See, This is the Problem With Congressional Republicans

I was reading the New York Times article on a set of proposals Congressional Republicans were throwing at the wall to see what sticked, when I read this jewel:

Some of the ideas from the conservatives have been circulating for months, including an immediate moratorium on seeking money for the pet home-state projects known as earmarks. But other Republicans have rejected that idea, arguing it is a chief responsibility of representatives to win federal aid for local initiatives.

Um, what?

This is the problem. The Republicans have become the Democrats.

Allow me to educate this fools, using the words of our Founding Fathers:

• “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”
  -Benjamin Franklin
• “I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.”
  – Benjamin Franklin, On the Price of Corn and Management of the Poor, November 1776
• “To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.”
  -Thomas Jefferson, letter to Joseph Milligan, April 6, 1816
• “A wise and frugal government … shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.”
  -Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801
• “Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.”
  -Thomas Jefferson
• “When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.”
  -Thomas Jefferson to Charles Hammond, 1821. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, (Memorial Edition) Lipscomb and Bergh, editors, ME 15:332
• “With respect to the two words ‘general welfare,’ I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.” - James Madison, the Father of the Constitution
• In 1794, , James Madison stood on the floor of the House to object saying, “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”
  -James Madison, 4 Annals of congress 179 (1794), following Congress’ appropriation of $15,000 for relief of French refugees who fled from insurrection in San Domingo to Baltimore and Philadelphia
• “…[T]he government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.”
  -James Madison
• “If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the general welfare, the government is no longer a limited one possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one subject to particular exceptions.” James Madison, “Letter to Edmund Pendleton,”
  -James Madison, January 21, 1792, in The Papers of James Madison, vol. 14, Robert A Rutland et. al., ed (Charlottesvile: University Press of Virginia,1984).

(Find more great quotes here.)

Republicans need to remember these things. They are losing elections because not only is the base disgusted with them, but the center doesn’t trust them. They simply do not do what they say they will do. They used to stand for small government, now they pass $300 billion farm bills, loaded with earmarks and tax breaks.

As one Freeper said:

If they take it on the chin this fall, and then still stick to that platform then it is believable, if they “change the message” again, we know it is pablum.

See. No trust.

Republicans have a negative balance in the trust bank account. They are going to have to make some consistent deposits before anyone will feel like doing business with them again. They have bounced too many checks.