The Rules Change on Roll Call Votes is A Smoking Gun - Granite Grok

The Rules Change on Roll Call Votes is A Smoking Gun

Smoking gunOne of the important debates in the shadow of Democrat elected Speaker Shawn Jasper’s (R-Hudson) ascension to the gavel is what degree of tolerance should conservatives have for Republicans disinclined to let the party platform temper their legislative passions.  Everyone had valid observations (in the email thread) up to a point but after reading a few days’ worth of back-and-forth I felt the need to distill the problem.

No citizen should think it a sound argument to allow a politician or a government to only defend 51% of the State or Federal Constitution.  This has to apply equally to a platform that pretends to defend that Constitution; a platform that is far easier to change; which (brings us) to the root of the problem.

If we settle for 51% of a platform-Republican human nature warns us that eventually that is the best we’ll ever do; 51% of a Republican, becomes 51% of a platform, becomes 51% of a constitution.   When Fifty-one percent becomes the new ninety percent (or even 100%) which half of your rights have you willingly abrogated to progressive socialism because you couldn’t be bothered to fight for another 30-50%?

We have to fight for principles without regard to party or they will take it all from us, in nibbles or chunks…

If your party thinks the constitution is an important check on government tyranny looking the other way even 20% of the time (allowing for the now infamous 80-20 rule) already seems risky but some insist that 51% support of the platform is still enough to justify supporting any Republican.  Yes, constitutions typically leave room for Political parties and (specifically) state legislatures to meddle or address local interests.  And no, there is no perfect set of circumstances where elected officials will always want or be able to comply with the party platform designed to balance those interests (or even be electable in some districts), but a state constitution is the highest law of that land and it’s inviolability is not optional.  In other words, with regard to the constitution, there is no 80-20 rule.

That is neither an extremist nor a purist position for either a citizen to require or a public official to concede.

So while you might find room in your activist skeleton closet for a Republican who looks the other way a time or two or three (out of every ten) with regard to the platform–assuming it is still worth the paper it is written on–when the horse (or in this case elephant) has wandered out onto open range to graze with herd animals who wouldn’t risk sullying their own”ass” with a wipe of any Constitution, and bloviating about having to make deals with shadows or penumbras, you have every right to recall that 2015 is the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta.

The people have basic human rights that no official, no matter how petty, may auction off.

In the last session elected “Republicans” sponsored legislation that would limit the unalienable and constitutionally protected right of both free speech and self-defense.  Is there an 80-20 rule on the Bill of Rights I was not informed about?

And rather than fight to own the message about why it was a bad idea they capitulated on a Medicaid entitlement expansion that is moving people off private insurance they could use and on to public insurance most doctors increasingly refuse to take.  If left in place it will lead to a sales or income tax.    Well there’s a win.  Expensive public insurance you can’t use in exchange for a broad based tax.  Brilliant.  And those are just the worst offenses by sometimes-Republicans working hard to advance the Democrat party agenda, there were plenty of others.

By all means, let us have more of that!

Fast forward to December 2014: Democrat elected speaker Shawn Jasper (R-Hudson) ignored his own Republican House caucus and made a deal with the far-left Democrats so he could rule despite what 50% + of his own elected party members had decide amongst themselves.

The first act of the new RINO regime of Democrat elected Speaker Shawn Jasper (R-Hudson) and his herd of chairs and vice-chairs was to make it more difficult for us to know how they vote in the next two years so we won’t know how often any one of them might actually be looking the other way.  Why?

If 51% is the new 80%, the platform can be ignored and the constitution is barely a guideline, why make it harder for people to know how close or how far you stand with regard to them?

Because they do matter and the RINO’s know it.

The rules change on roll call votes is the smoking gun.

These are not just Democrats with Republican ‘by-lines’ more enamored of the power and the process than the principles, the people, or the devices erected to constrain them, they wish to obscure if not hide their countenance so as to end “The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that (such political) flesh is heir to.

They are so shallow and scurrilous that they cannot even stand behind their own votes!

I have no reason to believe that Democrat elected speaker Jasper (R-Hudson), or anyone who supported him wont test the constraints of platform or constitution nor repeat the process of dispensing with transparency or accountability every time they find it convenient.  My only option is to do what I have always done,  make whatever deviations they have planned as politically inconvenient as possible based on the very principles they are are clearly afraid of disregarding.

It is not about demanding purity or perfection.  I simply will not sit idly by and watch B-side progressive social engineers barter away my natural rights in exchange for the empty promises of an administrative state lorded over by jackbooted bureaucrats.

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