RINO Power or Tea Party Principle?
"Tea Party favorite Christine O'Donnell's victory over Washington establishment favorite Mike Castle raised an interesting question," says Christopher Chantrill at American Thinker. "Do we want just political power and 51 seats in the U.S. Senate? Or do we want to build a movement?"
Chantrill says, "Put me in the movement camp. It's not going to do the conservative movement any good to get back into to power without a mandate. The experience with the Bushes proved it. They took America as the found it; they didn't try to change it."
The larger point may be this: It's not just that wobbly Republicanism will do the conservative movement little good but that it does the American people little good. A go-along-to-get-along GOP lacks the needed Constitutional and Declarational foundations to demand change in the direction of human freedom and dignity. That kind of change is not consistent with big secularist government centered in Washington and with tentacles in our cars, refrigerators, and living rooms.
What needs conserving -- and protecting and advancing -- is not the hard statism of liberalism or the slower road to hard statism of squishy Republicanism. No, what needs "conserving" is the fight for freedom and unalienable rights endowed by the Creator -- just as the timeless, true, and living content of the Declaration proclaims.
