Direction of the Conservative Movement
This is Mike Pence's speech at the American Enterprise Institute discussing the direction of the Conservative Movement.
CONGRESSMAN PENCE: Thank you, David, and I want to thank the American Enterprise Institute for letting me be seen publicly with Newt Gingrich.
CONGRESSMAN PENCE: I want to disabuse you all of the rumor that I dye my hair to look like Newt Gingrich.
[Laughter.]
CONGRESSMAN PENCE: Although I have said to Speaker Gingrich other than the voice of Ronald Reagan, when I entered politics in 1987 in the State of Indiana for what became the first of the three campaigns that took me to ride in Washington, D.C., other than the voice of Ronald Reagan, it was the clarion voice of the back bench bomb thrower who would become Whip, who would become Speaker that most influenced my early nascent thinking about the Republican Party, and I'm truly humbled to have the opportunity to speak about the future of our movement and the future of our party with Speaker Gingrich at my side.
A few minutes, and then I'll yield to my betters.
I believe the conservative movement is, as David suggested, the conservative movement is at a crossroads in America. And I think as the Republican Party did 40 years ago, as then actor Ronald Reagan said 40 years ago, I think we've come to another time for choosing whether we're committed to the ideals of limited government, fiscal discipline, and traditional moral values, or whether we will continue to sacrifice those principles on the altar of preserving our governing majority.
I offer that the 2004 campaign became a referendum on conservative principles.
Most of us remember the rhetoric of that campaign. The President was supposed to lose because he had been "taken captive by the Right in his party."
And inasmuch as before the election, the media made it a referendum on conservative ideals, I believe the President's reelection was an endorsement of the conservative agenda on the national level.
And today in Congress, I'm proud to report as Chairman of the House Conservative Caucus, known as the Republican Study Committee, that there is a new generation of men and women who aspire to do as those before us have done, and namely do the work that the American people elect conservatives to do, to lead this country on behalf of limited government and traditional moral values.
But as I've said, on a number of occasions, since I had the privilege of keynoting at the Conservative Political Action Conference a few short years ago, there is work to be done.
In light of two consecutive sessions of Congress that saw--one that saw a 52 percent increase in the federal Department of Education, the creation of national testing in Math and English, by Republican majorities and a Republican President, and the creation of the first new entitlement in 40 years, record increases in federal spending in every branch of government, I likened then the conservative movement to a tall ship plying the open seas of a simpler time; a proud captain, a strong and accomplished crew, but beneath the waves, imperceptibly, I argued that the rudder was veering off course into the dangerous and uncharted waters of big government Republicanism, for despite the enormous conservative achievements of the past four years, I see troubling signs that the ship of conservative governance is off course.
And as we come off of this extraordinary reelection of this good President and the preservation of this majority, I think we've come, with 2008 seemingly closer every day, to another time for choosing.
Ronald Reagan said famously, "government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem."
But many Republicans today see government increasingly as the solution to every social ill.
Our party and its rising generation of new leaders I submit face an age-old choice: the choice between the belief in limited government and tradition and the siren song of the central planner who says big government is good government if it's our government.
Let me say this point again because it's at the very essence of what I would observe about our movement today. Our choice between the belief in limited government and tradition and the siren song of the central planner, who says big government is good government if it's our government.
Ronald Reagan spoke of this choice in his famous speech in October 1964. He said, you and I are told we must chose between left or right, but I suggest there's no such thing as left or right. There's only up or down.
Up demands age-old dream, the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. The 40th President summed up his generation's choice--and I offer ours--as saying, "whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far distant capital can plan our lives better for us than we can plan them for ourselves."
So how do we find our way forward in this new governing majority? How do we ensure that a second Bush term and a 109th Congress reflects our party's commitment to limited government and tradition?
Well, I submit that, as I began with a maritime analogy, that we may find our answer in another maritime analogy. Many of us have read of popular contemporary accounts of the circumstances that surrounded Sir Ernest Shackleton's ship, the Endurance; 19 January 1915, after five months at sea, the Endurance was beset by an early ice pack in the seas north of Antarctica, and, as many know, the crew survived on the ice until the ship was destroyed, made their way to the edge of ocean, and it was there that Captain Shackleton made a decision to take a single life boat in an attempt to cross 800 miles of inhospitable ocean to make for the South Georgia Island and help.
He made it across that 800 miles, 16 tumultuous days, chipping at five and 10 inches of ice from that small craft, using an ancient form of navigation known as dead reckoning, for, you see, they could not find their way through the traditional means of navigation. They lacked both the equipment and they lacked other than for a very short period of times any ability to navigate off of the stars or off of the sun, because of the nature of the weather. But they used this ancient system of dead reckoning, where the navigator finds his course by measuring the course and distance he sailed from some fixed position. If the navigator has a fixed starting point, tracking heading and speed, he can calculate the exact location of the ship at any time.
Dead reckoning saved the Endurance. And I would submit to you today that dead reckoning can also save the course of Republican governance in the 21st century, namely I believe that conservatives must dead reckon off the starting point of what we know to be true about government, about the nature of government, and then we won't lose our way.
These are themes that Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater brought into the national debate; before him Russell Kirk and Friedrich Hayek, and I would say before them Edmund Burke, and the man who sits to my left only physically today brought them to the national stage as none other of his contemporaries.
But here are the principles as I see them.
Conservatives I submit know that government that governs least governs best. Conservatives know as government expands, freedom contracts. Conservatives know that government should never do for a person what they can and should do for themselves. And conservatives know that societies are judged by how they deal with the most vulnerable--the unborn, the aged, the infirmed, and the disabled.
I submit that as we navigate off these fixed truths, the way forward is clear. We must as a movement rediscover the principles of limited government that brought our party to power in 1980 and in 1994, and put them into practice.
But this requires that conservatives have an agenda built on the principles of limited government and tradition, an agenda that comprises what conservatives must do and also candidly what conservatives must undo.
Let me touch on those briefly before I yield to the speaker for his remarks.
First, in the category of what conservatives must undo, the negative, some hard truth: I submit first and foremost that conservatives must be a movement dedicated to the principles of freedom and liberty, and conservatives must dedicate themselves as we are purposing to do in the next month on Capital Hill, to bringing freedom back to our campaign finance reform laws.
We must reassert the freedom of speech in American political life that was so damaged by the bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, and even more significantly by the affirmation of every element of that Act, with all of its speech restrictions in the decision by the Supreme Court in the McConnell case that I was privileged to be a plaintiff in. We must undo that damage. We must recognize as Congress tries to wrestle with the aftermath of what I call the summer of 5/27ths. Congress must recognize as our legislation does that the only proper answer to inequities in the political economy of a free society is more freedom, not less freedom.
And so we've drafted what's come to be known as the Pence-Wynn 5/27 Fairness Act that actually answers the inequities of our system with the antidote of freedom.
Thomas Jefferson said and I paraphrase that I would rather be faced with the inconveniences that attend too much freedom than those that attend too little a degree of it. And our party and our movement must once again be a movement dedicated to the principles of freedom.
Secondly, we must again embrace the principles of limited government by undoing the entitlement aspects of the Medicare Prescription Drug bill. I was one of 25 members of Congress that facilitated the longest vote in the history of the United States House of Representatives--nearly three hours in the wee hours of Congress just a year and a half ago.
It was a difficult time for everyone involved in the debate, but it was a matter of days following that vote that we learned that the Medicare entitlement estimates were literally hundreds of billions of dollars off, and the price tag continues to grow. I submit to you that President Bush was right in the 2000 campaign when he articulated a vision of compassionate conservatism that said that we're a better country than that we would ever require any American to do without medicines that they need. But let's not create a program, a one-size fits all program and that provides free prescription benefits for every senior regardless of their income. We must undo the prescription drug entitlement.
Lastly, I think conservatives must undo the fundamental expansion of the federal government's role in our local schools by reforming the No Child Left Behind Act, and embracing the principle that education is always should be a state and local function.
I believe Congress should apply the successful lessons of welfare reform that Speaker Gingrich brought into the national debate to education spending. We should think of Washington, D.C., as a place where we should produce resources, not red tape, recognizing the cure for whatever ails our local schools can be found in our local communities, with parents and teachers working in partnership to achieve them.
Well, these are three items that I believe conservatives must undo, but what conservatives must do is a bit more evident and more optimistic, and so I'll close on that point.
First, conservatives must be prepared to rally support in Congress and throughout the country for the President's agenda, where it conforms with the ideals of limited government. And the good news is that all the big three agenda items outlined by the President this year are worthy of vigorous conservative support. Modernizing Social Security, overhauling the Internal Revenue Code, and reforming the legal system all reflect conservative commitment to limited government in principle.
I'm particularly pleased to see the progress that colleagues of mine, like Paul Ryan and Sam Johnson and Clay Shaw have made working with Senator Jim DeMint and John Sununu in developing a modest and positive first step for Social Security reform. It would simply use the Social Security surplus that's being generated over the next 12 years, stop the raid on the fund, and use those resources to create modest personal savings accounts for every working American. It's an important first step down the road for reform.
It's an expression of the President's vision for an ownership society, and it's one that conservatives should embrace.
Also, House conservatives should put on the green eye shades and put our fiscal house in order. That means passing additional tax cuts to ensure continued economic growth; passing a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, achieving fundamental budget process reform, which House conservatives were proud to accomplish earlier this year as the Wall Street Journal noted, where we achieved modest but meaningful reform, giving members of the Congress for the first time ever the ability on the floor to enforce the budget, the first time that was accomplished in the last 30 years with the point of order protection that House conservatives negotiated during the last budget debate.
And we must be prepared to uphold a presidential veto on a spending bill that exceeds the budget.
These are tough decisions. And sometimes it's squares you off with Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie, but it's terrain that Speaker Gingrich was willing to traverse, and it's terrain that this Congress and this movement must be prepared to traverse again.
Lastly, in the category of freedom, we must recognize the heart of the American people is--beats with a commitment to moral freedom; that conservatives know that freedom means more than just actuarial perfection. It means gains in moral freedom.
Congress must take action to free the American people from the cultural consequences of an activist federal court that would impose their view of morality, patriotism, and the recognition of our most cherished institutions and symbols on our communities and our families.
The decision by the Supreme Court yesterday, the Solomonic decision, slicing in half how was as Americans might display what is, however inconvenient, the cornerstone of our system of law in Western civilization is an expression of that.
We must lay the groundwork to defend a strict constructionist nominee to the Supreme Court. We must pass the Federal Marriage Amendment by sufficient majorities to send it to the states, and we must pass additional legislative limitations on abortion and human cloning and destructive embryonic research.
So these are some suggestions, and I simply believe that they represent the very core elements of how the conservative movement can find its way back to those energetic days of early 1995 or even 1988, when it was in its ascendancy.
Let me close with a thought, though. These are difficult days in which we live. There are threats at home and abroad. We'll hear the President speak passionately about them tonight. There's expansion of government at home. There seems to be an erosion of a recognition of values in our communities as well as the law.
But I'm not discouraged because I believe that these are precisely the times, these crossroads, as David described them, are precisely the times when Americans are always at their best.
I'll quote, as I sit next to one of my favorite historians, from a letter Abigail Adams wrote to John Quincy Adams, 19 January 1780, when I think about these times.
She wrote to her son, who was anxious about another trip to France with his dad, "these are times in which a genius would wish to live. It's not in the still calm of life or in the repose of a pacific station that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised and animated by scenes that engage the heart, those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant wake into life and form a character of the hero and the statesman."
Let me say that we live in such times, and while this Middletown Congressman is hardly a genius on this panel, it is a time that has been invigorating to me and a great privilege to be able to serve in the 109th Congress. Thank you.
[Applause.]
MR. FRUM: Very good. Thank you, Congressman.
It is pretty remarkable I think to hear Congressmen who came to Washington the same year as President who has become a leader of the conservatives in the House of Representatives offer a plan, which at its core calls for redoing and undoing two of the three most signal accomplishments of the--or actions anyway of the President's first term--the prescription drug benefit and the No Child Left Behind. And I think that this fact in itself may tell something of the mood of American conservatism at this crossroads moment, and if that's not enough fireworks for you, I present Speaker Newt Gingrich.
CONGRESSMAN PENCE: Thank you, David, and I want to thank the American Enterprise Institute for letting me be seen publicly with Newt Gingrich.
CONGRESSMAN PENCE: I want to disabuse you all of the rumor that I dye my hair to look like Newt Gingrich.
[Laughter.]
CONGRESSMAN PENCE: Although I have said to Speaker Gingrich other than the voice of Ronald Reagan, when I entered politics in 1987 in the State of Indiana for what became the first of the three campaigns that took me to ride in Washington, D.C., other than the voice of Ronald Reagan, it was the clarion voice of the back bench bomb thrower who would become Whip, who would become Speaker that most influenced my early nascent thinking about the Republican Party, and I'm truly humbled to have the opportunity to speak about the future of our movement and the future of our party with Speaker Gingrich at my side.
A few minutes, and then I'll yield to my betters.
I believe the conservative movement is, as David suggested, the conservative movement is at a crossroads in America. And I think as the Republican Party did 40 years ago, as then actor Ronald Reagan said 40 years ago, I think we've come to another time for choosing whether we're committed to the ideals of limited government, fiscal discipline, and traditional moral values, or whether we will continue to sacrifice those principles on the altar of preserving our governing majority.
I offer that the 2004 campaign became a referendum on conservative principles.
Most of us remember the rhetoric of that campaign. The President was supposed to lose because he had been "taken captive by the Right in his party."
And inasmuch as before the election, the media made it a referendum on conservative ideals, I believe the President's reelection was an endorsement of the conservative agenda on the national level.
And today in Congress, I'm proud to report as Chairman of the House Conservative Caucus, known as the Republican Study Committee, that there is a new generation of men and women who aspire to do as those before us have done, and namely do the work that the American people elect conservatives to do, to lead this country on behalf of limited government and traditional moral values.
But as I've said, on a number of occasions, since I had the privilege of keynoting at the Conservative Political Action Conference a few short years ago, there is work to be done.
In light of two consecutive sessions of Congress that saw--one that saw a 52 percent increase in the federal Department of Education, the creation of national testing in Math and English, by Republican majorities and a Republican President, and the creation of the first new entitlement in 40 years, record increases in federal spending in every branch of government, I likened then the conservative movement to a tall ship plying the open seas of a simpler time; a proud captain, a strong and accomplished crew, but beneath the waves, imperceptibly, I argued that the rudder was veering off course into the dangerous and uncharted waters of big government Republicanism, for despite the enormous conservative achievements of the past four years, I see troubling signs that the ship of conservative governance is off course.
And as we come off of this extraordinary reelection of this good President and the preservation of this majority, I think we've come, with 2008 seemingly closer every day, to another time for choosing.
Ronald Reagan said famously, "government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem."
But many Republicans today see government increasingly as the solution to every social ill.
Our party and its rising generation of new leaders I submit face an age-old choice: the choice between the belief in limited government and tradition and the siren song of the central planner who says big government is good government if it's our government.
Let me say this point again because it's at the very essence of what I would observe about our movement today. Our choice between the belief in limited government and tradition and the siren song of the central planner, who says big government is good government if it's our government.
Ronald Reagan spoke of this choice in his famous speech in October 1964. He said, you and I are told we must chose between left or right, but I suggest there's no such thing as left or right. There's only up or down.
Up demands age-old dream, the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. The 40th President summed up his generation's choice--and I offer ours--as saying, "whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far distant capital can plan our lives better for us than we can plan them for ourselves."
So how do we find our way forward in this new governing majority? How do we ensure that a second Bush term and a 109th Congress reflects our party's commitment to limited government and tradition?
Well, I submit that, as I began with a maritime analogy, that we may find our answer in another maritime analogy. Many of us have read of popular contemporary accounts of the circumstances that surrounded Sir Ernest Shackleton's ship, the Endurance; 19 January 1915, after five months at sea, the Endurance was beset by an early ice pack in the seas north of Antarctica, and, as many know, the crew survived on the ice until the ship was destroyed, made their way to the edge of ocean, and it was there that Captain Shackleton made a decision to take a single life boat in an attempt to cross 800 miles of inhospitable ocean to make for the South Georgia Island and help.
He made it across that 800 miles, 16 tumultuous days, chipping at five and 10 inches of ice from that small craft, using an ancient form of navigation known as dead reckoning, for, you see, they could not find their way through the traditional means of navigation. They lacked both the equipment and they lacked other than for a very short period of times any ability to navigate off of the stars or off of the sun, because of the nature of the weather. But they used this ancient system of dead reckoning, where the navigator finds his course by measuring the course and distance he sailed from some fixed position. If the navigator has a fixed starting point, tracking heading and speed, he can calculate the exact location of the ship at any time.
Dead reckoning saved the Endurance. And I would submit to you today that dead reckoning can also save the course of Republican governance in the 21st century, namely I believe that conservatives must dead reckon off the starting point of what we know to be true about government, about the nature of government, and then we won't lose our way.
These are themes that Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater brought into the national debate; before him Russell Kirk and Friedrich Hayek, and I would say before them Edmund Burke, and the man who sits to my left only physically today brought them to the national stage as none other of his contemporaries.
But here are the principles as I see them.
Conservatives I submit know that government that governs least governs best. Conservatives know as government expands, freedom contracts. Conservatives know that government should never do for a person what they can and should do for themselves. And conservatives know that societies are judged by how they deal with the most vulnerable--the unborn, the aged, the infirmed, and the disabled.
I submit that as we navigate off these fixed truths, the way forward is clear. We must as a movement rediscover the principles of limited government that brought our party to power in 1980 and in 1994, and put them into practice.
But this requires that conservatives have an agenda built on the principles of limited government and tradition, an agenda that comprises what conservatives must do and also candidly what conservatives must undo.
Let me touch on those briefly before I yield to the speaker for his remarks.
First, in the category of what conservatives must undo, the negative, some hard truth: I submit first and foremost that conservatives must be a movement dedicated to the principles of freedom and liberty, and conservatives must dedicate themselves as we are purposing to do in the next month on Capital Hill, to bringing freedom back to our campaign finance reform laws.
We must reassert the freedom of speech in American political life that was so damaged by the bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, and even more significantly by the affirmation of every element of that Act, with all of its speech restrictions in the decision by the Supreme Court in the McConnell case that I was privileged to be a plaintiff in. We must undo that damage. We must recognize as Congress tries to wrestle with the aftermath of what I call the summer of 5/27ths. Congress must recognize as our legislation does that the only proper answer to inequities in the political economy of a free society is more freedom, not less freedom.
And so we've drafted what's come to be known as the Pence-Wynn 5/27 Fairness Act that actually answers the inequities of our system with the antidote of freedom.
Thomas Jefferson said and I paraphrase that I would rather be faced with the inconveniences that attend too much freedom than those that attend too little a degree of it. And our party and our movement must once again be a movement dedicated to the principles of freedom.
Secondly, we must again embrace the principles of limited government by undoing the entitlement aspects of the Medicare Prescription Drug bill. I was one of 25 members of Congress that facilitated the longest vote in the history of the United States House of Representatives--nearly three hours in the wee hours of Congress just a year and a half ago.
It was a difficult time for everyone involved in the debate, but it was a matter of days following that vote that we learned that the Medicare entitlement estimates were literally hundreds of billions of dollars off, and the price tag continues to grow. I submit to you that President Bush was right in the 2000 campaign when he articulated a vision of compassionate conservatism that said that we're a better country than that we would ever require any American to do without medicines that they need. But let's not create a program, a one-size fits all program and that provides free prescription benefits for every senior regardless of their income. We must undo the prescription drug entitlement.
Lastly, I think conservatives must undo the fundamental expansion of the federal government's role in our local schools by reforming the No Child Left Behind Act, and embracing the principle that education is always should be a state and local function.
I believe Congress should apply the successful lessons of welfare reform that Speaker Gingrich brought into the national debate to education spending. We should think of Washington, D.C., as a place where we should produce resources, not red tape, recognizing the cure for whatever ails our local schools can be found in our local communities, with parents and teachers working in partnership to achieve them.
Well, these are three items that I believe conservatives must undo, but what conservatives must do is a bit more evident and more optimistic, and so I'll close on that point.
First, conservatives must be prepared to rally support in Congress and throughout the country for the President's agenda, where it conforms with the ideals of limited government. And the good news is that all the big three agenda items outlined by the President this year are worthy of vigorous conservative support. Modernizing Social Security, overhauling the Internal Revenue Code, and reforming the legal system all reflect conservative commitment to limited government in principle.
I'm particularly pleased to see the progress that colleagues of mine, like Paul Ryan and Sam Johnson and Clay Shaw have made working with Senator Jim DeMint and John Sununu in developing a modest and positive first step for Social Security reform. It would simply use the Social Security surplus that's being generated over the next 12 years, stop the raid on the fund, and use those resources to create modest personal savings accounts for every working American. It's an important first step down the road for reform.
It's an expression of the President's vision for an ownership society, and it's one that conservatives should embrace.
Also, House conservatives should put on the green eye shades and put our fiscal house in order. That means passing additional tax cuts to ensure continued economic growth; passing a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, achieving fundamental budget process reform, which House conservatives were proud to accomplish earlier this year as the Wall Street Journal noted, where we achieved modest but meaningful reform, giving members of the Congress for the first time ever the ability on the floor to enforce the budget, the first time that was accomplished in the last 30 years with the point of order protection that House conservatives negotiated during the last budget debate.
And we must be prepared to uphold a presidential veto on a spending bill that exceeds the budget.
These are tough decisions. And sometimes it's squares you off with Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie, but it's terrain that Speaker Gingrich was willing to traverse, and it's terrain that this Congress and this movement must be prepared to traverse again.
Lastly, in the category of freedom, we must recognize the heart of the American people is--beats with a commitment to moral freedom; that conservatives know that freedom means more than just actuarial perfection. It means gains in moral freedom.
Congress must take action to free the American people from the cultural consequences of an activist federal court that would impose their view of morality, patriotism, and the recognition of our most cherished institutions and symbols on our communities and our families.
The decision by the Supreme Court yesterday, the Solomonic decision, slicing in half how was as Americans might display what is, however inconvenient, the cornerstone of our system of law in Western civilization is an expression of that.
We must lay the groundwork to defend a strict constructionist nominee to the Supreme Court. We must pass the Federal Marriage Amendment by sufficient majorities to send it to the states, and we must pass additional legislative limitations on abortion and human cloning and destructive embryonic research.
So these are some suggestions, and I simply believe that they represent the very core elements of how the conservative movement can find its way back to those energetic days of early 1995 or even 1988, when it was in its ascendancy.
Let me close with a thought, though. These are difficult days in which we live. There are threats at home and abroad. We'll hear the President speak passionately about them tonight. There's expansion of government at home. There seems to be an erosion of a recognition of values in our communities as well as the law.
But I'm not discouraged because I believe that these are precisely the times, these crossroads, as David described them, are precisely the times when Americans are always at their best.
I'll quote, as I sit next to one of my favorite historians, from a letter Abigail Adams wrote to John Quincy Adams, 19 January 1780, when I think about these times.
She wrote to her son, who was anxious about another trip to France with his dad, "these are times in which a genius would wish to live. It's not in the still calm of life or in the repose of a pacific station that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised and animated by scenes that engage the heart, those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant wake into life and form a character of the hero and the statesman."
Let me say that we live in such times, and while this Middletown Congressman is hardly a genius on this panel, it is a time that has been invigorating to me and a great privilege to be able to serve in the 109th Congress. Thank you.
[Applause.]
MR. FRUM: Very good. Thank you, Congressman.
It is pretty remarkable I think to hear Congressmen who came to Washington the same year as President who has become a leader of the conservatives in the House of Representatives offer a plan, which at its core calls for redoing and undoing two of the three most signal accomplishments of the--or actions anyway of the President's first term--the prescription drug benefit and the No Child Left Behind. And I think that this fact in itself may tell something of the mood of American conservatism at this crossroads moment, and if that's not enough fireworks for you, I present Speaker Newt Gingrich.
