Rep. Blunt: We must return to conservative principles
November 9, 2006| By Nathaniel Ward
Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO): “Our losses in the election will have a silver lining if we now rededicate ourselves to those principles that brought us into power.”
Republicans must rededicate themselves to conservative values, House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO) explained this afternoon at The Heritage Foundation.
“Our performance has fallen short of our own expectations,” he said in an address broadcast live on C-SPAN from Heritage’s Lehrman Auditorium. He noted that Republicans, instead of acting as reformers, have recently defended “business as usual” and have lost their “healthy skepticism” about the role of government.
“Our job is to insist on less and better government, demanding that the federal government do its job, and not everyone else’s, and do it as well as can possibly be done,” he said.
“Our losses in the election will have a silver lining if we now rededicate ourselves to those principles that brought us into power,” he said. “Our job is to put our values above political expediency.”
Republicans over the past several years have strayed from these values and principles. They attempted, he argued, to use government for conservative ends instead of seeking to pare back government. He cited several recent big-government initiatives from Republicans to make his case:
- Passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, which he said he was mistaken to support
- Expansion of entitlement programs
- Failure to reform government programs and the choice instead to trim “around the edges,” as with last year’s small cuts to the growth in social spending
- Use of wasteful pork-barrel earmarks to “bring home the bacon” to lawmakers’ districts. “We should remember,” he said, “to define success by our ability to reform government programs, not earmark them”
Going forward, “we must challenge every dollar spent on every program,” Rep. Blunt continued. “We need to establish a culture of limited government to replace the big government culture of excess.”
He proposed a series of new initiatives for conservatives in Congress:
- A dramatic overhaul of entitlement programs, starting with Medicare, modeled on the successful welfare reform initiative of 1996 (he noted The Heritage Foundation’s role in that endeavor)
- A “pay-as-you-go” rule for government spending, so that all new spending programs would be offset with equally large cuts to existing government programs. This, he said, would set the big-government advocates against one another
- Identification of low-priority programs to eliminate, which would help curb the size of government
The majority whip also told the standing-room-only crowd that there need not be any conflict between limiting government and protecting traditional American values; he decried the liberal media for inventing such a dichotomy. A government that operates within its proper limits will automatically protect these values, he explained, since it would no longer impose its one-size-fits-all social policies.
Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.
