BY BOB BEARDEN
The presidential contenders want to [or so they say] shrink the federal government. But does that also pertain to the executive branch? In their zeal to show how they hate our government more than that other candidate behind the tree, they leave one to wonder with their pronouncements of what they would do if elected president.
They want to shrink the legislative branch, fire judges and overhaul the judicial branch to suit their whims, but when it comes to their own powers they as to one talk of expansion.
What’s that all about? Shrink our nasty ol’ government, well except the president’s executive branch. Smacks of fascism. Shrink the power of the people but give more power to the one in charge.
It didn’t really work too well for Mussolini or Hitler. They both, when they took power, shrank the other branches of their governments and essentially set-up dictatorships. Dictatorships that led to excessive abuses of power and finally to their own destruction.
Shrinking our government makes no sense. Making it work for all its citizens is what needs to be done.
Our government was founded as a social entity. It was empowered to work for the common good. But over the past 30 years forces on the right have attacked that very premise and have attempted to take away our government’s ability to “promote the general welfare.”
What those who are running for president need to be about is how they, if elected, can find ways to make it work for all of its citizens and live up to the constitutional mandate as prescribed in the preamble, not to shrink our government.
That mandate? Establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.
Shrink our government? Drown it in a bathtub? I think not!
Those running for the highest office in the land need to quit playing loose with the facts. Shrinking government will not solve our problems. Adhering to the principles handed down to us by our founders in the Constitution will.
We are a socialist [OMG, there’s that awful word] nation and our founders understood why we needed to be just that. They laid out a careful plan to ensure that every citizen has a say and every citizen has rights. That’s pretty socialistic. The very essence of what they were trying to accomplish and their ideas were social in nature and form. No other country in the world, until that time, had allowed their everyday ordinary citizens to have a say in how their governments were run.
We need to be calling out the candidates wanting to wreck our form of government that despite its flaws and glitches has worked well. We are a democratic Republic “of the people, for the people and by the people”! That’s a pure socialist statement from a Republican, Abraham Lincoln by name.
Taking us back in time to a 50’s kind of place will only perpetuate bigotry and racism and it will not solve the problems of today. We need to get back to the basics and do what is right for everyone.
Trickling down wealth and money and power will not work and it never has. That type of mentality only leads to dictators and not visionaries.
We need candidates that understand the Constitution and what it means, not ones who want to rewrite it in their own image!
– Bob Bearden, an occasional contributor to The Oklahoma Observer, is secretary of the Central Oklahoma Human Rights Alliance and a trustee of the Central Oklahoma Labor Federation
