Young America's Foundation

September 26, 2005

Washington, D.C.

# Another Time for Choosing

Rep. Mike Pence

As Prepared for Delivery

I come today with a sense of privilege and gratitude. It's a privilege
to speak to men and women from which will likely come the future of our
Party and our nation. And gratitude to the Young Americans Foundation,
who hosts me today, and who welcomed me last month to the home of my
hero. A home nestled in the Santa Inez Mountains of California, Rancho
del Cielo, the Reagan Ranch.

Thanks to YAF, my wife and our three small children spent a quiet day at
the ranch. As we walked the grounds, toured the small house and stables,
surveyed the sea and the valley between which this mountaintop home
rests, I thought of the man Ronald Reagan. I thought of his Midwestern
simplicity, his commitment to the ideals of our founders, and his human
kindness even toward those with whom he differed.

As I looked across the landscape of the Reagan Ranch I knew why the
President so often quoted that verse to visitors, "I look to the hills
from where my help comes from\...my help comes from the Lord, the maker
of heaven and earth." (*Psalm 121*)

Ronald Reagan's ideas inspired a nation and they inspire me still, and
as I think of the example of President Reagan, and I think of the men
and women with whom I serve in the 100-member House Republican Study
Committee, I know that the baton has been passed to a new generation of
conservative leaders.

Today in Congress, I am proud to report that a new generation of men and
women aspire to do as those who went before, to do the work the American
people have elected conservatives to do: to lead this country on behalf
of limited government and traditional moral values.

But there is work to be done, with the national debt at nearly \$8
trillion, over 26,000 for every American. In light of two consecutive
sessions of Congress that saw a 52 percent increase in the Department of
Education and the first new entitlement in 40 years, with record
increases in federal spending in every branch of government.

Two years ago, I likened the conservative movement to a tall ship plying
the open seas of a simpler time with a proud captain and a strong and
accomplished crew, veering off course into the dangerous and uncharted
waters of big government Republicanism.

For despite the enormous conservative achievements of the past four
years, I saw troubling signs that the ship of conservative governance
was off course.

As the next presidential election approaches and new Republican leaders
emerge, I believe as a movement, as a party, as a nation, we have come
to another time for choosing.

While Ronald Reagan said famously, \"government is not the solution to
our problem, government is the problem\" many Republicans see government
increasingly as the solution to every social ill.

Our party and you, its rising generation of new leaders, face an age-old
choice: A choice between the belief in limited government and tradition
and the siren song of the central planner who says that "Big government
is good government if it's our government."

Ronald Reagan spoke of this choice in his famed speech of October 1964:
"You and I are told we must choose between a left or a right, but I
suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up
or down. Up to man's age-old dream: the maximum of individual freedom
consistent with order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism."

The 40^th^ president summed up his generation's choice and ours as
follows: "Whether we believe in our capacity for self government, or
whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little
intellectual elite in a far distant capitol can plan our lives for us
better than we can plan them for ourselves."

So how do we find our way forward as the new governing majority?

How do we ensure that a second Bush term and the 109th Congress reflect
our party's commitment to limited government?

The answer may well lie in a tale of maritime valor nearly a century
ago:

On 19 January 1915, after five months at sea, Sir Ernest Shackleton's
ship Endurance was beset by an early ice pack in the seas north of
Antarctica, ending abruptly their expedition to that frozen continent.
After nine months wedged in the floating ice, the Endurance was crushed
and sank in October of 1915, leaving the crew to winter five months on
the ice flows until escaping to Elephant Island in April of 1916.

With supplies dwindling, Shackleton made the decision to take a single
lifeboat in an attempt to cross 800 miles of the inhospitable ocean in
the world, under hurricane conditions, in an attempt to reach South
Georgia Island and help.

In the course of 16 tumultuous days, where celestial navigation was
nearly impossible due to storm conditions, Shackleton and his skeleton
crew chipped at 15 inches of ice forming on the boat and made the
landfall using an ancient form of navigation known as "dead reckoning."

In dead reckoning, the navigator finds his course by measuring the
course and distance he has sailed from some fixed position. If the
navigator has a fixed starting position, by tracking heading and speed
he can calculate the exact location of the ship at any time but
navigation depends on knowing the location of the known starting point.

Dead reckoning saved the crew of the Endurance and dead reckoning can
save the course of Republican governance in the 21^st^ century.

Conservatives must dead reckon off the starting point of what we know to
be true about the nature of government and we won't lose our way:

> \- Conservatives know that government that governs least governs
> best.\
> \
> - Conservatives know that as government expands, freedom contracts.\
> \
> - Conservatives know that government should never do for a man what he
> can and should do for himself.
>
> \- And Conservatives know that societies are judged by how they deal
> with the most vulnerable: the unborn, the aged, the infirm and the
> disabled.

As we navigate off of these fixed historical truths, the way forward is
clear. We must rediscover the principles of limited government that
brought our party to power in 1980 and 1994 and put them into practice.

This requires that conservatives have an agenda, built on the principles
of limited government, an agenda which comprises what conservatives must
do and what conservatives must undo in the 109^th^ Congress.

**What conservatives must do**

First, House Conservatives must be prepared to rally support in the
Congress and throughout the country for the President's agenda where it
conforms with the ideals of limited government.

The good news is that all of the "Big Three" agenda items outlined by
the President in his State of the Union Address are worthy of vigorous
conservative support:

> \- Modernizing Social Security by introducing the option of personal
> savings accounts for younger Americans
>
> \- Overhauling the Internal Revenue Code, without a tax increase, to
> achieve a system that is simpler and fairer for taxpaying Americans
>
> \- Reforming the legal system to end the hidden tax that frivolous
> lawsuits place on our manufacturing and health care economies

These are the priorities of President George W. Bush and they deserve to
be the priorities of conservatives in Washington.

In addition to these "Big Three" goals, House conservatives should put
on the green eyeshades to put our fiscal house in order, beginning with
dealing with the aftermath of the worst natural catastrophe in American
history.

Katrina breaks my heart, when I think of the storm and its tragic
aftermath, I think of that story from Matthew: "And the rains descended,
the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on the house; and it did
not fall, for it was founded on the rock." (*Matthew 7:25*)

For most Americans, when a tree falls on your house, first you tend to
the wounded, then you start the clean up, then you sit down and figure
out how you're going to pay for it.

Thanks to swift and compassionate leadership by the President and our
leaders in Congress, we are tending to the wounded and have begun the
cleanup. But now is the time for Congress to begin to figure out how to
pay for it.

Last week, dozens of House conservatives offered a broad range of
suggested budget cuts to begin the debate over finding offsets in
government spending to cover the incredible costs of this storm. The
*Washington Times* called it a good start. The *Washington Post* called
it stupid. We must be on the right track.

The debate has been difficult, but it will go forward, because we have a
Republican President and a Republican Congress. The Democratic Party has
made it clear how they would respond to this tragedy: tax and spend, tax
and spend.

To that end, there are other priorities once we work past this crisis:

> -Pass additional tax cuts (as the Republican Congress has done every
> year since 1994) to ensure continued economic growth.
>
> -Pass fundamental budget process reform including a line-item veto
>
> -Uphold any Presidential veto on a spending bill that exceeds the
> budget
>
> -Take on wasteful government spending and actually eliminate outdated
> government programs

And as Reagan taught us, conservatives know that freedom means more than
just actuarial perfection, it means gains in moral freedom. Congress
must take action to free the American people from the cultural
consequences of activist federal courts who would impose their view of
morality, patriotism and our most cherished institutions on our
communities and families. To do this, we must:

> \- Support the next conservative nominee to the Supreme Court

\- Pass the Federal Marriage Amendment by a growing majority

> \- Pass additional legislative limitations on abortion, including
> parental notification and strengthening informed consent
>
> \- Pass the Incapacitated Persons Act to ensure that no disabled
> Americans have access to the federal courts when their unalienable
> right to life is threatened by government action
>
> -Pass legislation limiting jurisdiction over our most cherished
> symbols and free expression of faith in the public square.

**What Conservatives Must Undo**

In addition to what we must do, there is legislation that conservatives
must undo to advance the freedom agenda:

First, conservatives must undo the damage to the First Amendment by
reforming the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act.

BCRA violated the 1^st^ Amendment directive that "Congress shall make no
law abridging the freedom of speech."

The summer of 527's has given the advocates of government restrictions
on speech the excuse to try it again. We must seize the opportunity to
reform our campaign finance laws in a manner that empowers political
parties and restores the freedom of speech.

Second, conservatives must undo the Medicare Prescription Drug
entitlement. In the prescription drug bill, a Republican Congress added
an unfunded Medicare liability equal to the entire Social Security
obligation.

Congress must repeal the entitlement elements of the prescription drug
program that threaten to bankrupt our nation in the next century and
drive millions of retirees into Medicare for prescription drug coverage.

Third, conservatives must undo the expansion of the federal government's
role in our local schools by reforming the No Child Left Behind Act to
embrace the principle that education is a state and local function.

Congress must return education spending in Washington to the block grant
strategy of welfare reform, promoting school choice and innovation
through resources, not red tape.

These are difficult days in which we live: Threats at home and abroad,
expansion of government and erosion of values. But I am not discouraged
nor should you be.

For these are the times in which Americans have always been at their
best. Like those that Abigail Adams celebrated in a letter to her young
son:

> "These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in
> the still calm of life or the repose of a pacific station that great
> characters are formed...the habits of a vigorous mind are formed in
> contending with difficulties...great necessities call out great
> virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the
> heart, those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant wake into
> life, and form the character of the hero and the statesman."
>
> *(Abigail Adams to John Quincy Adams, 19 Jan 1780)*

So we have come to another time for choosing. And I have faith as other
Americans of other times have done before. We will choose liberty.

I believe that we will choose liberty because despite the occasional
difference of opinion, I believe in the leadership of this Congress, men
and women of integrity and principle who work every day to bring the
ideals of our Founders into the well of the People's House.

I believe that we will choose liberty because I believe in the American
people.

I believe that we will choose liberty because I believe in God.

I believe, as our Founders did, as all of our greatest leaders did, that
we are one nation under God, rich with a purpose yet to be fulfilled.

And I believe, with all my heart, that He who set this miracle of
democracy on this, these wilderness shores, will give us the wisdom to
know the right choice and the courage to make it as we choose the
direction of our party and our nation in the 21^st^ century.

For no matter how dark the day may seem, no matter how lost the cause of
limited government and traditional moral values, we are confident
knowing that the cause of freedom is not just our cause, but His: The
author and finisher of our faith and the faith of our founders.

And so we say along with the poet:

> "The woods are lovely dark and deep
>
> But I have promises to keep
>
> And miles to go before I sleep,
>
> And miles to go before I sleep."

We have promises to keep for future generations of Americans in
preserving, protecting and defending the blessings of liberty for
ourselves and our posterity.

Thank you for the honor of addressing you and for all you do to keep the
cause of conservative values alive in this shining city on the hill,
this last best hope of earth, these United States of America. God bless
you and the United States of America.\
\
Rep. Mike Pence