DENVER – Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., was “giddy” on policy and heavy on appropriating comments from conservative pundits in her key note speech to the Western Conservative Summit in Denver Friday night.
In a room of 600 conservative voters brought together by former Colorado Senate president John Andrews’ Centennial Institute, along with Liberty on the Rocks and Colorado Christian University, Bachmann brought the crowd to its feet more than once as she called for an end to the progressive agenda she said has taken over Washington.
“‘We are determined to live free or not at all. And we are resolved that posterity shall never reproach us with having brought slaves into the world,'” Bachmann read from founding father John Jay , ending her reading with the statement, “We will talk a little bit about what has transpired in the last 18 months and would we count what has transpired into turning our country into a nation of slaves.”
She reiterated her concern more forcefully toward the end of the program.
“I think this describes so well where we are right now,” Bachmann said before reading an excerpt from C.S. Lewis: “‘Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of it victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under a robber baron than under omnipotent moral busybodies… .'”
Bachmann urged the room to not only vote in constitutional conservatives like herself but also to make certain to implore their congressional delegation to vote them into leadership positions.
“I am not in leadership, but that is why I said in my remarks that it is extremely important that if the gavel turns, the leadership is made up of constitutional conservatives. All of you can put that pressure on them.”
Such a leadership, Bachmann said, would be able to implement a conservative shift in government that could, among many things, rein in federal spending. She pointed to numbers showing that when Obama took office the debt was $5.8 trillion, quickly rising to $13 trillion under his leadership.
According to the U.S Treasury Department on the day President Obama took office the total national debt stood at $10.62 trillion , and it has expanded to $13.2 trillion after massive spending on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to stave off another Great Depression.
Calling herself “giddy” with the notion of effecting change, she Bachmann laid out an agenda that has been the wish list for conservative politicians and pundits for years. She said first and foremost reforms to social security, Medicare, and welfare need to be addressed.
“We reform social security, then we reform Medicare, then we pare back welfare to the truly needy, for the truly disabled, because, yes, we can make that determination. No welfare for those who violate America’s borders. Close and secure American boarders, cut the budget, limit our foreign entanglements for America, then we massively cut spending first, then we cut taxes.”
Bachmann further said the military should not be used as a social experiment, called for the privatization of social security for those under 55, as well as the elimination of the capital gains tax, estate tax, alternative minimum tax, and the reduction of taxes to 20 percent for individual income and 9 percent for businesses. Finally, she called for the total repeal of “Obamacare” to thunderous applause.
Bachmann claimed the national health care reform package was implemented, in part, under the auspices of Rahm Emanuel’s brother Ezekiel, whom Bachmann, appropriating the claims of Betsy McCaughey, said supported the rationing of medical care to only those who were useful to the federal treasury. Bachmann, extending that claim to the administration, said , “It is about being useful not to you, not to others, but to the United States Treasury. How useful are you to the United States Treasury? These people are serious. It makes [Jack] Kevorkian look like Mary Poppins.”
While a number of sites have debunked claims against Emanuel, an ardent opponent of euthanasia, in a CBS interview he explained that he did not believe in rationing health care across the board but his contemplations as a philosopher found him looking at a situation where there might be one liver for three individuals. In those cases, he said he spoke of rationing, but that they did not apply to a larger system.
From the CBS interview:
Is he saying, as {Sarah] Palin and others have suggested, that those who aren’t “participating citizens” should have no guarantee to health care?“No,” Emanuel says, “and I think I made it pretty clear I wasn’t endorsing that view, I was analyzing that perspective and what it might mean in practical terms. The rest of the text around that quote made it pretty clear I was trying to analyze it and understand it, not endorse it.”
Comments are closed.