BIG GOVERNMENT SUCKS
One of the key talking points used by TPUSA to capture the attention of America’s college students and grow its membership exponentially was a simple, powerful truism rooted in the Federalist Papers, the Constitution, and the lives of the Founding Fathers, placed in a vernacular that young people coming of age during the Obama years could grasp and support: Big Government Sucks.
Clearly, it resonated. In Time for a Turning Point, Kirk pointed to “an almost palpable energy and enthusiasm” in TPUSA’s advisory board over it’s accomplishments in 2015, and its plans for 2016. But then came the gut-punch:
“And then news came in regarding the vote, first in the U.S. House and then in the Senate, regarding the $1.15 trillion spending package that had been passed in order to avoid a government shutdown. Throughout the remainder of the conference, our conversations were preoccupied with the disbelief over what Congress had just done.
It was just over a year earlier that Americans had elected a majority of Republicans in both the House and Senate, ostensibly to prevent the exact kind of spending from taking place that those same Republicans had now approved. The Republicans controlled 54 seats in the Senate and 247 seats in the House. They had seemed to have won a mandate to rein in government. Yet they clearly had other intentions and gave the openly big government-supporting Barack Obama nearly everything he had wanted. The Republicans had positioned themselves a year earlier as being the supporters of limited government, low taxes, and reduced spending. Look what they had done. The numbers have lost all sense. Total spending for the 2016 fiscal year is estimated at $3.59 trillion. Tax revenue for that period is estimated at $3.17 trillion, leaving a deficit of $420 billion.”
(Time for a Turning Point, 40-41)
To understand exactly how this astonishing betrayal of conservative principles had occurred, Kirk need only have consulted House Freedom Caucus Co-Founder, Congressman Ron DeSantis, who had voted against the irresponsible December 18, 2015 bill known as the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016. Kirk would doubtless have heard first-hand what DeSantis would eventually say about this systemic dysfunction in his second book, The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, published in 2023:
“Every Republican who gets elected to the US Congress must decide: drain the swamp or become part of the swamp?
This seems like it should be an easy choice for any newly elected Republican, given the contempt that GOP voters nationwide have for Washington.
But the entire DC ecosystem is wired to frustrate the aspirations of would-be reformers. A newly elected member arriving in DC without a firm philosophical rudder usually gets swept away by the powerful currents of the beltway.
A big reason for this is that the legacy DC media outlets that dominate the narrative are protectors of the way Washington operates and defenders of its permanent bureaucracy. The media treats reformers, especially those on the right, with hostility, usually targeting them with hit pieces. Most politicians congenitally want to be liked, so the prospect of getting unfairly smeared by the media traditionally disincentives new members from rocking the boat . . .
. . . Those who reject these pressures and want to change Washington face a conundrum. To upend the current order of things first requires attaining a position of authority sufficient to do so. But the problem is that ascending to such a position – be it a committee chairmanship or party leadership – is usually possible only once the member becomes part of the swamp. A member who rejects the swamp has little chance of ascending to positions of leadership in Congress; at the same time, even the well-intentioned member who tries to ‘play the game’ to climb the ladder tends to get neutered by the time he or she reaches a position of authority.
Of course, some members never intend to do anything to rock the boat once they get to DC. For these members, the positions that they take during their campaigns are mere platitudes advanced to get elected and reelected. Once safely ensconced in the swamp as a member of Congress, they become rubber stamps for the status quo . . .
. . . [A]ll the power is concentrated in the leadership – and mostly in the Speaker . . . [T]he entire process – committee hearings, legislative markups, floor votes – is choreographed by the leadership . . .
One of the most grotesque consequences of this is the massive omnibus spending bills that routinely get rammed through the modern Congress. The way these gargantuan spending bills get crafted is largely through secret, backroom negotiations between a handful of leadership and/or committee staffers and members. Whenever leadership unveils a massive spending bill spanning thousands of pages, a typical member of Congress may have as little as twenty-four hours to read it.”
(The Courage to Be Free, 45-50)
To his credit, Congressman DeSantis himself stayed out of the swamp, distinguishing himself from those who’d succumbed to it. For one thing, rather than simply vote the way GOP leadership directed, he read the actual text of each bill in its entirety before voting. He concluded that the language in the bills was often hard to comprehend, and worse, failed to equate with what leadership said about the legislation’s alleged objectives. Equally noteworthy was the Congressman’s decision to sleep in his office rather than rent an apartment and thus become a regular on the DC social circuit. Instead, he regularly flew back to Florida when voting was over to be with his family and work among the residents he represented in his district. And to signal to those residents that he was in Congress to serve them and not himself, he declined his congressional pension and healthcare plan (a plan that exempted Congress from the Obamacare mandate imposed on everyone else), and stopped trading stocks to avoid any suggestion of acting on inside information for personal gain. (The Courage to Be Free, 45-50)
Because of these decisions, DeSantis was tagged by some of his congressional colleagues as a “wicked-smart loner,” and by others as a selfless, measured, hard-working man who shunned the spotlight and stuck to his task: – to make a difference despite the swamp. (“From loner to phenom: DeSantis’ old colleagues are surprised at his rise,” Politico, March 6, 2023)
Though the actions of the House Freedom Caucus he co-founded were not enough to drain the swamp, they did upset the apple cart, and in doing so “identified the shortcomings of the modern Republican establishment in a way that paved the way for an outsider presidential candidate who threatened the survival of the stale, DC Republican orthodoxy” – Donald Trump.
(The Courage to Be Free, 56-57.)
In addition, determined to make his presence felt and his positions known, Congressman DeSantis launched several initiatives, the wisdom of which have endured over time. Specifically –
He advanced legislation to eliminate congressional pensions, Obamacare mandate exemptions, and slush funds to help settle sexual harassment claims secretly.;
He pressed for enforcement of immigration laws and construction of a southern border wall.;
He advocated for greater constraints on wasteful spending within the Department of Defense.;
He championed relocation of America’s Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.;
He revolutionized the treatment of war veterans suffering from posttraumatic stress by authoring and pressing the PAWS Act to provide funding for soldiers suffering from PTSD to pair with specially trained service dogs, a superior alternative to the sedatives being supplied by the Veterans Administration.;
He voiced early and frequent opposition to the politically concocted Russian Collusion investigation against Trump; and
Most importantly, he proposed constitutional amendments to impose term limits on members of both the House and Senate, and to require that all members of Congress be subject to the same legal obligations they impose on others.
(The Courage to Be Free, 57-58)
* * *
Two weeks after he was elected to his third congressional term in November 2016, Ron’s wife Casey gave birth to their first child, a baby girl they named Madison. By the fall of the following year, Casey was expecting their second child, a boy they would name Mason.
Meanwhile, from where new dad DeSantis sat, the newly elected Republican Congress, working with newly elected Republican President Donald Trump had, inexplicably, done very little to fulfill the mandate voters had given it. With a likely mid-term power shift to Nancy Pelosi looming, Ron and Casey talked it over, and came to a wise conclusion: Ron should come home at the end of his term in 2018, focus on being a father, and set his sights on a position from which he could contribute his natural-born leadership skills to the crafting of a blueprint for America’s revival – as Governor of Florida. (The Courage to Be Free, 73-75.)
As noted above, Charlie Kirk was quite upset about a Republican House and Senate signing off on Obama spending $1.15 trillion dollars. No doubt he was equally upset when President Trump failed to veto a 2020 “stimulus” bill that Kirk had publicly described as “insane.” (X, @CharlieKirk11, December 22, 2020)
In addition, one is given to wonder how Kirk felt about Congress spending $19.5 trillion during Trump’s first term in office, $5 trillion more than what was spent during Obama’s preceding term. Kirk did not explicitly address this dramatic acceleration in spending in any of his books or other X posts, nor did he address the fact that under Trump, $7.2 trillion had been added to the national debt, bringing the total to $21.6 trillion by the end of his term. (Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget at crfb.org)
Governor DeSantis, for his part, achieved historic reductions in Florida’s debt, as discussed in Chapter 7 of this book – “America’s Greatest Governor.”
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In 2017, as Charlie Kirk was promoting his 2016 anti-Obama “Turning Point” book, while Congressman Ron DeSantis pushed back against Obamacare and other big government policies, JD Vance, as free-lance political commentator, was fighting to sustain Obamacare, and advocating for the expansion of Medicaid to include “nondisabled, working-age adults with no children.” (Hart, J., Don’t Let Trump off the Obamacare Hook, National Review, February 27, 2023; Vance, JD, A Republican Health Care Fix, New York Times, July 21, 2017.) Attempting to gaslight the American public’s attention away from his big- government stance, Vance cited the late Ronald Reagan for support of these initiatives, apparently hoping his readers would not remember Reagan’s famous skewering of big-government in 1986; back then, Reagan had quipped that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Sadly, these words are just as terrifying today as they were in 1986, and the dire need to drain the swamp has grown all the more urgent.