“And Now, the Real Work Begins” (…and some words about Steve Munisteri and the RPT)

This post originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics.

It is still a little overwhelming when I think about the gains Republicans made in last week’s mid-term elections.

With control of both houses of Congress, 67 state legislative chambers, at least 31 governorships, and a majority of Republican-appointed justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, we have the best chance in many years of producing real governmental reform that restores the constitutional allocation of federal responsibility and competence between the state and federal governments in a way that creates a solid foundation for growth, opportunity and liberty for the rest of this century. 

That restoration must move along two tracks simultaneously: one at the state and local level, which restores trust, effectiveness, and responsibility for most domestic governmental functions; and one at the federal level, which restores

• the proper functioning of the legislative branch;
• the constitutional checks and balances among the three branches;
• the proper limits of federal responsibility;
• the effectiveness of the federal government when exercising its proper responsibilities;
• a pro-growth and opportunity national and international economic policy that had been embraced by administrations of both parties for more than a generation;
• a modern interstate infrastructure of roads, bridges, rail-lines, waterways and canals, dams, nuclear power plants, electricity grids, and pipelines to meet the foreseeable needs of the nation for the next several generations;
• the proper limits of the size and responsibility of the administrative agencies that have evolved into a de facto fourth branch of government outside of the constitutional structure; and
• (through the proper exercise of the Senate’s advice-and-consent and oversight responsibilities) the focus of our foreign and military policy toward a more realistic acceptance and exercise of our post-World War II global responsibilities.

In my last posts in August of this year, I provided a philosophic foundation for these reforms, and I will not restate them here. Instead, I’ll just ask you to re-read them: Mercy, Trust, and the Future of the Republican Party; and Mercy, Trust, and the Future of the Republican Party – Part 2.

Although my list of reforms at the federal level is longer, the actual action that we should expect at the federal level will be slower and more limited over the next two years because the task at hand is to reverse the growth of the federal government that has occurred over the last 100 years, and that has exploded over the last 6 years, while we still have a President who is committed to its expansion by any means (constitutional or not) that he chooses.

 

While our Representatives and Senators fight with patient persistence to hold the line in Washington and proceed with the incremental reforms that are needed, the opportunity for the most far-reaching and effective reforms are at the state and local levels. Following the courage shown by Governors Walker, Snyder and Daniels in the Midwest over the last few years, we must commit ourselves to reform state and local governments so that they can accept the larger responsibilities they must exercise if we are to restore limited government at the federal level. This will require a commitment to govern effectively, efficiently and wisely—but to govern. It will require fundamentally reforming and re-building

• educational systems from the classrooms and the professionalization of teaching, through the school districts and state agencies;
• state budgeting processes;
• the relationship of government employees to the government, including their compensation systems;
• opportunities for education and employment in every neighborhood, including the assimilation of every citizen into our society;
• law enforcement systems that continue no tolerance for “broken windows” while providing meaningful opportunities for first-time offenders (and their families and neighborhoods) to avoid a life of under-education, under-employment caused by over-incarceration;
• a network of public and private agencies to provide health and safety-net systems for the addicted, the poor and the unemployed with the goal of helping them to become (to the extent possible) self-sufficient members of our communities;
• tax policies and systems that raise sufficient revenue to fund the government while promoting growth, but without creating subsidies that pick winners and losers or reward cronies;
• a physical infrastructure of roads, rail-lines, ports, airports, and utilities—and adequate public transportation alternatives in urban areas—to meet the expected growth over the next several generations; and
• most importantly, the trust of our neighbors that state and local governments will function fairly and justly, as well as effectively and efficiently.

I am still an optimist—I believe all of this is doable if we commit to the long struggle it will take to persuade our neighbors of the correctness of our goals, and to the patience it will take to formulate and implement these goals. This election gave us the opportunity to start this process, but we must seize that opportunity—now, the real work begins.

P.S.

Steve Munisteri publicly confirmed yesterday at the Greater Houston Pachyderm Club what he has been saying privately for several months: he will not serve his entire two-year term until the RPT Convention in 2016. Although he did not say when he would step down, his confirmation means that the SREC will soon choose a new Chair to serve the remainder of Steve’s term.

For me, this is a bitter-sweet moment. Sweet, because the efforts that were started by a handful of us in 2009 to improve the financial and organizational management of the Republican Party at the county and state levels were first realized under the Steve’s leadership at the RPT, and those efforts have now started to bear fruit here in Harris County since the election of Paul Simpson. I am proud to say I supported Steve’s quixotic campaign against the incumbent Chair in 2010, and I am even prouder of his accomplishments—he did what he said he would do, and then some. How rare is that in public life?

Bitter, because I know that his work is not done, and he leaves big shoes to fill. All I can do for now is hope that the candidates who come forward to run for Chair will pledge to continue Steve’s approach to the financial and operational management of the RPT and the Victory campaigns, including his ongoing efforts to grow the party in every community and demographic group in this state. We don’t need to return to the days when we confused cheerleading for leadership—we need to continue the hard work of real leadership that Steve started.

Steve, thank you. I wish you all the best in whatever you choose to do next. You’ve earned my unswerving admiration for all you’ve done.

Mercy, Trust, and the Future of the Republican Party

This post originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics.

Though I’ve paused from a lot of blogging about politics this year, I haven’t stopped thinking about it. It’s just that, because there is so much going on that troubles me, it is hard to process it all and remain positive—and I didn’t want to write much again until I could offer something I felt was positive to consider.

What I kept coming back to was a conversation I had with two lawyers during a dinner in New York over 20 years ago. As we paused from discussing the cases we were working on together, our discussion turned to politics—both local to New York and nationally. Both of my colleagues from New York were liberal Democrats, and as I listened to them a thought came to my mind that—being young and a little impetuous—I offered to them. It went something like this:

I think the biggest problem in politics today is that politicians don’t seem to be addressing the issues that government was designed to address, and I think that is because, in part, we’ve forgotten how to show mercy to our fellow man.

Remember that at the end of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, Christ posed the question: “So which of these three do you think was neighbor to him who fell among the thieves?” And the lawyer answered, “He who showed mercy upon him.” Then Christ affirmed the lawyer’s answer by saying, “Go and do likewise.”

I look around and too few people in public life are showing the mercy that truly loving their neighbor requires of them. Today, we still have people walking down the road, like the priest and the Levite, who avert their eyes and keep walking—they’ve always been among us. But now it seems as though the people who do stop to help the stripped and wounded man on the side of the road do one of two things: they either stop others, demand contributions from them (like taxes or tolls), and then give the donations to the man on the side of the road; or they sermonize to the man on how his own mistakes led to his current predicament and how he should change his life to avoid such calamities in the future. Then, both men leave, feeling good about themselves and the help they believe they provided to him; meanwhile, the stripped and wounded man on the side of the road is still left to die.

There are no Samaritans among us today.

I remember my dinner companions stopped and looked at me, and said nothing for what seemed an eternity. Then the senior attorney looked at me and said, “Ed, I can’t find any basis to disagree with you. Sadly, we are all at fault for this.” Then the conversation moved quickly on to a sailing regatta the other attorney would be participating in that weekend, and we never broached the subject again.

Based on this reaction, I rarely tried to express this idea again publicly, but I still believe it to be the primary problem we face today—and it has only gotten worse over the last two decades. I believe that the political party that correctly embraces the ideal of the Samaritan as the core of our society will be the party that captures the imagination and the trust of the voters. The ideal of the Samaritan should be the natural position of American Conservatives and the Republican Party, if only we will embrace it.

Our Settlers and Founding Fathers understood and accepted the challenge of trying to create a society around the Samaritan ideal on this Continent, even though they were woefully blind in their initial application of this ideal when it came to Catholics, Native Americans, Africans, Irish and Women (just to name a few groups)—a blindness that would haunt us for centuries. But the ideal itself became the correcting force that eventually changed our society for the better.

It is the Samaritan ideal that led us to form families, congregations, civic organizations, and private businesses; to create the neighborhoods where these institutions would take root and flourish; to push those neighborhoods across a continent; to form colonies and states to preserve and protect those neighborhoods; to create a nation to protect this societal structure; and, finally, to open our society’s promise to all its citizens.

The limited nature of the federal government wasn’t designed to oppress individuals, but rather to protect the sanctity and vitality of these neighborhoods of free people, in which most of the decisions that would guide day-to-day life would be made and performed.

This model only works, though, if the ideal is taken seriously—that each citizen, in his or her own way, accepts the challenge to show mercy to our neighbors. Unless each citizen accepts this responsibility, the trust necessary for the model to sustain self-governance at the local and state level evaporates and creates a vacuum—a vacuum that is subject to being filled by an expanding federal government that is not institutionally competent to fill it. Forget the express limits written into the Constitution for a minute, and just remember that far-away agents, bureaucrats, and social workers with one-size-fits-all assignments, regardless of their best intentions, will never provide the mercy that our Settlers and Founders believed would be necessary to build and maintain trusting neighborhoods of free people.

We can argue until the cows come home over how and why we got into our present mess, but the time for political change is now and the blueprint for that change has always been within our grasp—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution (as amended), and the Federalist Papers. What is needed now is the will to embrace the Samaritan ideal and our founding blueprint, and to apply it to our diverse 21^st Century society. What is needed now is the willingness to seriously address the reforms at each level of government—from Washington to our school boards—that is needed to restore the mercy and rebuild the trust needed to apply our American blueprint to the 21^st Century.

We will never corral and control public spending and debt until we make this reform, we will never fix public education until we make this reform, we will never fix both the security of our borders and our immigration policies without this reform, and we will be unable to meet the commitments we promised to the rest of the world after World War II unless we commit to this reform.

If the Republican Party embraces this reform, and explains how it will improve the lives of each of our citizens by giving them the means to control their lives and accomplish their dreams for themselves and their children, we will regain the trust of voters needed to win elections and govern. But to do that, we Republicans must practice what we preach among ourselves, too—we must show mercy and trust among our own factions, for as Lincoln reminded us so long ago, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

As a life-long Republican who continues to revere the life’s work of Lincoln, Goldwater, Dirksen, Reagan and Kemp, I believe we can—we must, we will—accept this challenge and embrace this reform.