Ok… now to pick up where we left off… I will start out with the panel on healthcare.
Dr. Eric Novak
Dr. Novak opened by saying that health reform is needed and that there can be no doubt about that. Still, he said, “patients’ right to choose must be their own.” He is pushing for the Healthcare Freedom Act (more information can be found at www.ushealthfreedomcoallition.com). The basic tenets of this are that people should be free to choose any healthcare facility and that they should not be forced into any insurance plan, which, by the way, is forced under President Obama’s most recent healthcare proposal. There will be a yearly fee of hundreds of dollars assessed to anybody that doesn’t have health insurance. The Healthcare Freedom Act has actually had considerable legislative success already at the state level. Dr. Novak showed a map of all the states that had considered and passed the bill and it was very encouraging.
Dr. Hal Scherz
Dr. Scherz founded a group called Docs for Patient Care (www.docs4patientcare.org). He had the crazy idea that Doctors should talk with their own patients about the healthcare system and what reforms would be helpful to them. He asks all of his patients if he can take two minutes to talk to them about healthcare reform at the end of all of his visits. Through this experience, along with the experiences of other doctors that have joined this organization, they have put together some practical ideas. The central idea that he pushed in his talk at the conference was to take medical malpractice suits out of civil courts and put them in specialty courts. I think it’s a very interesting idea.
Chris Chocola
Chocola, President of the Club for Growth and former member of Congress, spoke a little bit about the crowd-favorite need for the Republicans to come home to their conservative ideals. He began by asking if the Republicans would really enact conservative policy. “I am not convinced.”
He asked how Republicans could regain the trust of the people and then delivered a line that really serves as a pretty good summary of the whole weekend.
“Every year, conservatives come back to Republicans. This year, I think it is time for Republicans to come back to conservatives.”
Of course, the crowd liked that.
Rep. Michele Bachmann - Minnesota
A favorite of liberals all over the world, this fire breather knew how to light up the crowd at CPAC. She said she wanted to focus on how the people in the audience could do their part to win upcoming elections. She focused on the power of persuasion and the need of one-on-one campaigns where people aim to win votes one conversation at a time. It reminded me of talking with members of my fraternity about the best way to recruit new members. It’s all about personal contact.
She talked about the reverse town hall held in North Dakota where 1,000-1,500 people stood up and told their public officials what they thought about the issues of the day. She said the comments were very thoughtful and well articulated and she was proud.
She then moved on to the Democratic agenda. She said that the central problem with government control is the lack of choice that it permits for people. She repeated the stat quoted by another speaker before her, that 30% of private industry was now owned by the federal government under President Obama. She stressed that, if the healthcare and energy sectors were added, that number would be up to 57%.
She told the story of Levi Preston, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, who was once asked what drove them to war with Britain. His response was, “We always governed ourselves, and we always meant to.”
She continued with story after story of Americans who highlighted the struggle for liberty and freedom. She bordered at times on getting a little bit too emotional. She basically made Democratic policy out to be the enemy of anything and everything that America has ever stood for. Not that there isn’t something to it, but she may have taken it a little too far with the stories and rhetoric.
She knew her crowd, though, and got several standing ovations throughout her speech.
Steve Poizner – California
The candidate for governor in California began by talking about the need for conservatism in his home state. He highlighted the exploding deficits and high taxes.
He spent a considerable amount of time talking about the water shortage situation in California. He said that this problem is not natural, it’s the result of the ruling of an unelected federal judge legislating from the bench. He then said that, if elected, he would use the power of the state to sue the federal judge over the ruling and take it all the way to the Supreme Court to get a ruling on whether or not the states have the right to control their own natural resources.
Chuck DeVore – California
In a previous blog post, I highlighted the California Senate Race for the seat currently held by Barbara Boxer. Chuck DeVore, if you’ll recall, is the Tea Party favorite in the race and appeared on Glenn Beck’s television program where he looked right at home.
He said that California is a laboratory for the liberal left. The California law on greenhouse gases was a precursor for what Barbara Boxer and the EPA are now trying to do at the federal level. He said the results can already be seen in California, where they have the 4th highest unemployment among the states.
John Ashcroft
This where CPAC began to get interesting. You see, Ron Paul would be the closing speaker that day and his fans were rapidly filling the hotel. John Ashcroft, one of the architects behind the Patriot Act and its implementation while Bush was in office, is not exactly their favorite person.
Well, it started out well enough. Ashcroft gave a speech that was very reasonable. He said that the people impose their values on government, not the other way around. He implored the crowd, “Don’t stop, don’t let up.” He went on to explain his views on the supposed conflict between liberty and security. “I reject the formulation,” he said, “of balancing security and liberty.” Instead, he believes that security gives value to liberty and that, without security, there can be no liberty.
Presented with the “Defender of the Constitution” Award, the proceedings seemed to be going just fine.
Then, the next panel, consisting of 2008 Libertarian Party Candidate Bob Barr, former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore, Rep Dan Lungren (R-CA and one of the chief defenders of the Patriot Act) and Viet Dinh of the Georgetown University Law Center and moderated by Dr. Jay Sekulow of the ACLJ, began its debate.
It got very tense, to say the least. Words were exchanged and the crowd got into it. There were plenty of mixtures of applause and boos as the conservative/libertarian factions began to appear.
Some really good points were made on both sides. Ultimately, what it came down to was the argument that John Ashcroft had spoken of earlier. Gilmore and Barr sided with liberty and used the word as often as they could because the Libertarian elements of the crowd seemed to swoon just as you would expect an Obama crowd to swoon over hope and change. Lungren and Dinh made the same point that Ashcroft had made a few minutes earlier, that liberty is not possible without security, and that they believed the Patriot Act included sufficient checks on the ability of anybody to abuse their power. They also made it clear that these were enemy combatants not protected by the same Constitutional rights that we possess. That, in the modern world, traditional rules don’t apply because there is such a blurred line between a soldier and a citizen and the battle lines aren’t what they used to be.
What continues to be missing in this argument, in my opinion, are the examples. Why doesn’t anybody ever talk about examples of abuse? It’s always the potential for abuse. Well, if there are examples of the system being abused, then let’s talk about it and how we can prevent it from happening again. I’m not saying there aren’t examples out there, I just wish that somebody in these debates would talk about it. Too often, it just becomes a shouting fest swamped in rhetoric and that is exactly what led to the tensions that finally spilled over.
To close the panel, John Ashcroft came back out to the podium and tried to say that both sides had their points but once again reiterated the need for security for liberty to exist. Then, he was interrupted by a woman recording the event from the stairs on one side of the room. She screamed something loud enough that it disrupted what Ashcroft was saying and caused quite a bit of commotion afterwards. I wish I could have understood what she said well enough to write down the exact exchange but, alas, my ears are not the best out there. You can be sure, though, that it was an idealistic statement of liberty over everything else.
Anyway, Ashcroft proceeded about as well as he could and closed by saying, “My time is out and her time is past.”
Laura Roth
Ok, she was just an emcee, not a speaker, but I had to include something about her. She was AWFUL. I guess she hits some kind of market on her radio show, but she just comes across as an angry person wanting to pick a fight. She did nothing but bash Democrats with baseless ad hominem attacks. She was like a living spam e-mail. Did you know that President Obama refuses to salute the flag and doesn’t like the “Star-Spangled Banner”? I’m serious… she went there and more that I didn’t care to listen to.
Rep. Darrell Issa – California
I guess somebody decided CPAC would be a good place to shove it in Democrats’ faces that we had people in their backyards. There were so many speakers from places like California, Minnesota, and Massachusetts… it was weird.
Anyway, Rep. Issa didn’t say an awful lot of substance, but the main point I took away from his speech was the connection between the President and ACORN.
You know, I’ve never paid much attention to the ACORN stuff because I figured it was just another one of those distractions people like to blame when they should really be focusing on the real thing: we just plain got beat because we did a terrible job of governing for a decade. But, the next panel really made me think.
Saving Freedom from Vote Fraud
This panel, including Anita MonCrief, a former ACORN employee, presented some compelling evidence that there really is some funny business going on. President Obama is clearly very integrally associated with the organization. They played a video of him going on and on about how he was on their side in a conversation with ACORN directors of some sort. Of course, that doesn’t mean anything.
In case you are like me and just haven’t paid much attention to this whole ACORN thing, it is a group that claims to represent communities, one of their chief missions being to register people to vote. Although, they seem to play favorites as to what types of people it likes to register and it doesn’t seem to pay a whole lot of attention to whether or not they are actually eligible.
Apparently, Ms. MonCrief (http://anitamoncrief.blogspot.com), collected a lot of information while she worked there showing consistent, organized efforts to register as many people that agreed with their stances as possible, purposefully creating a mess for somebody else to sort out later. They apparently put a lot of effort into finding all of the intricate details of registration laws in the various states and taking advantage of everything the can.
All of this wouldn’t really concern me an awful lot because they are simply doing what they should be doing… they are registering people. Somebody else should do their job and check the registration rolls and make sure everybody is actually eligible. The only problem is that ACORN receives federal funding… to the tune of $53 million under the Bush administration according to this panel.
They made a good point by quoting Chris Dodd in saying that every election law “should make it eaiser to vote, harder to cheat.” I agree whole-heartedly, but surely the federal government should not take it upon itself to fund registration efforts, especially so blatantly partisan ones.
Another thing the panel concentrated on was the need to focus on more groups than just ACORN. Because of all of the negative publicity, it appears ACORN groups across the country are shutting down but they aren’t going away. They are just changing names and continuing business as usual. They said that people should keep an eye out and contact their local officials and find out just who is registering voters in their counties.
Rep. Tom Price – Georgia
Introduced by Dr. Ed Feulner of The Heritage Foundation who touted the Mount Vernon Statement which defines a Constitutional conservative, Rep. Price is heavily involved in the Republican Study Committee.
Rep. Price then delivered a good line for the crowd. In response to Nancy Pelosi calling the Tea Partiers un-American, he said, “Don’t you fly over our country in your luxury jet and tell us what is American!”
He repeated the familiar “no” chant championing the “party of no” label.
At this point, I think the Ron Paul fans were about ready to explode. I’m sure sitting and waiting for a few minutes was too much for many of them but several hours was simply too long for them to be quiet so they once again became a little disruptive.
Two-Minute Activists
Then, one of the more unique moments of CPAC, was the presentation of several conservative activists from colleges across the country, though most were centered in the DC area. It was a really weird thing because each of them was allotted two minutes to talk about what they had done and each had a cheering section from their school when they were introduced. There was just a real college feel to the whole thing, which I guess makes sense.
The big thing to come out of it, though, was a statement in support of GOPride, a conservative gay rights group which was allowed to sponsor CPAC 2010 causing a lot of controversy. It caused a mixed reaction in the crowd, but the Ron Paul fanatics enjoyed it.
Then, a few speakers later, one of the activists took his allotted time to condemn CPAC for accepting the sponsorship of GOPride and railed against the abomination of homosexuality. The boos from the Ron Paul fans were incredibly loud, so much so that most of what the student said on stage was drowned out. It was a really surreal moment to have somebody booed off the stage at CPAC for speaking out against homosexual marriage. I’m sure some of the older elements of the crowd were wondering what in the world was going on.
Rep. Ron Paul – Texas
Then the messiah of the libertarian movement, Ron Paul, came to the stage. It is really crazy how similar his followers are to the followers of President Obama… so much raw passion.
I really respect Ron Paul a lot. I really do. I think that the United States House of Representatives could use 20 more Ron Pauls… but I wouldn’t want any more than that. At some point, you have to be willing to govern and you have to know how to formulate a foreign policy.
Ron Paul’s speech was basically a campaign speech, at least it would have been one if he was running against Woodrow Wilson. He railed against the policies of Wilson, including the passage of the 16th Amendment which allows for an income tax. He said that we should repeal it. I am all for that. He talked about how Wilson created the Federal Reserve and that we should “End the Fed” which seems to be another catch phrase for Paul supporters who chanted it all day long, usually in a very disruptive fashion. I think that it is an option that certainly deserves discussion. He also talked about his bread and butter issue, the gold standard. Now that, I’m not so sure about. But then, he talked about how Wilson supposedly arrested hundreds of people simply for disagreeing with his policies and for no other reason. It’s a story I’ve never heard before and would like to hear more about. Still, I find it’s relevancy to be a little thin. I’m sure he was trying to draw a connection to the Patriot Act, but I don’t think anybody would claim that it has been used to round up political dissidents.
Then, he tried to define a true conservative foreign policy of non-interventionism which once again harkens back to the days of Wilson because it died after it was blamed for the escalation of World War II…
It’s as if he really believes that nobody would ever mess with us if we just minded our own business over here on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Nevermind the fact that two towers, a defense building, and a plane all fell down almost ten years ago because a few people on the other side of the globe had declared war on the United States. Even if you want to claim that we started it with our interventionism at the end of World War II, which is a very feeble argument to be made, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Does anybody think that if we just picked up our things and came home that the rest of the world would stop hating us? Does anybody think that terrorists would stop trying to kill our citizens?
It’s just not a real-world view of foreign policy. That is why we cannot afford too many Ron Pauls. Still, he is a passionate ideologue who mixes things up and throws out different ideas. We need more people like him in Congress.
Conclusion
It was a very intense day, as I hope you could pick up from my summary. Still, it was a very educational and entertaining day. Tomorrow, I will try to get all of Day 3 up and finish up my summary of CPAC 2010!
