Paul Ryan For Speaker

Steve Parkhurst and I have written an editorial in support of Congressman Paul Ryan for Speaker of the House. Please visit Big Jolly Politics to read it.

My editorial in the Dallas Morning News

My editorial, which first appeared at Big Jolly Politics, was printed in today's Dallas Morning News.

“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.

A Prayer to Bury the Loner Among Us

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:


As we entered the past weekend and prepared for Thanksgiving, a wave of emotions and thoughts hit me as I stopped and absorbed so many of the articles and TV documentaries about the end of John F. Kennedy’s life and Presidency. I know a lot has already been printed and broadcast about this event over the last week, but for me, there is another perspective I want to share with you in light of all the turmoil that has been swirling around us over the last few months.

Looking back over the years since three rifle shots rang out on that Friday afternoon in November, 1963, I believe the most important consequence of that event has been the deterioration of the social trust needed for our unique society of free people to function properly. For some reason, the shared sorrow of that day long ago seems to have created reactions among us, which ripped at the fabric of our social trust in ways that we have never come to grips with.

Robert Putnam, author of the landmark work, Bowling Alone, used the term “social capital” to describe the web of interdependent relationships and networks we have used over the centuries to create and maintain a society of free people. What his studies have noted is a sharp decline in “social capital” over the last 50 years. With the loss of this social capital, we have too many people living in physical communities without any sense of neighborhood with each other, and that loss of neighborhood has led to social dysfunctions in our families, our schools, our communities, and our politics. Without this social capital, we have become more and more dependent on governments and other institutions to provide for the needs of society—needs that used to be filled by private relationships and networks among neighbors in communities, churches, local schools, work places, and civic organizations.

Putnam’s books and articles search for ways in which social capital can be re-built. But the type of interdependence that is needed to build and maintain social capital cannot be re-established without trust. And it is trust that we no longer share with our neighbors—trust that allowed a generation of kids to ride their bikes down the street and play in the local parks without adult planning or supervision; trust that led the families of judges and business owners and doctors and executives to live and participate in the same neighborhoods as teachers and factory foremen and union members; and trust that allowed our parents to work together in civic organizations regardless of their politics or religion.

It was a form of social trust that a young John Kennedy described in a speech (quoted by Putnam in Bowling Alone) Kennedy gave during his first campaign for Congress in 1946:

Most of the courage shown in the war came from men’s understanding of their interdependence on each other. Men were saving other men’s lives at risk of their own simply because they realized that perhaps the next day their lives would be saved in turn…We must work together…We must have the same unity that we had during the war.

At a very basic level, a soldier must trust his fellow soldiers to develop the interdependence that Kennedy described. Likewise free men and women must form a level of trust with each other in order to develop and sustain the relationships and networks needed to raise families, build communities, transact business, and manage governments.

In fact, it is another quote from Kennedy that always catches my attention when I think of the type of trust that is needed to manage governments. In his book, Profiles in Courage, Kennedy described his liberalism this way:

If by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people-their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties-someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal”, then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal.”

There was a time, not too long ago, when a conservative could proudly use the same definition to describe his or her beliefs, because there was a time when the vast majority of us—liberal and conservative—shared these beliefs; we mainly disagreed over the proper role of government at each level of the federal system, the proper role of the individual and his or her private relationships and networks, and the proper, constitutional balance between these two spheres of institutions needed to address these shared ideas and concerns. Because we shared these ideas and concerns and debated the proper balance needed to address them, there were liberals who called themselves Republican, and conservatives who called themselves Democrats. It is why, still today, there are conservatives who agree with many of the words and policies of Kennedy just as there are liberals who admire Reagan and many of his accomplishments. And our shared beliefs, together with our interrelationships and networks, strengthened a social trust that allowed us to work with each other to solve problems without destroying society or our constitutional system—allowed us, in Kennedy’s words, to “[a]sk not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

Alas, there always have been people who lived outside the social capital formed through trust. Some were kept outside on purpose because they were perceived wrongly as either different or unworthy, and much of the social advancements made over the last half-century have come from the movements to open participation in our society to those people. Others followed ideological beliefs that rejected these relationships and networks as the basis for a “just” society and sought to replace them with imposed institutions and structures of their own design, which are far less dependent on social trust for their existence and perpetuation. Unfortunately, the natural tensions foreseeably created by opening our social relationships and networks to all citizens have been exacerbated by those who have been driven by ideology to replace the relationships and networks all together, and the result—playing out every day in our families, our schools, our courts, and our politics—are citizens becoming more estranged from each other as they become more dependent on institutions, and the ideologies that support them, for their material and spiritual needs.

The simple facts are that in order to trust each other enough to work with each other, you must be willing to know and care for each other, and ideology is a barrier to forming such a relationship. For some reason, the events that started on a Friday afternoon so long ago began a series of events that eventually unraveled our desire to know and care for each other in a way that promoted social trust, and caused us, over time, to turn to ideological institutions for solace. Eventually, distrust replaced trust in our social interactions, including our politics. It is a sign of that distrust that some people can still blame a conservative-extremist conspiracy for the death of the President, when the sad fact is that a loner, trained as a military sniper and driven by a misguided Marxist ideology, fired those shots that day. Ideology, and its handmaiden, distrust, have clouded our ability even to process that event and get over it.

If we are to regain our balance in this country, and in this ever-more dangerous world, we must start to reach out to know and care about each other again, to recognize our shared ideas and concerns, and to work together to shape our communities and public policies based on those shared ideas and concerns—even though we may disagree on the role of government v. the role of the individual in shaping those policies. To take this step we must first realize that we did not lose our social trust because of someone else’s extremism. Instead, all of us must look ourselves in the mirror and realize that over the course of the last 50 years, it is we—each and every one of us, regardless of our professed faith or politics—who have enabled this situation by becoming the loner; the loner too influenced by the extremism of our own chosen ideologies to forge the relationships with our neighbors needed to rebuild social trust, and to ask what we could do for our country.

As we enter this holiday season, my hope and prayer is that we finally bury the Oswald that we have let simmer inside of us, and that we rekindle the Kennedy and Reagan in each of us; and that we re-build on that Kennedy-Reagan foundation the social trust we need to save and secure this unique society of free people for our children and grandchildren.

I wish all of you a Happy and Safe Thanksgiving.

My Choice for Lieutenant Governor - Jerry Patterson

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

Even as we start voting in important local and constitutional elections, the 2014 primaries are barreling toward us. This is especially true of the race for the Republican nomination for Lieutenant Governor. Because the train of this race has left the station and already seems at times to be on a course that could derail the entire Republican ticket next fall, people who care deeply about the future of our party and this State must start to express their preferences in order to try to avoid such a derailment.

It is in this spirit that I have decided to make my endorsement for Lieutenant Governor now, and to explain the basis for it.

Before I do so, though, I want to make a few preliminary points:

1. All four men running for the GOP nomination are competent to run the Texas Senate based on their experiences of serving in, or running the Senate. Moreover, at least three of these men have the temperament required to manage the Senate. If any of the three men who have both the competence and temperament to be Lieutenant Governor win the primary, I promise to actively support that candidate next fall; if the fourth candidate wins the primary, I will support the Republican ticket, but I will take no active role in support of that candidate.

2. My normal rule for primary races involving an incumbent is that the challenger bears the burden to prove to voters that he or she is not only competent to serve in the office, but also that the incumbent does not deserve re-election and the challenger would be the better choice. I held myself to that standard when I ran for office, and I expect other challengers to meet this burden as well. However, I cannot apply this rule to this race. To do so would require an endorsement of the status quo in Austin for four more years, because, as my friend David Jennings continually reminds me, David Dewhurst has been a good Lieutenant Governor. But this election gives voters the first opportunity in almost 12 years to bring new thinking and approaches to applying our conservative principles to Texas government, so I cannot just blindly embrace the status quo and forgo this opportunity. Therefore, in reaching my decision I have treated this office as if it were open with no incumbent running, so as to review each candidate on a level field to determine which one would make the best Lieutenant Governor going forward.

3. Consistent with what I wrote in my last post, this endorsement is personal and does not reflect the thinking of any organization of which I am a member, officer, or board member. By making this endorsement, I am choosing to recuse myself from the evaluation and endorsement process for this race conducted by United Republicans of Harris County. This decision was not easy to make, and I doubt that I will make another such statewide endorsement before United Republicans completes and publishes its endorsements; but I believe this race is important enough to make this exception.

With these points in mind, I am making my endorsement based on a saying attributed to Andrew Jackson:

One man with courage makes a majority.

Specifically, I am looking for a candidate who has the knowledge and experience to understand the current and long-term issues facing Texas, the courage to address these issues, and the humility and wisdom to build a majority of Texans and Texas Senators in support of effective solutions based on conservative principles. I believe the one candidate who has shown that he has these necessary qualities is Jerry Patterson. A retired Marine officer and aviator who served his country in war and peace, Jerry has at least twice shown me that he has the courage I am looking for in the next Lieutenant Governor.

In the mid-1990s, when many Texas neighborhoods and businesses were suffering from an explosion of violent crime and many people here and across the country were clamoring for more gun control, Jerry stepped forward and instead called for Texans to be able to exercise their constitutional right to bear arms in response to these developments by advocating for a concealed-carry law. At the time, the chattering class (including many Republicans) was skeptical of Jerry’s idea, and he faced a daunting task to pass such legislation while serving in the minority party in the both houses of the Legislature. But, he had the courage to build support for this landmark legislation with the public and among legislators from both parties. With the passage of Texas’ law, a movement for such laws spread across the country together with a movement for clarifying and strengthening the Second Amendment right to bear arms. In the almost twenty years that have passed since Jerry took his stand, the Supreme Court has twice ruled that the right to bear arms is an individual right, and many locales and states have passed concealed-carry laws. As further vindication of Jerry’s pioneering efforts, credible studies show that locales and states where such laws have been implemented have experienced a statistically significant greater drop in violent crime than locales and states that have retained or increased restrictive gun control laws.

Then, in 2012, Jerry—alone among our statewide elected officials—not only recognized the need to change our party’s rhetoric and approach to immigration reform, he exhibited the courage to act on this need in a wise and measured way. When he stood and addressed the delegates of the 2012 convention of the Republican Party of Texas to support the “Texas Solution” contained in the new proposed platform plank, he showed immense political courage—courage that helped forge an overwhelming majority vote in favor of the new plank—when he knew that many of those delegates had entered the convention hall pre-disposed to oppose the new plank. In the end, Jerry helped create a majority of delegates willing to direct our party to take a new and better approach to immigration reform, and to lead a new national discussion on this important issue.

Go to Jerry’s website, http://votepatterson.com, and browse the “Issues” he has analyzed and addressed in detail, and I believe you will see evidence of a serious mind with the courage to address the issues we are facing with a fresh approach based on conservative principles. Whether it is education, water, transportation, immigration and border security, or state finances, Jerry is showing the courage needed to build a conservative majority to address these issues with long-term solutions, rather than by broadcasting or preaching to a vocal faction of the base of the party with worn-out slogans. It is clear that Jerry is ready to help govern Texas into the future, rather than keep us mired in the tired dogmas of the past, which too often have impaired our ability to apply real, timeless conservative principles to the problems facing Texas.

I know that I will not always agree with Jerry. But, I trust that he always will show the courage to present and debate his ideas candidly, and will use humility and wisdom to listen to others as he works to build a majority around conservative solutions.

This type of courage was once the hallmark of our greatest Republican leaders, including Lincoln and Reagan. And those leaders also shared another gift that Jerry possesses: the gift to be able to communicate his arguments clearly and with humor—humor that helps to engage and persuade. Use of such humor is not—as one of his opponents alleges—a personality flaw or a sign of a lack of seriousness. Instead, it is a gift that our leaders desperately need as we work to persuade a new and diverse generation of Texans to support and implement conservative public policies. Show me a man who disparages the use of humor in the public square, and I’ll show you a man who takes himself and his “cause” too seriously to be trusted with the power of elected office in a democracy.

It is because I trust Jerry Patterson to be a courageous conservative reformer, that I whole-heartedly endorse his candidacy to be the next Lieutenant Governor of Texas. I hope you will support him, too.

As Autumn Approaches, It’s Time To Govern

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:


The last few months have been a time of reflection and rejuvenation for me, as I attended to personal and professional matters, and stepped away—as much as possible—from political matters. But Labor Day has now past, and the traditional summer “vacation” has ended, so now it is time for me to return to the political issues and races of 2014, which are just now starting to heat-up.

During my hiatus, I accumulated a fairly long list of issues that I could write about when I returned. While I will write about many of these issues over the next few months (and I will return to the issue of Education reform once we get a written opinion from the trial judge in Austin in the school-finance litigation), I want to start with what I perceive as the common thread that runs through so many of these issues: the need for the Republican Party to govern.

The need to govern on first principles

Now those of you who are awake and living in Texas will immediately respond by saying something like, “Ed, isn’t that what we’ve been doing for the last two decades?” And the answer I would give them is, frankly, “no”—at least, not the way I mean it.

To govern, a party must have first principles that it seeks to enshrine in public policy; to do so, the party must work to elect officeholders who will infuse its principles into law and then administer those laws effectively and creatively to achieve ends that are consistent with the first principles. Principles are just that—they are principles, not ideology. The process of enshrining principles into law, requires positive commitment and persuasion, and—yes—the ability to compromise by making wise and timely trade-offs and choices. Then, governing requires competence to administer the laws effectively and creatively, so that the civil society that is realized closely approximates the civil society we had hoped to create and maintain.

We once had leaders in both parties who understood this process. As recently as the Nixon and Reagan Presidencies, we had leaders who understood the guiding principles of American foreign policy (first survival with, and then victory over Communism). Then, with Reagan, came a man who understood the deepest first principles of our country and our party, and who knew how to enshrine those principles in public policy through commitment, persuasion, and compromise. Together, Nixon and Reagan spawned a generation of competent men and women capable of effectively and creatively administer government.

The move from first principles to ideology

Unfortunately, as the Clinton years turned into the Bush 43 years, and then into the Obama years, both parties slowly moved away from competing over principles to fighting over ideology; and worse, the GOP has waged an internal battle over ideology—masked as the perennial fight over whom among us is the most “conservative”—that has left our shared principles flailing to survive. The effects of these battles between the parties and with the GOP can be seen in the sordid responses to so many of the issues that have percolated to the surface this summer, including the pathetic handwringing going on all over Washington about whether and how to address the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime—which, hour-by-hour, day-by-day is slowly ceding the balance of global power and responsibility held by Washington and Europe since 1945 to Moscow, Beijing and Tehran, regardless of the ultimate decision and action that will be taken. Any American over the age of 45 should be very concerned about this drift in global influence.

In the meantime, the Obama years’ shift to an “all butter, no guns” ideology of government is creating a federal government that will be too large and irresponsible to ever govern at home, or maintain the peace abroad, effectively. On the other hand, at state and local levels where the GOP maintains the majority of political power in this country, conservatism has the greatest opportunity it has had in a generation to show that it is an effective governing philosophy. All the GOP needs is a return to the principles that unite us, and an end to the civil war that has divided us; and a commitment to the future, rather than a rigid adherence to the past.

Texas and Harris County as leaders

For Republicans in Texas and Harris County, this process is important not just for the county and the state, but also to the nation. We Republicans in Texas often lose perspective of the fact that we are to American Conservatism what California and New York are to American Liberalism—the outlier state at the farthest end of the political spectrum. Yes, this does mean that we are, more often than not, trend setters for other conservatives, and we get frustrated by the more moderate Republicans in our midst and in other parts of the country. But it also means that most of the rest of our fellow countrymen, including our fellow Republicans see us both as trend setters and as kooks—much like the clothes buyers who have to evaluate the fashion designers who exhibit their new designs in New York, Paris and Milan every year. And, just like the designers at the cutting-edge of the fashion world who value the purity of their creativity over the value of their designs to the general public, we too often value the purity of our “conservatism” over the effectiveness of our ability to enshrine our principles into the real-world policies that our countrymen live with every day of their lives. If we in Texas and Harris County want to be the leaders of a new era of American Conservatism, we need to help design and promote policies that will allow our elected officials to use our principles to address real problems, rather than enshrine the latest ideological fad into bad (and ultimately irrelevant) law.

Defining and deploying first principles

Virtually every Republican I have ever met believes in a constitutionally limited federal government, where the power and responsibility over most daily issues are handled locally and privately by individuals, families, businesses, and civic or religious organizations, or locally and publicly by state and local governments. We believe in the prosperity created by free markets and free trade, which creates a tide that lifts all boats. We believe in a national defense that protects not just our borders and our citizens from immediate danger, but that preserves the balance of power that has allowed for the greatest era of economic growth and prosperity the world has ever known. And we believe in the development of personal character and virtue, which leads us to live a life in which we make more right choices than wrong as we develop relationships, create families and build neighborhoods.

If we believe in these principles, then let’s stop fighting with each other and start building a party that will elect men and women who will enshrine these principles into policy: who will cost-effectively build the infrastructure we need to maintain our communities, reform the schools we will need to educate our children, and promote health through preserving the local doctor-patient relationship; who creatively will bring the message and the policies of our principles into the communities in our region in which too many of our neighbors are under-educated, under-employed and over-incarcerated; and who will promote the right choices in life that slowly, steadily and wisely develop character and virtue, over the constant condemnation of what we perceive as wrong choices that simply separate us and our principles from our neighbors.

An older era has been slipping away this summer. If we conservatives want an effective voice in shaping the new, emerging era in a way that preserves what is best about our society, we need to stop fighting over ideology and start promoting our shared principles.

********

The passing of District Attorney Mike Anderson

On a last point, I want briefly to address the passing of Mike Anderson.

I first met Mike, and his wife, Devon, while I was running as a judicial candidate in 2007-08 and Devon was running for re-election. I grew to like both Mike and Devon personally, and to respect the work they had been doing as prosecutors and district-court judges. The news of Mike’s passing on Saturday was so sad.

To Devon, I think I am expressing the feeling of most members of the Republican family in Harris County when I say that you and your children—and Mike—are in our thoughts and prayers; and we are here for you, just as you and Mike were here for us, if and when you need a helping hand over the months and years ahead.

To the rest of us, we have some soul-searching to do. We have been embroiled in two difficult primaries over the office of District Attorney since December, 2007, when the scandals that brought down Chuck Rosenthal became public, and we now are facing two election cycles in a row when this office will again be on the ballot. As for the last cycle, though Mike won the primary handily, the contest was very bitter among our party activists. Because I also respected Judge Lykos and some of the reforms she had proposed and started to implement, I found the last primary cycle so difficult—two good, conservative public servants, with somewhat different approaches, were fighting over the future of the criminal justice system. We cannot repeat the bitterness of the last primary and hope to keep this office in Republican hands—and the fate of the criminal justice system in this county hangs in the balance.

Soon Governor Perry will appoint someone to succeed Mike, and there will be a contested primary. The names I am hearing so far, for either the appointment or the primary race, are all good and qualified Republicans. Let’s keep that in mind as the race unfolds and make our choice on merit, rather than on one of the many issues that seem to always divide us. That approach would be the greatest legacy we could give to Mike’s memory and tenure in public office.