by FrontPageMag.com
Below is the transcript to Gov. Rick Perry’s keynote speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event took place Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
David, as we gather here for this 20th anniversary celebration of the Freedom Center, it was similar circumstances that this country found itself in when you had the first Restoration weekend in 1994. Two decades ago Republicans had swept into power in both of the Houses, a revolution that changed the balance of power for the first time, Cleta, in 40 years. Twenty years later, Republicans again have won historic victories in the midterm elections and once again we are controlling both houses of Congress. In addition to picking up eight seats in the U.S. Senate, we picked up at least a dozen House seats, three governorships, several state legislative chambers. Today, Republicans control 68 of the 98 partisan state legislative chambers. That is the most in the history of our party. And we stunned the pollsters. It was a beautiful thing. We stunned the pollsters even more than we stunned President Barack Obama, who apparently doesn’t realize that November 4 even happened. He’s too busy representing those who didn’t vote to listen to those who did vote. But even if he didn’t hear the message, the American people delivered one. They said enough of the slow growth tax policies, enough of the smothering debt, they said enough to this colossal bureaucracy that we’ve seen, and these agencies of government that all too often are unaccountable to the people. They rebelled against government-run healthcare schemes, against a President who refuses to secure the border, and against bureaucracies that are broken, arrogant and abusive of power. That’s what the American people said Tuesday. The American people made it clear. They want a clean break from the economic policies that have slowed our recovery at home, and the foreign policies that Jim did an incredible job of laying out that have weakened our standing abroad.
I’m here to say that a congressional majority is a terrible thing to waste. The power that has been newly granted by the people must be used wisely to serve the people, that it’s not good enough to state what we are against. We must articulate what we are for. The election results leave us with a truly once in a generation opportunity to usher in an era of renewal and reform. You are here tonight through your commitment to the Freedom Center, and you’re going to be on the front lines of this battle. One of the ideas that has returned to the fore of the conversation, to the forefront of people’s minds, if you will, is the proper place of states within our constitutional system. Indeed, we have spent the last six years challenging edicts out of Washington that amount to federal control of our classrooms, our healthcare, and our environment and our economy. Washington’s assault on state sovereignty and individual freedom is a well-documented assault on the Constitution and, in particular, the Tenth Amendment. Some have ridiculed the binding power of the Tenth Amendment, but, of course, Jay, without that amendment, the Bill of Rights would have been incomplete, and the Constitution would never have been ratified. The question is whether Republicans in Washington, now in control, will pursue Washington-centric solutions to the problems that plague us, or will they look to and empower the states.
It was the liberal Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis who called the states laboratories of democracy which “tried novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” Yet Brandeis’s political descendants have forgotten that lesson. In fact, they flipped it around trying these grand experiments in federal power, ostensibly for the common good. I like that Tocqueville observed that in the American system the actions of the federal government would be rare, but the reality is the federal government is involved in all kinds of things the Constitution doesn’t empower it to do, while ignoring basic responsibilities like securing our border. And it’s the states that are pushing back against federal overreach and the courts are starting to take notice.
In the infamous Obamacare case of 2012, Chief Justice Roberts upheld the law, but the Supreme Court also struck down the mandatory Medicaid expansion as a violation of the Tenth Amendment. Now a new Obamacare case is about to be heard. It uses the letter of the law to challenge the federal government’s use of subsidies on many of these healthcare insurance exchanges. Now we know that the federal government overstepped its powers. We know that, partly because we know there is now a new smoking gun: One Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of Obamacare. In less than a week’s period of time the Washington sin of prevarication has come to be known as “Gruber-ing.” He said repeatedly, I think, what is there now, six videos that we have, that the federal government had to lie to the voters because we are too stupid to know what’s good for us. That shows exactly why the states are so important to defending individual freedom; because the states have stood up to the abuses of federal power in Obamacare. The law, as a matter of fact, it may collapse upon its own weight.
So if the states are these laboratories of democracy, I would suggest to you that Texas has found the formula for success. You know, it’s interesting, some people call it the Texas miracle, and I tell them, I said it’s not a miracle. I can’t explain a miracle. This I can explain. This is really pretty simple. This is not rocket science. You don’t spend all the money. Keep the taxes low, a regulatory climate that is fair and predictable, a legal system that doesn’t allow for over-suing, and accountable public schools so you’ve got a skilled workforce. This will work. It’ll work anywhere. Jay, it’ll even work in California, I swear to God, I’m telling you it will. And the results have been rather stunning. When you look at job creation, one-third, one-third of all the jobs created in the United States in the last 13 plus years have been in the Lone Star State. Over the last ten years, we have created four times more jobs than the state of New York, we have created nine times more jobs than the state of California.
And some would say well it’s because you have all of that energy, and I will suggest to you we are glad we have that energy. America is glad we have that energy. But it’s not singularly the energy boom, that’s only part of the reason for our success. We’ve added jobs across the spectrum – 228,000 workers in education and healthcare, 156,000 in professional services, 162,000 in hospitality services, 130,000 in trade and transportation, according to the Texas Public Policy Foundation. I am particularly proud of the fact that as of January of this year, Texas became the number one high-tech exporting state in the nation, passing up California and the famed Silicon Valley. And we’ve been continuing to reach out to give California companies the opportunity to relocate to the great state of Texas, companies like Toyota, who moved their North American headquarters to Plano this last year, companies like Space-X, and we’re going to keep doing it.
And my point is, I want the Golden State to succeed. We need California to be a powerful, successful country. That was a Freudian slip. We would really like to bring them into the United States and be a part of this country. You know, for ten consecutive years now, Chief Executive Officer magazine has chosen Texas as the number one state to do business, and, thanks to the governor of this state, Rick Scott, they are doing a good job to push us. Rick Scott is an extraordinary governor, and Floridians were really wise to put this man back into office again because he really understands what the future of our nation, the future of this state is all about, and the focus on creating that environment, where the citizens of this state will be free.
Freedom is what this is all about. It is in the pursuit of freedom, and, on average, there is a thousand people every day moving to the state of Texas because they are in pursuit of freedom. Freedom from over-taxation, freedom from over-litigation, freedom from over-regulation. That is what needs to be the powerful Republican message as we go forward inside the boundaries of this country. And here are some of the results of those policies. Our crime rate is now the lowest that it’s been since 1968. We’re shutting prisons down in the state of Texas, not building them.
But, in all seriousness, can we do more? Yes. Should we try to do more? Absolutely. But what Texas shows is that with a rapidly growing economy all else becomes possible. Clearly Texas is a model that works, but we’re not alone. America has just experienced a great test of governing principles. In the days leading up to the 2014 mid-term elections, we were told that Republican governors were in trouble. You read it everywhere. You saw it on multiple outlets. Scott Walker’s public union reforms in Wisconsin, Sam Brownback’s tax-cutting in Kansas, Rick Scott’s pro-growth policies in Florida, all were going to be punished by the voters. For example, the campaign for America’s future said that seven Republican governors were now “being judged harshly by voters now that their right-wing policies had failed to deliver.” It went on to say that these states were laboratories for the kind of small government trickle-down economics that Senate candidates hoped to bring to Washington, impose on the nation, and there is a real danger that the failed experiments in these seven states will be brought to Washington by a Senate Republican majority. But the experiment wasn’t quite over, and the voters decided in a very powerful conclusion on November 4. Not only did six of those seven governors win re-election, but Republicans picked up governorships in solid states for Democrats like Massachusetts, Illinois, and even Maryland. And there were a lot of people, a lot of people that were responsible for those Republican victories including a number of you, if not all of you, in this audience tonight. Yet in the end it was the people who decided. They told fellow Americans that the experiment and conservative governance is a resounding success and they want more of it.
There were a few places that bucked the trend though. Jay, your California being one of them. See, I tell people, I say California, for example, is as liberal as Texas is conservative. But that is not an argument against federalism. In fact, California is an example of how the state’s Tenth Amendment powers work for liberals too. You think about this. California has some policies that no other state in the union have tried, and in most other states, don’t want to try. Take cap and trade, for instance. I mean, not even Barack Obama, in those heady early days of his first administration, could pass cap and trade, but California has it. And it’s making new companies like Tesla a lot of money, even as it is at the same time forcing a lot of companies out of that state.
Nearly 20 years ago, California also became the first state in the nation to legalize medical marijuana. In 2012, Washington and Colorado legalized marijuana entirely. This year Alaska, Oregon, and the District of Columbia followed suit. The governor of Colorado said that he regrets it. Most conservatives oppose it. The federal government’s still fighting it, and the United Nations said this week that legalizing marijuana violates international law. But that is the beauty of the Tenth Amendment. I’m telling you, that is the beauty of federalism. If states can make their own decisions on matters of general policy, then we can have the kind of political diversity among the states that gives meaning to the pursuit of happiness. People can vote with their feet, they can vote with their pocketbooks, they can invest their dollars where they want, and that gives states an incentive to attract them, and to innovate. The reason welfare reform became so popular nationwide was because it succeeded in Wisconsin. The reason state provided healthcare is unpopular nationwide is they proved that it was costly in Massachusetts.
Some states want to cling to policies for various reasons. California is addicted to spending. Therefore, it’s addicted to debt and taxes. So, there’s a result. It’s losing people, and entrepreneurs, and homeowners, and that is another benefit of federalism. You can do what you want in your state. But you are forced at some point to pay the costs.
So, how do we ensure that the states protect and, I might say, regain their Tenth Amendment rights? One way is by continuing to fight the encroachments of the federal government. Whether bad laws like Obamacare, bad spending like the stimulus of 2009, or bad faith in immigration policy, but beyond that we can take political action. We can show the American people concrete results, how states work better, how states compete against each other, and, I might add, better than the federal government could do. And that’s exactly how Governor-elect Larry Hogan over in Maryland, that was the point that he made. He laid out the data. He showed people in that state how many people had left the state, how many billions of dollars it was costing the state because of the bad policies. If we show people the difference between conservative policies and liberal policies, I happen to think they’re going to demand conservative policies almost every time just as they did last Tuesday. And when people understand, when people understand that they have the power to choose these policies, they’ll resist. They’ll resist any attempt by the federal government to take that power away. There is a reason that people and states are included together in that Tenth Amendment. Individual liberty has shone brightest when it’s been protected from big government. Only successful states are strong enough to protect our freedom from those in Washington who think they know better. States are the essence of our national motto e pluribus unum, from many one. That is the common creed of the David Horowitz Freedom Center that defends it every day. They defend it now and I will suggest to you they will defend it 20 years from now. And that is what each of us must fight for every day.
God bless you, and thank you all for coming and being a part of this.
FrontPageMag.com
Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/rick-perry-restore-the-10th-amendment-restore-freedom/
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