The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Feb. 24 – Mar. 2

The Good

In President Donald Trump’s address before congress earlier this week, he discussed the need for securing our nation’s borders and enforcing our nation’s immigration laws–something that has been shown apathy by congressional “Republicans” for many years, and outright contempt by our former Democrat president.  While the Left desperately wants to frame the conservative desire for law and order as “racism,” Trump was smart enough to portray it exactly for what it is: an issue of public safety and national security. A nation that won’t control its own borders is not really a nation (certainly not a secure one), and a nation that won’t enforce its own laws is not a safe one–not for anyone.

Another Good

According to the Christian Post, “Over 100 conservative leaders have signed a letter urging President Donald Trump to sign an executive order on religious freedom that will protect the rights of businesses and individuals to act in accordance with their religious convictions on marriage and sexuality without fear of government backlash.”

What would be even better would be for congress to pass legislation that protects religious liberty in statute (it’s actually pathetic that we even need to spell it out–AGAIN–since it’s already protected by the First Amendment), and still better would be for congress to rein in the federal court system by using their Article 3 power to limit the authority of the federal courts in the area of religious liberty, as well as areas that encroach on religious (and other) liberty such as marriage and government meddling in the free market.

While an executive order would be good (and most importantly, constitutional) for the short term and for those actions that fall specifically within the actions under the control of the executive branch, systemic repair to our rogue court system is what is desperately needed. Besides, if we end up cheering President Trump for usurping congressional authority and legislating by executive order in a mirror image of how we condemned President Obama for usurping congressional authority and legislating by executive order, then we are monumental hypocrites. We need to do things right, not tit for tat.

Come on, evangelical leaders: do what I’ve been trying to get you to do for years, which is use your muscle to push our RINO congress to actually behave like Republicans, and protect the values the Republican Party claims to believe in.  Glad-handing these gutless RINOs, praising them effusively for their pathetic records, and licking their shoes in the desperate hopes that they might actually behave in the conservative manner they like to talk about obviously hasn’t been working. Put your influence, your capital on the line for what you say you believe in…or just go home.

The Bad

Unfortunately, President Trump also used his speech before congress to peddle Leftist big-government positions. Namely, he pushed paid family leave–something we used to expect only from Leftists in the Democrat Party. If a company wants to provide paid family leave to it’s employees, that’s the business of that business. That’s what a free market is: a market where companies are free to run their business as they see fit, consumers are free to patronize or not patronize that business as they see fit, and workers are free to market their labor to the business and take their labor elsewhere if they don’t like the compensation the company is offering them in exchange for their labor.

The federal government has no constitutional authority to tell businesses what they can and cannot do with regard to how they compensate their employees for their labor. No authority is delegated to the federal government to do this either through the enumerated powers of Article 1 Section 8, nor are such powers found in the amendments to the U.S. Constitution, or anywhere else in the U.S. Constitution. At one time, Republican presidents used to understand this.

Also among the Leftist big government proposals trumpeted by Trump was his $1 TRILLION infrastructure spending plan.  Excuse me, but didn’t Republicans just spend the last eight years bellyaching about all the spending and the $20 TRILLION in debt our nation has run up? And now we want to spend another $1 TRILLION–the overwhelming majority of which are things that, again, the federal government has absolutely zero authority to be meddling with?

We used to have a liberal party and a conservative party. Now, the conclusion is unmistakable that we have a liberal party and a slightly less liberal party.

The Ugly

As ugly as it was to see a “Republican” president promoting more meddling in the free market and more big government spending, it was even uglier to see a congress full of “Republicans” cheering on these unconstitutional statist proposals.  America needs leadership which will champion and pursue our country’s traditional limited government philosophy that made us the greatest nation in history in the first place. What we got was unprincipled Democrat-lite. As the saying goes, we get the government we deserve.

In the past year, we’ve seen people who used to be staunchly conservative, strongly constitutional and supportive of the limited government model our founders gave us 230 years ago, whore away those principles so they could “win.”

What kind of “win” is it, when your champion is pushing many of the same things you said you were opposed to, the same things you used to claim to oppose?

Yeah, Hillary Clinton isn’t in the White House. But apparently we don’t really need her there to advance many of the agenda items of her party, do we?

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Bob Ellis has been the owner of media company Dakota Voice, LLC since 2005. He is a 10-year U.S. Air Force veteran, a political reporter and commentator for the past decade, and has been involved in numerous election and public policy campaigns for over 20 years. He was a founding member and board member of the Tea Party groups Citizens for Liberty and the South Dakota Tea Party Alliance. He lives in Rapid City, South Dakota with his wife and two children.

Bob Ellis

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