The Conservatives' Legislative Mistakes

The current debacle over health care legislation points up an important error which Republican Party members of Congress and Presidents (Reagan, Bush and Bush) made over the past thirty years.

Beginning with their attaining a Senate majority in 1982 (?), Republicans should have moved to cement their preferred approaches to social security, medicare, medicaid, energy policy and health care into legislation. By 1994, when the Republicans took the House, as well, they were well-poised to draft and push preferred solutions to issues in these areas.

As a conservative, it's very sad to see, some twenty years after Reagan left office, that little of his term's accomplishments remain in place. Spending has gone wild, taxes are rising, and government is big and getting even bigger. The only lasting achievement seems to have been breaking up the old Soviet Union and its penchant for extending communism around the globe.

How different things would have been, had Reagan led by example and sent legislation to Congress to simplify and solidify, in law, health care reforms which, only now, his party's Congressional members are hastily finding the courage to champion?

Even to the point of pushing, during the George W. Bush's two terms, Constitutional amendments to effect key conservative objectives?

It's the same with energy policy, social security and medicare. The latter two are an ever-growing drag on the nation's economy and federal treasury. The former is something which, once and for all, should have been set on solid, clearly-conceived ground and then left to operate.

In the past, conservatives have obviously felt that the less they did and legislated, the better. They naively believed that others, specifically, liberal Democrats, would not continue to push for legislatively-based changes in these key areas of government and societal policy.

By leaving the topics unresolved through legislation, Republicans left themselves vulnerable to those whose mantra is to continue to encroach on individual liberties while enlarging the government's 'safety net.'

Perhaps this generation of Republican leaders, e.g., Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor, have finally learned this lesson and will move adroitly and quickly, when in power in the House, to fix in law conservative solutions to important social issues, the liberal approaches to which will cost infinitely more money and confiscate many more individual rights and liberties.