Why the legislature matters

(Denver Post, Sept. 27) “It’s sucking Colorado dry,” a Republican state senator lamented the other day. He wasn’t talking about the demand on our rivers from Arizona and Nebraska. He meant the massive outflow of campaign dollars to Obama and Romney, diverting money from state races in this election. If you don’t have to think about political fundraising, as do state Sen. Bill Cadman, working to dislodge an eight-year Senate Democratic majority, and state Rep. Mark Ferrandino, trying to oust the House Republicans who took over in 2010, count yourself lucky. Even so, you feel the effects in TV ad saturation, where Denver trails only Cleveland and Reno in the air war this fall. Those spots we’re all tired of focus on the presidential race. You see about as many ads for legislative candidates as for dogcatcher. Of course the White House is the world’s biggest political prize. But voter beware. The legislature matters too. Which party controls the Colorado General Assembly can really make a difference in your life

We elect 100 fellow citizens to make laws for our state. If they prioritize individual liberty, personal responsibility, free enterprise, and the Constitution over big government, collective solutions, and progressivism – or vice versa – this becomes a more desirable or less desirable place to raise our families and better ourselves. Ask yourself these questions:

1. How much economic freedom? Republicans favor entrepreneurship and deregulation to spur growth. Democrats like to pick winners and losers. What’s your pick?

2. Who cares about taxpayers? Republicans favor spending limits and voting on taxes. Dems evade TABOR when they can and are suing to annul it.

3. Who says the budget is out of control? It’s stabilized since the GOP took the state House. Maybe a GOP Senate, facing Gov. John Hickenlooper (D), would help even more.

4. Will the PERA pension bomb blow us all up? Not if the party less beholden to unions takes charge. (Hint: it doesn’t rhyme with “bureaucrat.”)

5. Why not unlock Colorado’s energy treasures? Conservatives like the job creation, the revenues, and the non-Arab aspect. What’s not to like? Fracking, say liberals, armed with junk science and groundless fears.

6. Any way out of the Obamacare swamp? The whole unpopular PPACA law collapses if states resist the health-insurance exchange provision. Both parties in Colorado have fumbled this, but the GOP more nearly gets it.

7. Who will put students first? Democrats just caved to the Chicago teachers union. Republicans just de-unionized Douglas County schools and passed parental choice.

8. Is armed self-defense still a right? Democrats cite recent mass shootings to urge disarming us through gun bans. Republicans prefer tougher enforcement of existing laws, and polls agree.

9. Will we become the cannabis capital of America? Polls also suggest Amendment 64 may pass. Either way, marijuana is on a roll here. Which party do you trust to put the brakes on?

10. Is freedom of expression and conscience still a right? Muslims, gays, and Obama’s administration advocate speech codes and church-busting mandates. Your General Assembly has a role here too.

America’s going through a rough patch. Our genius for self-correction needs to surge. Decentralized government, responsive human-scale institutions, and reform from the bottom up are a big part of that – which gives us an advantage over ungainly rivals like Europe and China. The 50 state legislatures not only matter. They matter as never before.

When I was a state senator, it was always funny to have someone who should know better ask us how it was going in Congress. Sheesh, we’d say to each other – is the legislature that obscure? But I’m betting that you, a discerning reader of this newspaper, are a cut above. You can prove it on election day by voting smart for state House and Senate.

Mountain man Ryan aims high

(Townhall.com, Aug. 27) Is America in decline? Do we need to lower our expectations, aspire to lead from behind or not at all, and warn the kids of tougher times to come? Or are America’s best days still ahead? This election is not only a referendum on Romney vs. Obama for president and on Republicans vs. Democrats for control of Congress. It’s also a test of the American people’s determination to rise up as free citizens shaping our own destiny – saying no to the defeatism that sees us sliding down and helpless to change it. Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin joining the Republican ticket as Mitt Romney’s running mate is a clear signal that the GOP intends to frame the contest in exactly those terms. It won’t just be a resume runoff between the entrepreneurial executive with “sterling” turn-around skills (to quote Bill Clinton) and the community organizer in over his head.

Ryan’s youthful energy at 42, the intellectual command that has propelled him into House leadership, his steely courage as a truth-teller about our fiscal peril and a pathfinder away from the precipice toward prosperity, as well as his unapologetic faith at a time when religious freedom is under attack, make the vice-presidential nominee a clear asset for Republicans and a feared opponent for Democrats.

Add to this the hard-charging congressman’s love for the Colorado high country – he has climbed 40 of the state’s 54 peaks over 14,000 feet – and you have the most potentially transformative VP selection since President William McKinley put Theodore Roosevelt on the ticket in 1900. (Not the genteel Roosevelt, squire of Hyde Park, but his “strenuous life” cousin who ranched in Dakota and hunted bear in Glenwood Springs.)

Why does it matter that Paul Ryan is a mountain man, at home above timberline on the Fourteeners? Because there is no better index of character. It tells of someone’s backbone under pressure, resourcefulness in facing adversity, and trustworthiness for power. Conservative or liberal isn’t the point. The high peaks simply test your mettle. Declinists and defeatists need not apply. Excuses are for flatlanders.

Describing the summit approach for Capitol Peak near Aspen (14,130’), the Colorado Mountain Club guidebook says with jaunty understatement: “Scramble around a pinnacle or two, stroll along the knife edge,” and you’re there. Ryan told me last week that Capitol and nearby Pyramid Peak (14,018’) are his favorite climbs so far.

Can you imagine Vice President Joe Biden even wanting, let alone being able, to stroll the Capitol knife edge? Or forging to the top of a “very rough and steep” Pyramid with its “precariously poised rocks,” warned of in the same guidebook?

I can’t – and it’s not just that Biden always has one foot in his mouth. Nor is it merely differing leisure preferences: golf greens for the presidential incumbent, boulder fields for the would-be veep. Rather the contrast goes to the core of what the men on these two tickets expect of themselves and what they believe free Americans are capable of.

Can you imagine Barack Obama turning around the Olympics from impending failure or mobilizing the volunteers who rescued a lost girl from the mean streets of New York, as Mitt Romney did? Me neither. The GOP nominee has summited some steep ones of his own.

Self-discipline, surefootedness, stamina, grit, gumption, vision, daring, toughness, prudence, drive, the will to rise, the refusal to quit, team thinking, practical intelligence, joie de vivre, a zest for the difficult and a disdain for the allegedly impossible – these are the mountain-conquering qualities we see literally in Ryan and figuratively in Romney.

“Bring me men to match my mountains,” the opening line of Sam Foss’s 1894 poem “The Coming American,” is a favorite of Romney’s on the stump. In Paul Ryan, he adds to the ticket a man indeed well-matched to the mountainous challenges of our slumping economy and soaring debt – and very likely the coming man for a 2016 Republican recapture of the White House if Democrats prevail in 2012.

Romney’s slip of the tongue in saying “next president of the United States” at his introduction of Ryan on Aug. 11 (oddly, the same slip Obama made at Biden’s debut in 2008) would then have come true.

It was on a climb of Mount Shavano last summer – according to Bill Bennett, Reagan’s education secretary – that Ryan nearly said yes to Bennett’s entreaties for a 2012 presidential candidacy. But the younger man sped on alone to the summit (14,229’) while his onetime boss at Empower America rested a few hundred feet below, and so Bennett (in his words) “lost the argument.”

Speeding to the summit comes naturally to the Wisconsin budgeteer turned mountaineer, it seems. Ryan says his next climbing goal may be the Mount of the Holy Cross west of Vail (14,005’) – and after that, presumably, the hiker’s holy grail of bagging all 54 of Colorado’s Fourteeners.

But none of that will occur this year, of course, as the Romney-Ryan convention is now underway in Tampa and election day races toward us in ten short weeks. What a contest it will be. Between the incumbents running on fear (“They’ll push you off the cliff”) and the challengers running on solutions (“This way to the top”), we face a choice as sharp as the Continental Divide itself.

Who says we're free?

(Denver Post, July 22) July 4 has seldom been set up more dramatically for Americans to think hard about freedom, than it was with this year’s Supreme Court ruling on health care the week before. If Congress can compel the behavior of individuals through taxation, what’s really left of our liberty? When you read the decision by Chief Justice John Roberts alongside the Declaration of Independence, it’s striking how different America is today from the time of the founding – not just in the vastly greater size and scope of government, but in people’s demand and tolerance for that massive political presence in our lives. Indeed, the two factors feed on each other in a vicious circle. The Declaration’s brave words about our right to “alter or abolish” an unjust government, about resisting oppression “with manly firmness”, about finding George III “unfit to be the ruler of a free people,” still stir the blood. But realistically, amidst our timid and tepid 2012 notion of what freedom even means, they might as well be runes from Beowulf.

For some of us on the right, who had put too much hope on courts to enforce the Constitution, the June rulings on Obamacare and immigration were an overdue reality check. Self-government in America is too far gone for judges to rescue it, or even harm it much. Constitutional make-believe now prevails in all three branches and at the federal, state, and local levels, top to bottom.

Make no mistake: I’m sorry Arizona’s SB-1070 was not fully upheld and the Affordable Care Act was not struck down. I hope the Colorado Supreme Court rejects the Lobato school finance suit and affirms the Douglas County vouchers. I still believe in judicial term limits, and I’d love to see voters “clear the bench” some year; send’em a message. I hope Romney, not Obama, makes the next SCOTUS appointment.

But if you want this new century to be a time when individual liberty still means something in the United States, and when personal responsibility is honored as liberty’s price, the courts are not the ballgame. Liberty and responsibility must be renewed in the same way they were lost – through values and attitudes, 300 million of us getting the government we deserve. A few black-robed jurists are beside the point.

The independence we celebrate on July 4 “was effected before the war commenced… in the hearts and minds of the people,” wrote John Adams. Well before 1775, Americans had already made a “radical change in (their) principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections.” Our supine acceptance of ever-growing unfreedom and dependency today reflects a radical change BACK, since about 1900.

Likewise, in his famous warning that our government is workable “only for a moral and religious people,” Adams was not speaking from theology, but from the same shrewd psychology as before. Unbridled human passions, he explained, “would break the strongest cords of our (paper) Constitution as a whale goes through a net.” Without a self-reliant and self-assertive, yet self-restrained, citizenry the whole thing would implode.

How close is it to imploding now? Just to ask the question sounds alarmist, I know. Looking around us, stagnant economy and all, we see that life is good. We’re still the land of the free. Summer is on, and gloom is out of season. Besides, in about 100 days we’ll all vote, and the great ritual of settling things by ballots, not bullets, will occur again as so often since 1787.

Land of the free? It depends on your definition. Jefferson and Adams wouldn’t agree. The prophet Samuel warned Israel that the king they wanted would take ten percent of everything. Look what the IRS takes now. Implosion is the wrong metaphor. Think rather of the unsuspecting frog, drowsily boiling in socialist soup. Wake up, froggy.

Government hostility to religion keeps mounting

(Denver Post, June 3) The Founders wouldn’t believe it.  The Colorado Court of Appeals says the governor may not proclaim an official day of prayer because of a clause in the state constitution prohibiting that “any preference be given by law to any religious denomination or mode of worship. This novel interpretation would come as a surprise not only to the governors who have issued such proclamations dating back many years, but also to the authors of that very constitution, who declared in its preamble their “profound reverence for the Supreme Ruler of the Universe.”  They couldn’t have intended the religious preference clause to become a barrier to state action encouraging Coloradans to seek that Supreme Ruler’s favor. Good to know that Gov. John Hickenlooper has directed Attorney General John Suthers to appeal the ruling to the state Supreme Court, which should surely overturn it based on logic and precedent. 

But wait; did I say “surely”?  When it comes to religion and politics, church and state, nothing is sure any more.  Also headed for the state Supreme Court is an ACLU challenge to Douglas County parents using their own tax dollars to educate their own children in (horrors) faith-based schools. 

Meanwhile at the legislature we’ve seen both political parties consider divorcing the legal definition of marriage from its time-honored theological definition. The rationale for gay civil unions was put this way by Hickenlooper: “We don’t believe we should legislate what happens inside a church or place of worship, but government should treat all people equally.” 

Leaving aside the vexed question of how the law recognizes different kinds of couples, look what the governor is saying in that sentence BEFORE the comma. He implies that government’s power over you and me stops only at the church door.  This echoes a theme from President Obama, whose speeches always refer to “freedom of worship,” not “freedom of religion.”  

What’s the difference?  Freedom of religion includes the individual right of conscience in conduct outside of church – exactly what secular theocrats are trampling on with the HHS mandate for Catholic and evangelical institutions to provide drugs for contraception or abortion, in violation of their allegiance to God. 

“The Supreme Ruler of the Universe,” you see, is no longer acknowledged as a reality under the dominant liberal consensus.  He, or it, is now treated as just an outmoded notion which backward folk are allowed to preach about in their sanctuaries – but to whom they must no longer render homage by public word or deed.  That homage is now supposed to be Caesar’s alone.

Where is all this leading?  For over a millennium and a half, ever since the Emperor Constantine in 312 A.D., Christians in Europe and eventually America have been accustomed to friendly treatment by civil government.  But that is over, over there, and may soon be over with here. 

The Church of State, as my Colorado Christian University colleague Kevin Miller calls it in his important book “Freedom Nationally, Virtue Locally,” is setting up as the one and only religious establishment. I won’t say get used to it, because we never should.  It must be fought. 

But we who honor the God of the Bible had better gird ourselves, for this will get worse before it gets better.  We’d better study the persecuted church, thriving in China and Africa; our own time may be coming. We must realize, as the Founders knew, that America is not in the Bible.  Americans are, however.  It holds vast wisdom and warning for us. 

As the Constantinian settlement – itself quite unscriptural – passes away, a good place to start would be Jesus’ own rule: “Render to Caesar, render to God.”  That balance, the only safe harbor for faith and freedom, was lost in Christendom centuries ago.  It is now ours to rebuild.

Partisan Politics for Dummies

(Denver Post, Apr. 29) If I undertook to write about partisan politics for dummies, I’d immediately have your attention. Many people think that’s all partisan politics is for. It’s everyone’s favorite punching bag.But I’ll argue that partisan politics is forever with us and a good thing, so we may disagree. At least if we avoid capital letters, there’s no trademark rub with the popular “For Dummies” book series. Anyone cover a cut with a generic bandaid or xerox on an off-brand copier, after all. So I come to praise partisan politics, not to bury them. If that sounds crazy or wrong, it doesn’t make you a dummy in the sense of low IQ. But it may do so in the sense of that book series – someone who just never got up to speed on a subject. Politically, I dare you to do it now. Really you can’t afford not to.

Several straws in the April wind bring this up. Harris Kenny of the libertarian Reason Foundation tells The Denver Post that for him and other young voters, “the future is nonpartisan.” Jason Salzman of the progressive Bigmedia.org complains in the Huffington Post that partisan Republicans (me included) “overwhelm” Democrats as voices in the Denver media.

Petitioners set out to make the Colorado secretary of state’s office nonpartisan after Democratic chairman Rick Palacio brands the GOP incumbent, Scott Gessler, as shockingly partisan. Some Republicans brand their state chairman, Ryan Call, as a liberal after he appeals for cooler rhetoric and fewer charges of “RINO” (Republican in name only) or “establishment.”

Meanwhile the new super-PACs overshadow the old parties as Romney takes on Obama. The waters are further roiled by such well-funded upstarts as the No Labels effort, targeting Congress, and the Americans Elect movement, promising a bipartisan presidential ticket with one maverick from each party.

Never mind that this led to a train wreck with Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr after the deadlocked election of 1800, necessitating a constitutional amendment. Our transpartisan dreamers missed that in school, which is typical of these earnest folks. Sam Cooke’s “Don’t know much about history” could be their national anthem.

History teaches ten reasons why partisan politics is fortunately here to stay: (1) Power corrupts; human beings tend to lie, cheat, steal, and overreach. (2) Parties check each other’s stewardship of power and fulfillment of promises.

(3) Human beings naturally disagree; interests inevitably clash; unanimity is rare. (4) Parties give voters a choice between contrasting visions for governance. (5) Governing is difficult; wrong turns are everywhere; mistakes can be disastrous. (6) Thus while the ruling party steers and accelerates, the opposition party is there to monitor and brake.

(7) Americans who see the rewards and benefits of government tend to be Democrats; those who see the dangers and costs of government tend to be Republicans; we need both. (8) Republicans, favoring the brakes, thus tend to agree parties are good; while Democrats, favoring the gas, tend to wish away the need for parties. Hence the “partisans R not us” angle taken by Salzman and Palacio.

(9) There is no real-world example of a free society with democratic institutions and constitutional self-government that doesn’t also have competing political parties, each party consisting of a contentious coalition around an establishment core. Hence the wisdom of Call’s appeal.

(10) There are too many real-world examples of unfree societies with only one political party, or with personality cults and thought control instead of parties, resulting in brutal tyranny. Hence the impossibility of Kenny’s nonpartisan future. It’s a fantasy, and ominous at that.

Aristotle said man is a political animal. Moses and Jesus warned he’s also an imperfect one; often a dummy, in fact. I know I sure am. Parties can help save us from ourselves.