Skip remarked on my post about Jeanne Shaheen’s Senate vote to keep the gas tax money the feds scoop out of all 50 states in DC, instead of returning it back to the states where it belongs. In those remarks he says he slightly disagrees over who is pulling whose strings….
Where I slightly disagree with him is in the reason why Jeanne Shaheen acts in the manner she does – it is not that Jeanne Shaheen represents “lobbyists, politicians, and bureaucrats” – she merely uses them soley for who (or actually, what) she represents: a “fundamentally transformed” America (look how she “fundamentally transformed healthcare here in NH with promises akin to Obama’s Obamacare ones that turned out radically wrong) they are merely useful idiots; tools, not constituents.
Skip and I do not disagree on the goals of the progressive agenda, its destructive nature, or how to turn things around, but we do appear to disagree in some regard on where or how the power to advance that agenda flows. I think Shaheen is the useful idiot here so I guess I’d better explain why.
I don’t think Shaheen acts as she does just because that is who she is. That would presume that she has principles, and I don’t believe that is the case.
I think she acts as she does because she was encouraged to pursue progressive political power by the apparatus that paves those paths to power, because they saw in her an opportunity to fill a progressive place holder.
She played the game, said the right words, and the progressive infrastructure, whose heart and soul (and money) are based in DC, paved her way to the “emerald city.”
If the collectivist power brokers paved a different path, she’d have been on that one instead.
So I don’t think Shaheen is using the entrenched bureaucracy (lawyers, lobbyists, staffers, the very fabric of DC) to advance her agenda. It’s not hers.
I think it is the other way around.
Nothing she supports is new. Nothing she has done in or to New Hampshire prior to reaching DC has not already been desired or exercised somewhere else in the progressive universe. She was just the local franchisee. The fact that no one in New Hampshire has stopped her does not mean she can drive the progressive mother ship, it simply earned her a promotion to DC pawn, rubber stamp.
She is more their tool, a moth attracted to the statist progressive flame of the bureaucracy which includes the entrenched staffers, lobbyists, insiders, and professional political money and infrastructure of the ‘political class’ that never leaves DC.
The only difference between her and any number of Republicans who went there and caught the Georgetown flu is that she was already a carrier when she arrived, having been predisposed to infection years before.
And as a Senator Shaheen appears not just happy but committed to giving most of the power to that DC machine-and not just because it can protect her in the future by making and enforcing law she approves of without her having to cast a vote.
Her vote on the federal gas tax money was defensive. She was protecting her host. A power that is a far more permanent progressive fixture than Ms. Shaheen will ever be.
Barring any fundamental change it will be there for the next Shaheen, and generations that follow her, all props making speeches for policies executed daily by a nameless faceless mass of progressive power that infringes on our rights at our expense and would try to spit her out the moment she turned on them.
This permanent political class, whom I have referred to as “The Bureaucracy” is the disease that makes reform almost impossible.
The only way to stop the spread of the disease is to elect people who will fight it. We need politicians who can and will stand up to the progressive power. We need people who will not be tools of “The Bureaucracy.”
Jeanne Shaheen has no interest in that, nor does she add anything new. Jeanne Shaheen is not using them as tools to advance her agenda, they are using her. When she is gone, they will use someone else. And this is how things will continue until we find and elect enough representatives who are the tools of the taxpayers and not tools of the government.
The States Are The Key that locks the Tool Box
This is exactly why we must focus at the state level and take our state back from the progressives. It is why we must elect state level representatives who will not sit back and let tools like Jeanne Shaheen support and defend a DC political class, the bureaucrats, and a progressive national agenda that is bad for New Hampshire and her citizens.
Until we secure quarters in the Granite State, who or whom we send to Washington will have very little impact on the political class that runs and controls it. Our best defense against DC is to build an open and dynamic marketplace that can strive to be a self-sufficient and self reliant sovereign state instead of another dependent class beggar tied to the progressive rule makers who elevate tools like Shaheen to defend them.
We have to show them we don’t need them. That we will not stand by while they try to enforce bad policy, laws that limit or hamper employment and growth, or any unconstitutional laws within our borders; laws that contradict the best interests of our state and her citizens.
To do that we have to continue to starve the progressive bureaucracy in Concord before it can fully mimic its mother down in DC. (Whether or not that has already happened is a debate for a different time.)
To do that, we need to keep New Hampshire Democrats out of office, for they are not just the tools of the local bureaucracy, they are also the tools of the DC bureaucracy. Tools that are more than willing to let the Federal government advance its progressive agenda at the stat level, so that they can sit back and watch that cancer spread without ever having to take credit for the destruction that always follows.
