX
R
EFORM.
Adopt a simple and fair single-rate tax system by scrapping the internal revenue code and replacing it with one that is no longer than 4,543 words—the length of the original Constitution.

R
ESTORE
F
ISCAL
R
ESPONSIBILITY
& C
ONSTITUTIONALLY
L
IMITED
G
OVERNMENT IN
W
ASHINGTON.
Create a blue-ribbon task force that engages in a complete audit of federal agencies and programs, assessing their constitutionality, and identifying duplication, waste, ineffectiveness, and agencies and programs better left for the states or local authorities, or ripe for wholesale reform or elimination due to our efforts to restore limited government consistent with the U.S. Constitution's meaning.

E
ND
R
UNAWAY
G
OVERNMENT
S
PENDING.
Impose a statutory cap limiting the annual growth in total federal spending to the sum of the inflation rate plus the percentage of population growth.

D
EFUND
, R
EPEAL
, & R
EPLACE
G
OVERNMENT-RUN
H
EALTH
C
ARE.
Defund, repeal, and replace the recently passed government-run health care with a system that actually makes health care and insurance more affordable by enabling a competitive, open, and transparent free market health care and health insurance system that isn't restricted by state boundaries.

P
ASS AN
“A
LL-OF-THE
-A
BOVE
” E
NERGY
P
OLICY.
Authorize the exploration of proven energy reserves to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources from unstable countries and reduce regulatory barriers to all other forms of energy creation, lowering prices and creating competition and jobs.

S
TOP THE
P
ORK.
Place a moratorium on all earmarks until the budget is balanced, and then require a two-thirds majority to pass any earmark.

S
TOP THE
T
AX
H
IKES.
Permanently repeal all tax hikes, including those to the income, capital gains, and death taxes, currently scheduled to begin in 2011.

One of the primary concerns we repeatedly hear at rallies is that no one in Washington is listening. The Democrats increased this perception by passing the health care legislation, employing extraordinary procedural trickery, that much of the country had vociferously opposed. Instead, they belittled the protesters. If the Republican Party ignores this Contract from America, they will be signaling to us that they aren't listening, either. They know it exists—we've told many of the leaders in Washington personally. And some have wisely embraced it. It is our job to make sure many more do.

If the Republican Party wants to find its way back into power this year, it will need to live up to its promises of limited government, embrace the Tea Party movement, and allow the movement to guide the agenda. This is the formula for success for everyone who believes in limited government, whether they currently belong to the tea parties or the Republican Party or the Democratic Party or some other party or no party at all.

Republicans want to get elected, and we can influence the outcomes of their elections. As fiscal conservatives, we are the center of American politics. We are the elusive independents in the middle who decide elections year after year. So they need us.

But we need them—and their well-built infrastructure—too.

The establishment and the media will never understand that the goal of our peaceful revolution is not just getting Republicans elected. We should not waste our time being concerned when they make that simple accusation. We know our goal is to use the Republican Party to shift the center of gravity in Washington to small-government conservatives—that's to say, we aim to get Washington's agenda in balance with the convictions of Americans outside the Beltway.

N
O
T
IME TO
C
ELEBRATE

A
SEISMIC SHIFT IN
American politics was being generated from the ground up.

The warnings came in waves. First there was the unexpected collapse of the initial TARP vote on the floor of the House of Representatives. And then came an explosion of opposition to the Democrats' $786 billion “stimulus” bill that no one had bothered to read before it was rammed through Congress. Then August saw the visceral opposition to a hasty attempt by President Obama to have government takeover of our health care. There was the special election in New York District 23, where a no-name citizen came within an inch of defeating the handpicked professionals of both political parties. Then Scott Brown's election sent tremors across the country.

The very foundations of a deeply entrenched establishment were starting to shake, but Republicans and Democrats alike chose to ignore what was happening. The telltale signs were there all along, but for some it was easier to pretend everything was going to be just fine.

So when this political earthquake finally hit Florida, Governor Charlie Crist had no idea it was coming. Crist was lauded by many in the GOP establishment as a new breed of Republican, a fiscal “moderate” they embraced as the answer to the drubbing of the 2008 election. For fiscal conservatives, he was an awful choice to send to the U.S. Senate. He seemed like the ultimate opportunist, easily morphing into the champion of the latest political fad.

As governor, he embraced “cap and trade” restrictions on energy use that put Floridians at an economic disadvantage without any tangible benefit to environmental quality. He had also essentially taken over the market for property and casualty insurance in the state, setting up a taxpayer-funded system that was a fiscal time bomb, not unlike Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, set to go off with the next serious hurricane. And he had been dead wrong to embrace President Obama's waste-filled stimulus plan, the very one that had drawn the ire of Mary Rakovich and her small band of protesters back in February 2009.

In spite of all this bad economic judgment, when Crist announced his bid for the U.S. Senate, the Republican Party broke with the tradition of staying out of primary races and immediately endorsed Charlie Crist as the favored candidate.