EckerNet.Com

Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) presents the Top 10 Conservative Legislative Priorities for 2006. Let\’s take a look shall we??

First of all, I notice Illegal Immigration doesn\’t even make the list. I am NOT encouraged so far.

10. Pass legislation that stops the raid on the Social Security Trust Fund and allows Americans to own a Personal Social Security Account.

Ok good idea, but it\’s a dead issue. The public just isn\’t interested. They should be, but they\’re not. Bush tried this and spent alot of political capital trying to push it. Got him nowhere.

This issue has already been demonized. People retiring soon are convinced you\’d try to steal their retirement money. People that are still far from retirement either don\’t care or else have already given up on Social Security and are preparing for retirement in other ways.

9. Pass Protections for Religious Freedom, such as the Pledge of Allegiance, the Ten Commandments, and religious expression in the public square.

Realistically this would have to be an amendment to pass judicial review. But yeah, I like the idea. Now is the time to do it if it\’s gonna be done. If handled properly you could also use this as a political wedge on some the Democratic base. Force the liberals to publicly come out either for or against it.

Of course, Democrats will also come back with cries of a theocracy and the \”religious right\”, and so forth. Not that it gets them much traction.

8. Defend the Sanctity of Human Life, which includes banning all human cloning, passing the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act, promoting ethical adult stem cell research, and preventing federal funding for destructive embryonic stem cell research.

Is human cloning really a problem in the US? Bush hit on this a number of times in his last State of the Union, and made it sound like there were thousands of cloned zombie hordes roaming the streets (and probably voting Democrat).

All the above sound like they would be pretty much slam-dunk issues, with the exception of the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act. Even though the Act doesn\’t ban or even restrict anything, Democrats are gonna fight it tooth and nail as if you were trying to overturn Roe vs Wade. If you\’re gonna get into this type of fight, you may as well go for the heavyweight title.

7. Offset all emergency supplemental spending with spending reductions and offset all new programs with simultaneous, equivalent reductions in, or eliminations of, existing programs.

God bless you sir. My only complaint would be do we really need emergency supplemental spending to justify doing any of this? But heh, I\’m willing to pick my battles.

6. Pass a Balanced Budget Amendment to put our fiscal house in order.

Wow.

Dear Playboy,
I never thought it would happen to me….

The heavens have parted. Angels have descended to earth and handed me a keg of Guinness. You guys pass it, I\’m gonna go celebrate. If it happens that is. This is yelled from every soapbox that has a rightward tilt every election cycle. If it actually happens I wouldn\’t feel depressed with every session of Congress.

Frame it right and you may even be able to make the Democrats look bad, after they\’ve been decrying the deficit of the Bush administration the past 5 years….although so have many grassroot conservatives. Potentially the Achilles Heel of this though is it makes it more likely that politicians will just raise taxes with every session of Congress to pay for their pet projects since they can\’t run the budget into the red anymore.

5. Pass the Marriage Protection Amendment, to ensure that marriage, the union of a woman and a man as husband and wife, is not redefined by activist judges.

Your not exactly blazing trails, now that quite a few of the states have passed their own amendment. But heh, nobody says the government runs quickly….or at all. At the present it has overwhelmingly popular support, get it done now.

4. Pass Ethics Reform that requires transparency and earmark reform that permits Members of Congress to strike earmarks on the House floor.

Sounds good. No more bridges to nowhere.

3. Pass another Deficit Reduction Bill in the form of budget reconciliation, to reign in autopilot spending, which has risen from 25% of all federal spending in 1963 to 54% today, and is expected to reach nearly 60% in 2014.

This is the third budget issue on the list so far. Finally feeling the heat from fiscal conservatives? Good, too bad it took you this long.

2. Pass Budget Process Reform, which includes budgeting for emergencies with a rainy day fund, instituting a sunset commission for federal programs, instituting a constitutional line-item veto, and making the budget resolution carry the force of law.

Ohhhh, you were doing so well too. Bad idea. Here\’s the one universal truth about all politicians. Give them money and the WILL spend it. Set up a rainy day fund, and you\’ll have Democrats tossing buckets of water from the capital dome just for an excuse to spend it. It WILL get spent, whether there was even a cloudy day or not.

How about this. You operate like the rest of us do. Something comes up, we make room in our personal budget, and if that means tightening the belt, then so be it. Well…actually most of us set aside savings for that type of stuff, but you guys haven\’t saved anything since you were elected, so we\’ll kill that idea before it\’s even tabled.

1. Make the Tax Cuts Permanent, including the repeal of the marriage-tax penalty and the death tax and pass fundamental tax reform.

Ok you\’re back on track. Congrats, on behalf of all of us, we\’d like to welcome the Republican Party to conservatism.

Flat tax maybe?? Wishful thinking maybe? Heh, a guy can dream can\’t he?

Ok the list likes pretty okay. The problem here is there is NOTHING new on it. This is the same lines you\’ve feed us since the 98 election. You\’ve spit out so much double-talk, you\’ve developed a nasty case of Athlete\’s Tongue.

I keep hearing how you\’re gonna get all this done, now you\’ve got the White House, both Houses of Congress and the Supreme Court is back on an even keel. Yet what have you truly accomplished?? And don\’t say Iraq and Afghanistan, you didn\’t acomplish that, our military did. The Dept of Defense is the only part of the government that works.

So this time instead of telling me another fable of what you\’re gonna do, how about you actually do it? And then when you get all this done you can put Illegal Immigration on the top of the next one.