Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto (18 page)

DAVID SCHWEIKERT:
There’s incredible opportunity, particularly with that under-forty, under-thirty-five population. We have data that says they’re brand switchers. When they walk into the grocery store they don’t buy Tide because their mom and grandma bought it. They buy what they think is the best value, or what they saw on their social media as having a benefit they want. And I think, actually, they’re about to grow up politically. They have to now realize that they’ve been lied to by this president about privacy—look at the things the NSA has done—about their individual freedoms. This White House has not cared about their individual freedoms. As a matter of fact it’s been more collectivist. I’m waiting for that revolution with young people to say, “And now you’ve basically made me an indentured servant through the debt, through my future tax liability, and now what you’ve done to me health-care-wise.” It’s time for our young people to wake up and understand: The battle’s on.

MK:
It’s an interesting time to be here right now, because we’re in the midst of this gargantuan fight. Not just for the soul of the Republican Party, but perhaps for the future of this country. What does this new party look like?

RAND PAUL:
It looks like the rest of America if we want to win. I say, “With ties and without ties, with tattoos and without tattoos.” It needs to look like the rest of America, but also in an ethnic way as well. We are a very diverse culture. We need to reach out to African-Americans and say, “Look, the war on drugs has disproportionately hurt the black community.” One in three black Americans is a convicted felon, primarily because of nonviolent drug crimes. We need to reach out and say, “It isn’t fair that we’re targeting black Americans for arrest.” It is said, by surveys, that whites and blacks use drugs at about the same rate, and yet the ACLU recently said that blacks were being arrested at five to six times the rate. Prison statistics show that seventy-five percent of prisoners are African-American or Latino, and it is because the war on drugs is not equally applied. I think we need to tell kids that drugs are a bad thing. I tell my kids to stay away from drugs. They’re a bad thing. But if one of my kids gets caught, I don’t want them in jail forever. I saw the other day, Michael Douglas’s kid is in jail for ten years. He’s been in solitary confinement for two years. Is he hurting himself by using drugs? Absolutely. But I would rather see him in some kind of rehabilitation hospital than solitary confinement.

But we have to understand, and as Republicans we need to go to the African-American community and say, “Look, they’re losing not only their freedom. They come out and then they’re a convicted felon for the rest of their life.” You ever try to get a job? They call it “checking the box.” Checking the box of convicted felon. They can never get ahead again. Their child support payments build up while they’re in prison. They come out and they owe four thousand dollars in child support. How do they ever pay that working minimum wage, or not working at all? One thing adds up and it’s this cycle of poverty. I think if Republicans had a message, that message is a limited-government one. This is: The government should protect us from violence against other individuals. The sort of self-inflicted bad things that people can do to themselves, we should try to work as a society to minimize that, but putting people in jail for doing bad things to themselves is just not good for society.

JUSTIN AMASH:
And when I go back to my district my constituents are very supportive of what I’m doing, Republicans and Democrats. I think things are changing, and I talk to many of my colleagues who are just entering Congress the last two cycles. They think more like I do on many of these issues. And in fact, when you look at the NSA amendment, for example, newer members were much more supportive of my amendment than members who have been here for a long time. I think there’s a generational shift and it’s shifting in the direction of libertarianism.

TED CRUZ:
I think the Republican Party needs to get back to the principles we should have been standing for in the first place. We need to get back to defending free market principles and defending the Constitution. I think what we’re seeing, the rise of the grass roots, is the American people holding elected officials accountable of both parties. I think that’s terrific. I think that should happen a lot more.

MK:
But if you were to open to a page in the
New York Times,
they would describe a libertarian as socially moderate and fiscally conservative. I never thought that was quite right. I always thought it was about our relationship with the government and whether or not we got to control our own lives.

JUSTIN AMASH:
That’s right. It’s just about being able to make decisions for your own lives. So, there are very socially conservative libertarians. I’m a fairly socially conservative libertarian. And there are other libertarians who are not as socially conservative. But the idea is that we should have a government that allows us to make those decisions for our own lives, and we can decide as a society whether we like those values or not. And if you disagree with someone, you’re free to tell them. But we don’t need government imposing one viewpoint on everyone.

THOMAS MASSIE:
People like to label everybody in Washington, D.C. I’ve been called a libertarian-leaning Republican, a constitutional conservative, a tea party congressman, but I think the one that fits best is when they call me one of the twelve members of the Republican conference who didn’t vote for John Boehner.

MK:
It strikes me that it’s no longer so much about Republicans versus Democrats. It may be about D.C. insiders versus the rest of America.

JUSTIN AMASH:
Yeah, I don’t think we should ever worry about who we’re working with in terms of Republican versus Democrat versus libertarian or independent. We have to work together here.

TED CRUZ:
There is a divide, and it’s a much bigger divide than a divide between Republicans and Democrats. That’s the divide between entrenched politicians in Washington and the American people. There are a lot of people in both parties in Washington who just aren’t listening to the people anymore.

DAVID SCHWEIKERT:
Well, think about this. If you’re a bureaucrat, what do we know about bureaucracies, of every kind both private and public? Ultimately the preservation of the bureaucracy becomes the number-one goal. So, if you’re Lois Lerner, you’re at the IRS, is it as much even ideological, as it’s the preservation of the bureaucracy? And you see that all over Washington, because the scandal at the IRS isn’t the only place this type of activity is taking place. It’s up and down government. Because are you going to support the party, the more collectivist party that wants to grow government, wants to give you bonuses, wants to give you certain shiny objects, or the party that wants to hand power back to the states? You end up with a very different incentive system, and it’s quite perverse.

THOMAS MASSIE:
Here’s one thing that people don’t really understand, that I didn’t understand. They say that money corrupts the process. I’ve always kind of believed that, but I didn’t know how it corrupts the process. Congressmen raise a lot of money. Some of them raise two or three million dollars an election cycle. But what do they do with that money? Their reelection is virtually assured. It’s more certain than anything that they’re going to come back, because they’re incumbents and they’ve done the right things. So, they don’t need the money to get reelected. They’re not buying yachts and Ferraris with the money. What are they doing with the money? It’s the currency of power.

Here’s what they’re doing with the money that they raise: They’re giving it to other congressmen. And then they become ingratiated. They feel like they owe that congressman something. A vote, maybe on an issue, or a cosponsorship on a bill. So, it’s the currency of influence within Congress, and then you also take most of that money and you give it to your party, whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat.

There’s a big football game that’s going on in Congress. The party that has the majority is playing hard to keep the majority, and the party that’s in the minority is playing hard to get the majority. It’s a football game that’s played with money, and the more money you raise for your party, the more influence you’re granted. You’ll get a better committee. Do they measure committees in terms of how much you can do for your constituents? No. All the A-committees in Congress are based on how much money will lobbyists give to you if you get on one of those committees. So, you raise money for your party, you’re a good soldier, you get on a higher fund-raising-capable committee, you raise more money, but now you’ve got a quota. Now you’re on the treadmill. If they give you a spot on the big pirate ship, you’ve got to collect a lot of treasure. That’s the way the process gets distorted. That’s how money distorts the process in Washington, D.C.

RAND PAUL:
Imagine how it could be if Hillary Clinton is the nominee for the Democrat Party. If she’s the nominee and she wants to be involved in the middle of the Syrian civil war, and she doesn’t give a damn about your privacy. Imagine if, on the Republican side, we have someone who wants a constitutional foreign policy, who says, “Sure, we defend our country. You mess with us, you’re going to get what happened after 9/11—overwhelming use of force against you. But we’re not going to be involved in every civil war, and Congress will vote. The will of the people will decide whether we’re in war.” I think you could have a complete transformative election, where all of a sudden the reactionary, nonthinking individual is going to be Hillary Clinton, and the Republicans could have a forward-looking person who talks about privacy and talks about adding a degree of justice to our criminal justice system.

MK:
The newly empowered citizenry, with their new tools of accountability, makes me an optimist, even though everything in this town and everything that President Obama has done to our economy and to our Constitution should make us despair about the future. Are you an optimist or are you a pessimist about the future of this country?

THOMAS MASSIE:
This place is way more broken than I realized before I came here. Now that I’m here, I give it a fifty percent chance that we’re going to be able to turn this ship before we hit the shore. And a fifty percent chance that it’s going to take something big to wake people up and to get the changes we need. But the only thing I can do is fight to turn the ship. That’s what I’m working on. Instead of being home in Kentucky and preparing for the ship to hit the shore, I’m up here trying to avoid the shore.

MIKE LEE:
I’m an optimist in a Churchillian sort of way. Winston Churchill is reported to have said, “The American people can always be counted on to do the right thing, after they have exhausted every other alternative.” I think we’re reaching that point where we have exhausted every other alternative, and we will be left with doing the right thing. That’s what the American people are doing. That’s what they’re saying. They want to return to a time when the people are sovereign, and they’re citizens, not subjects.

TED CRUZ:
I’m incredibly optimistic. I’m optimistic because I think there is a movement that’s sweeping this nation of millions of Americans who are waking up and looking around. If you look at the past year, the rise of the grass roots, in fight, after fight, after fight in Washington, the grass roots have turned the fight around. Nothing scares elected officials more than hearing from their constituents, and in my view, liberty is never safer than when politicians are terrified.

DAVID SCHWEIKERT:
I’m optimistic also, but be careful because sometimes I’m pathologically optimistic. How do you get the public, mom and dad, the young person, the person who’s trying to grow their life and their business, to be able to take that little bit of their time? And it’s not about writing a check, though those are helpful. It’s about reaching out to a FreedomWorks or other organizations and driving their voice, saying, “We’re paying attention, and we care.”

CHAPTER 8

T
WELVE
S
TEPS

WHAT, EXACTLY,
DO YOU
want
?

I get this question all the time, inside the Capitol Beltway. Sometimes the hostility of the inquiry makes me feel like I’m participating in the drug intervention of an old friend. You’ve finally got their attention, and they feel trapped, busted. Then comes the denial, the paranoia, and the hostility. An addict will shoot at any messenger that delivers the bad news: You have a big problem, and the path you have chosen will not—cannot—end well.

This is precisely the way that official Washington has reacted to the citizens asking the tough questions of their two party representation. Obviously, those who ask this question typically have an agenda. They are trying to deflect attention, boldly claiming that Washington does not have a spending problem. An addiction to power? Not here; at least nothing that can’t be solved by giving the fixers another fix, more and more money and control. Without another government program, how will anything get better? The relentless clamor for more of your money rattles through Washington like junkies pleading for just one more hit.

One of the common critiques coming from progressives, the media, and chin-clutching establishmentarians inside the Beltway is that we are just against things. President Obama loves this particular straw man. We oppose a government takeover of health care, so we must be against people getting health insurance. We oppose federal meddling in education, so we must be against children learning. We oppose an omnipotent surveillance state, so we must be against the safety of innocents.

David Brooks, the resident “conservative” at the
New York Times,
doesn’t even try to hide his disdain for the new generation of legislators who have come to Washington committed to changing the rules of the game: