Grassroots Activists Help Launch Historic “Contract from America”

THECONTRACT.ORG, NEWS RELEASE, 4/14/2010 - On April 15th, hundreds of local Tea Party and limited government groups around the country will join together to announce the launch of the “Contract from America,” a grassroots legislative blueprint for 2010 and beyond. Originally proposed by Ryan Hecker, a Houston Tea Party activist and National Coordinator for the initiative’s chief organizing group Tea Party Patriots, this project is intended to present a different kind of agenda for our federal lawmakers: unlike the Contract with America introduced in the 1990s, everyday citizens proposed and voted on every plank of the Contract from America. Read more about the launch at The Contract.org...

Sign The Contract from America HERE.

Read the contract...

The Contract from America

We, the citizens of the United States of America, call upon those seeking to represent us in public office to sign the Contract from America and by doing so commit to support each of its agenda items and advocate on behalf of individual liberty, limited government, and economic freedom.

Individual Liberty

Our moral, political, and economic liberties are inherent, not granted by our government. It is essential to the practice of these liberties that we be free from restriction over our peaceful political expression and free from excessive control over our economic choices.

Limited Government

The purpose of our government is to exercise only those limited powers that have been relinquished to it by the people, chief among these being the protection of our liberties by administering justice and ensuring our safety from threats arising inside or outside our country’s sovereign borders. When our government ventures beyond these functions and attempts to increase its power over the marketplace and the economic decisions of individuals, our liberties are diminished and the probability of corruption, internal strife, economic depression, and poverty increases.

Economic Freedom

The most powerful, proven instrument of material and social progress is the free market. The market economy, driven by the accumulated expressions of individual economic choices, is the only economic system that preserves and enhances individual liberty. Any other economic system, regardless of its intended pragmatic benefits, undermines our fundamental rights as free people.

1. Protect the Constitution

Require each bill to identify the specific provision of the Constitution that gives Congress the power to do what the bill does. (82.03%)

2. Reject Cap & Trade

Stop costly new regulations that would increase unemployment, raise consumer prices, and weaken the nation’s global competitiveness with virtually no impact on global temperatures. (72.20%)

3. Demand a Balanced Budget

Begin the Constitutional amendment process to require a balanced budget with a two-thirds majority needed for any tax hike. (69.69%)

4. Enact Fundamental Tax Reform

Adopt a simple and fair single-rate tax system by scrapping the internal revenue code and replacing it with one that is no longer than 4,543 words—the length of the original Constitution. (64.90%)

5. Restore Fiscal Responsibility & Constitutionally Limited Government in Washington

Create a Blue Ribbon taskforce that engages in a complete audit of federal agencies and programs, assessing their Constitutionality, and identifying duplication, waste, ineffectiveness, and agencies and programs better left for the states or local authorities, or ripe for wholesale reform or elimination due to our efforts to restore limited government consistent with the US Constitution’s meaning. (63.37%)

6. End Runaway Government Spending

Impose a statutory cap limiting the annual growth in total federal spending to the sum of the inflation rate plus the percentage of population growth. (56.57%)

7. Defund, Repeal, & Replace Government-run Health Care

Defund, repeal and replace the recently passed government-run health care with a system that actually makes health care and insurance more affordable by enabling a competitive, open, and transparent free-market health care and health insurance system that isn’t restricted by state boundaries. (56.39%)

8. Pass an ‘All-of-the-Above” Energy Policy

Authorize the exploration of proven energy reserves to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources from unstable countries and reduce regulatory barriers to all other forms of energy creation, lowering prices and creating competition and jobs. (55.51%)

9. Stop the Pork

Place a moratorium on all earmarks until the budget is balanced, and then require a 2/3 majority to pass any earmark. (55.47%)

10. Stop the Tax Hikes

Permanently repeal all tax hikes, including those to the income, capital gains, and death taxes, currently scheduled to begin in 2011. (53.38%)

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Get involved. Sign the Contract. Join the movement. Make sure your voice and your priorities are heard. Together, we can and will make a difference.

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News from CPAC

BREITBART, 2/20/2010 - WASHINGTON (AP): Glenn Beck says it's still morning in America: a head-pounding, hangover morning. The conservative commentator drew cheers from conservative activists Saturday night in a speech that implored Republicans to renounce profligate ways in Washington, let big banks fail and honor true conservative principles. ∴ Beck was keynote speaker for the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. The TV and radio host said the GOP should confess its adherence to big government in the way golfer Tiger Woods admitted a problem with women—and show the same remorse. ∴ Democrats didn't get off the hook. Beck called "progressivism" a disease imperiling the morning in America that Ronald Reagan saw as full of promise.

CPAC Presidential Straw Poll Results per Washington Post:

Ron Paul 31%
Mitt Romney 22%
Sarah Palin 7%
Tim Pawlenty 6%
Mike Pence 5%
Newt Gingrich 4%
Mike Huckabee 4%
Mitch Daniels 2%
John Thune 2%
Rick Santorum 2%
Haley Barbour 1%

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Grass Roots Issues Education is the Key to Winning Elections, Advice from Ronald Reagan

VIA EMAIL, 6/1/2009 by Suzanne Gallagher (Hat tip: Jeff Limón) - Phyllis Schlafly in her December ’08 newsletter (sometimes it takes awhile to read these excellent articles) came to a compelling conclusion, one that I have touted for some time. She noted that it is education of the Grass Roots that wins elections, not connections with people in high places. Schlafly: We Must Educate Leaders To Be Conservatives

Phyllis points out the history lessons to be learned...

“After the 1964 defeat, conservatives were persuaded to support the moderate candidate who had cozied up to the Rockefeller establishment, Richard Nixon, instead of Ronald Reagan who was also available. In preferring Nixon and electing him in 1968, conservatives mistakenly overemphasized experience.

After Republicans lost massively in the post-Watergate Congressional elections of 1974, Ronald Reagan spent six years working the grassroots, speaking at dinners, answering audience questions…making radio broadcasts, and learning from average Americans. By 1980, Reagan had sharpened his conservative philosophy in sync with what Americans want from their leaders…”

See? The candidate positioned himself long before the campaign season began!

Phyllis notes that,

“Increasingly, voters believe we have one-party government: the party of the D.C. insiders who socialize together, appear in the media, and give handouts and bailouts to their powerful friends and favored constituencies. Conservatives can defeat that party by campaigning from the ground up, not the top down.

While Obama's supporters fight over who gets which government titles and bask in favorable media attention, conservatives should not only educate the grassroots, but also educate all potential candidates. It would be a mistake to leave the selection of the issues in the next election to the media. When prominent members of the media chaired the 2008 presidential debates, many of the most vital issues were simply excluded, such as immigration, illegal aliens, abortion, same-sex marriage, jobs, and trade policies. We can't afford to wait for a handful of state primaries in 2012 to get vital issues out on the table for debate.

Republicans should follow Ronald Reagan's example and focus on the grassroots with a campaign that will be a learning process for both the voters and potential candidates. It is important to educate the voters about the issues, and it's even more important to educate all those who are vying to become our leaders. That can best be done by having them criss-cross the country, speak to small groups, and open themselves up to questioning about real issues. Only then can they demonstrate that they are authentic rather than pseudo-conservatives.”

Advice from Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan sharpened his own conservative philosophy and his vision of where America as he traveled the country speaking to groups prior to his nomination for President. His speech to the 1975 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) spelled out his formula:

“We have been through a disastrous election. It is easy for us to be discouraged, as pundits hail that election as a repudiation of our philosophy and even as a mandate of some kind or other. But the significance of the election was not registered by those who voted, but by those who stayed home. . . .

It is possible we have been persuasive to a greater degree than we had ever realized. Few, if any Democratic Party candidates in the last election ran as liberals. . . . Bureaucracy was assailed and fiscal responsibility hailed. . . . Make no mistake, the leadership of the Democratic Party is still out of step with the majority of Americans. . . .

I don't know about you, but I am impatient with those Republicans who after the last election rushed into print saying, "We must broaden the base of our Party" — when what they meant was to fuzz up and blur even more the differences between ourselves and our opponents.

It was a feeling that there was not a sufficient difference now between the parties that kept a majority of the voters away from the polls. When have we ever advocated a closed-door policy? Who has ever been barred from participating?

Our people look for a cause to believe in. Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people?

Let us show that we stand for fiscal integrity and sound money and above all for an end to deficit spending, with ultimate retirement of the national debt. Let us also include a permanent limit on the percentage of people's earnings government can take without their consent (I included that in my “issues” paper! see attached). . . . Let us explore ways to ward off socialism. . . .

A political party cannot be all things to all people. It must represent certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency, or simply to swell its numbers. I do not believe I have proposed anything that is contrary to what has been considered Republican principle. It is at the same time the very basis of conservatism.

It is time to reassert that principle and raise it to full view. And if there are those who cannot subscribe to these principles, then let them go their way.”

Seems like yesterday that Reagan spoke those words…..they are true today! Read More......