Our Backyard Shush-ka-Bob Party

By Paul B. Skousen

On May 8, 2010, we took three-term Senator Bob Bennett out of office and legally shushed him.

We’re calling it our Shush-ka-Bob.

We like Bob. He’s a good friend to many of us. He did well with the majority of issues facing Congress. He is a good man with a great legacy who carried our best interests at heart. Our problem was that he showed a shallow grounding in some important guiding principles that cost us some serious chunks of freedom.

The last straw for most of us was his support of TARP.

Local and national press are looking at Utah’s ouster of Bennett as a takeover of the Republican party by the so-called tea party movement.

It’s amazing how names can either vilify or canonize a person or group so they can be “handled” by the media. So, what’s in a name?

As with any other form of prejudicial generalization, the “tea party movement” is not what actually ousted Bennett from the Senate.

Neither was it a bunch of fanatics or opportunists who ganged up and made frowny faces at him. Nobody recoiled in horror at his breath or choice of socks. Nobody conspired to ruin his day.

No, it was his lapse in judgment, his rejection of basic Constitutional and free economic principles, his recent stack of bad decisions whereby he skewered himself to become a Shush-ka-Bob. Indeed, Bob Bennett did himself in by his own choices.

As delegates to the State GOP Convention, what we did on Saturday was fulfill the proper role of the State Legislature as originally intended by the Founding Fathers.

Back in the day, the Founders set up the Senate as a means of representing states’ rights. This is sometimes confused with the job of balancing the ebbs and flows of popular sentiment—that burden belonged to the House of Representatives. Congressmen were popularly elected and were mandated to stay closer to the people. And because that realm was so volatile, congressional terms were only two short years so the people could kick the bums out relatively quickly. (See pages 163, and 169, “Strong Local Self-Government” in “The Five Thousand Year Leap” by W. Cleon Skousen)

But when it came to the sovereignty of the state and its legal, permanent and Constitutional standing among all states, that was the job of the Senators. They were there to veto anything the House passed that might hurt states’ rights.

The role of Senator was hotly debated. It became a pivot point of passage as the small states argued for equal representation with the larger states. In the end, each state was given two Senators—”chosen by the Legislature thereof for a period of six years.”

The Legislature! They had the power to appoint and to replace Senators. That very structure put the Senators beholden to a small group of elected bosses. If the legislature didn’t like what a Senator was doing, he could be replaced. It was a critical link in the chain of control, and brilliantly gave representation at all major levels of government.

In 1913, we recklessly abandoned that powerful chain with the 17^th amendment.

Suddenly, the election of Senators was not much different than Representatives, and they quickly behaved with a new arrogance towards our locally elected legislators: you can’t tell me what to do, I was hired by the people.

The 17^th amendment rendered impotent our legislature’s ability to shush Bob.

When Bennett was challenged regarding some of his votes, he replied that if he didn’t get the money for Utah using earmarks, those funds would go to some other democrat state. To which we reply: That money is not Constitutionally raised nor spent. Jousting over earmarks is like fighting over deck chairs on the Titanic.

With that frame of mind guiding his decisions, we Republican delegates did what the legislature was prevented from doing by the 17^th amendment: we fired Bob Bennett—with a vote of thanks.

Here’s how we loaded our skewer of Shush-ka-Bob:

1) Bennett’s vote in favor of that TARP bailout idea was an extraordinary violation of the Constitution and the basic principle of the freedom to fail. He should have stood firm in the face of those enormous pressures and “smoke and mirrors” of doomsday talk, and not violated the unwavering cleansing and correcting principle of failure.

2) Bennett insisted that earmarks are how the Senate spends our money, so he worked hard at it. But violating Article 1 Section 8 where a specific list of authorized taxes and expenditures is laid out in black and white is not acceptable just because he steered money to Utah. His attitude, multiplied by 99 other senator’s attitudes, is why the national budget grew from $6 billion in 1937 to $600 billion in 1980, and is now $3.7 trillion today. And along the way we accumulated nearly $14 trillion in debt—the annual interest payment alone is enough to pay for all of World War I, over and over and over again.

3) After his shushing at the Convention, he told the press he would have made most of the same voting decisions even if he had known “it would ruin my career.” Career? Does anybody anywhere want an elected politician who views his or her position as a career? My dear Brother Bennett, it’s a temp job at best. Jump in, help where you can, and jump out. Read the Founders’ warnings about career politicians—they are anathema.

4) Senator Bennett’s signature Wyden-Bennett health care proposal would have cost us $1.3-$1.4 trillion a year, financed by tax increases of $400-$500 billion a year. And he thought this idea was good. The Constitution gives zero authority for such a piece of suicidal socialism to be impressed upon our free nation.

There was more of course, but with our skewer of Shush-ka-Bob adequately filled, it was time to fire up the grill—and it reached cooking temperature this past Saturday.

The question now arises—will others who are similarly culpable for our financial mess repent and allow principles to rule, freedom to reign, and Constitutional choices to be made to slow down this monstrous Federal juggernaut of spending?

Just in case, we’ve already got another skewer ready and we’re firing up the grill—it should be plenty hot by early 2012.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 11th, 2010 at 11:26 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.