Fellow Patriots,

There are three major stories today that represent significant victories for advocates of small government, especially those within the tea party movement. The first is probably the most obvious… the fact that Scott Brown landed a knock out blow in defeating far left candidate Martha Coakley in the MA special election. The second is news that Nancy Pelosi is now suggesting she doesn’t have the votes needed to pass government control of the healthcare industry. Last but not least is news that the Supreme Court struck down legislation that prevented Corporations from practicing free speech through campaign dollars.

I’d like to briefly discuss the three, and then ask for your thoughts and opinions on each.

1) The Supreme Court Decision on Campaign Dollars and Corporations
If you missed it today, the Supreme Court made a highly controversial ruling that is certain to spark debate across all sides of the political spectrum. The ruling says the following:

The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations may spend freely to support or oppose candidates for president and Congress, easing decades-old limits on their participation in federal campaigns.

By a 5-4 vote, the court on Thursday overturned a 20-year-old ruling that said corporations can be prohibited from using money from their general treasuries to pay for their own campaign ads. The decision, which almost certainly will also allow labor unions to participate more freely in campaigns, threatens similar limits imposed by 24 states.

It leaves in place a prohibition on direct contributions to candidates from corporations and unions.

Critics of the stricter limits have argued that they amount to an unconstitutional restraint of free speech, and the court majority apparently agreed.

This news, in my opinion, is going to cause a split within the movement. Not one of competition, but one of ideology. To put it simply, this ruling will paint a clear divide between small government advocates and those who are OK with federal government intervention when it comes to this sort of free speech activity.

I say this because my inbox has been lit up all day with emails from all sides of the debate. Some claim it presents a significant danger because of corrupt unions and special interest, progressive corporations, other cheer that it finally gets the federal government out of the way of free speech in the election realm.

Personally, I believe this ruling is long over due, and I believe anyone who advocates against it cannot claim to also advocate for smaller federal government.

Either you want the federal government to be involved in this sort of thing or you don’t. We as liberty minded activists need to stop “picking and choosing” where we wish for the fed to intervene. Our argument should be against virtually every intrusion with the exception of the following:

-Protection of borders (Defense)
-Regulation of inter-state commerce (Keep it “regular”)

The federal government has failed at both. But in my view, this is all the fed needs to be concerned with. Nothing more. Not the regulation of pot plants, not the regulation of speed limits, not education, not national ID cards… not any of it.

These are things the STATES should control. Not the federal government.

Again, you’re either for less federal government or you aren’t.

With regards to free speech in political funding… we might not like that unions can put private dollars into the process. But in a free America, they have every right to do so. The federal government should never, EVER have the authority to come in and tell a private company or individual what it/he/she can and can’t spend money on.

Period.

2) Did we kill government run healthcare?
A few weeks ago we announced that if Scott Brown won in MA, we believed it would be the death of federal government mandated healthcare. It looks like we were right.

Though reeling from a seismic political loss, House Democrats rejected the quickest fix to their health care dilemma Thursday and signaled that any agreement on President Barack Obama’s signature issue will come slowly, if at all.

Democrats weighed a handful of difficult options as they continued to absorb Republican Scott Brown’s election to the Massachusetts Senate seat long held by Edward M. Kennedy. Several said Obama must forcefully help them find a way to avoid the humiliation of enacting no bill, and they urged him to do so quickly, to put the painful process behind them.

House leaders said they could not pass a Senate-approved bill, standing by itself, because of objections from liberals and moderates alike. Such a move could have settled the matter, because it would not have required further Senate action. Brown’s stunning victory restored the GOP’s power to block bills with Senate filibusters.

This by no means should be viewed as a reason to stop fighting the bill, but it certainly suggests we’re slowly starting to get a competitive edge in the battle to keep government out of our lives.

In fact, I would argue that this is the time to step up our efforts and push back even harder. In this particular case, we certainly want to kick them while they’re down to ensure they can’t get back up.

3) Scott Brown and what his wins means for us
A lot of you have lashed out at us for helping Scott Brown win in MA. This is understandable as Scott Brown might not be the most libertarian Senator of the bunch, but a lot of you seem to miss the larger point and strategy in doing so.

First of all, we needed a candidate who had a chance. The movement never would have been able to unify behind a candidate that didn’t have a viable chance with enough time to pull off a win.

Kennedy, the independent candidate for the race, never had a chance. He never came anywhere close to having a chance. I know, many of you will say “we could have given him a chance if we wanted to,” but that doesn’t fly with me. We “could have” won many races in the past, but we didn’t. We “could” have won with Doug Hoffman in NY23, but we lost.

We need to be thinking strategically, not just emotionally. As I told the New York Times over the weekend…

“For us, this is not so much about Scott Brown as it is about the idea that if we really collaborate as a mass movement, we can take any seat in the country.”

If we would have tried to support Kennedy in MA, we would have lost. Government healthcare would still be alive, and we would have a much more difficult fight ahead of us in 2010 because we would still need to prove to ourselves what we can accomplish through unity.

But think about it, we defeated the machine in MA. We defeated the liberal pick for Senator. We defeated the winning vote for government healthcare.

That was the goal for us in the MA special election. It wasn’t to get a libertarian elected; Rather, it was to put up a significant roadblock in the progressive plan to push our country further into socialism.

This week our movement was able to stop a super majority, virtually kill government takeover of healthcare, and the supreme court ruled against government blockades of political free speech.

In my opinion, this is Historic.

For Liberty,
-Eric Odom

Eric Odom

Eric Odom is Executive Director and Co-Founder of the American Liberty Alliance. Eric is a libertarian minded, free-market activist. His profession is web strategy and online community development.

Tweet This Post to Facebook Digg This Bookmark at Delicious
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.