“I Follow the Constitution”

“I follow a set of principles…. And that’s what I base my votes on,” Michigan Rep. Justin Amash told The New York Times. Big business has no more interest in the Constitution than does Barack Obama. In fact the local and national Chambers of Commerce were against Justin Amash before his victorious Michigan primary run on Tuesday.

Here my friend David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, writes about the age-old clash between politically minded businessman and free-market libertarians.

David quotes one pork-minded lobbyist as saying, “We’re not going to let ‘liberty Republicans’ throw business out of the Republican Party.”

It is just this type of Export-Import Bank-supporting Republican who has turned the Republican party into an amalgamation not a whole lot better for America than the Marxist/Progressive crowd that flies the flag of the Democrats.

At the moment, we are stuck with basically a two-party system. The entrenched politicians have succeeded in locking the country into an A or B choice between the Marxist/Progressives and the grubbing big-business/neocon-based Republicans.

Americans have The Club for Growth, the National Taxpayers Union, FreedomWorks, Pat Buchanan, a small group of Washington politicians like Rand Paul and, of course, the Cato Institute for guidance, but it is an uphill battle against the self-serving, virtually tenured group of political parasites hunkered down in Washington.

Americans supporting a constitutionally based Federal Republic form of government must work with their state governors against Washington encroachment. Texas Governor Rick Perry has been in the forefront of such an effort. The Swiss model of a weak central government, neutrality, and a national militia is a model that works. Most Swiss on the street have no idea who the president of Switzerland is. America’s original Articles of Confederation argued this Swiss approach. And neither the Articles nor the Constitution support a standing army as we have in America today.

Small government, anti-interventionist Americans are going to have to take over the Republican party from the George Bush, Karl Rove, John McCain, Mitt Romney Republicans supported by and promoted by the likes of The American Enterprise Institute, The Council on Foreign Relations and the (hardly read) Weekly Standard.