In today’s Friday interview the John Locke Foundation’s Mitch Kokai talks to Heritage Foundation President Edwin Feulner about his new book Getting America Right: The True Conservative Values Our Nation Needs Today. The interview aired on Carolina Journal Radio (click here to find the station near you).
Kokai: Why did you write this book now?
Feulner: At this stage of the game, we are really convinced that most conservatives are really rather disillusioned. After all, we’ve been in charge of the White House for 18 of the last 25 years, we’ve been in charge of Congress for the last 12, and both of those for the last five. So this should be the best of times. And yet we’ve got real problems in Washington. So how do we get it right? And that’s when we came upon our format of having six basic questions that we want people to be able to put to their elected representatives.
Kokai: What are the six questions?
Feulner: First, is it the government’s business? That’s pretty basic, but something we don’t ask often enough. Second, does it promote the self-reliance of the American people? Third, is it responsible – this program particularly or that one? Is it responsible for the government to be doing it? And then the three issue-related kind of questions: first, does it make us more prosperous? Second, does it make us safer? And third – one that’s very much in the news these days — does it unify us? Does it bring us together as a nation? Those six questions – we think — form kind of a basic rubric of conservative perspectives on whether the government should in fact be doing something or not.
Kokai: I’m guessing that you would say many government programs don’t really pass the test.
Feulner: We are not kind of hardcore libertarians who believe that — or anarchists actually — who believe that there shouldn’t be any government. We cite in our book some very good government programs of the past, whether it’s the G.I. Bill post World War II that was basically a voucher plan that enabled our returning veterans to get higher education. And we talk about other programs over the years that have been well designed and targeted to their specific needs. But I’ve got to tell you that when we’ve got the federal government funding things like a rain forest in Iowa, or that famous bridge to nowhere in Alaska, or now they’re talking about a railroad to nowhere down in Mississippi, that’s not really the government’s business. Government shouldn’t be doing that. We ask again whether it promotes self-reliance. There we have our annual Index of Dependency that we produce every summer. Unfortunately, just since Ronald Reagan was first elected 25 years ago, we’ve seen the dependency of the American people for the four basics – health care, housing, education, and welfare – go up like 112 percent. I mean we’re moving in the wrong direction. The Americans are a self-reliant people, and we’ve got to re-encourage that. We’ve got to get people off of the idea that government owes them so much.
Kokai: What do you think about the elected leaders who’ve been dubbed “big government conservatives”?
Feulner: One of my colleagues has started handing out bottled water to every congressman he meets, on the theory that otherwise they’ll drink too much of the Potomac River, and that somehow corrupts them. I don’t think it’s that simple. I think what it is is that they come to Washington, they see the old kind of way of thinking about things – the way liberals always have – in terms of carving out the pork barrel, and making sure we get our share, and so they kind of fall in the trap of believing that somehow big government is good government if it’s our government. Well, conservatives shouldn’t believe that. We should all believe as Mr. Jefferson from my home state of Virginia said 200 and some years ago, “Any government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have.” And that’s what concerns me is that conservatives have just lost this sense of principle and this sense of doing the right thing once they’re up there. That’s of course what we’ve involved in at The Heritage Foundation, day in and day out, too. It’s what we call policy politics. How do you get the men and women who were sent to Washington to do the right thing once they’re there instead of taking the easy way out and just voting for the pork and assuming that will get them re-elected back home?
Kokai: Based on that sort of concern, some think it’s time for the Republicans who’ve controlled the White House and Congress in recent years to now suffer an election setback in 2006. What do you think about that notion?
Feulner: No, I don’t agree with that. Of course, at Heritage we’re a non-profit and non-partisan organization. We are unashamedly, unabashedly conservative. Now that doesn’t mean we are necessarily Republican. The fact is that most conservatives are Republicans, but if you really look at the Congress and you add up individuals who would describe themselves as liberals in both the Republican Party and then the overwhelming majority of them in the Democratic Party, it’s still very much an uphill battle. Conservatives are still — frankly — pretty much outnumbered. One of my colleagues who watches the U.S. Senate very closely says that really — when you get down to it — you’ve got kind of a rock-solid base of about 38 Republican conservatives in the United States Senate. Of course, you need 60 to break a filibuster, and you need 51 to pass every measure you’ve got. So they end up compromising on so many things. And then, some of the guys we would consider rock-solid conservatives — like my good friends Trent Lott and Thad Cochran from Mississippi — want to put in a $700 million so-called railroad to nowhere, just to move this railroad down in the coast in Mississippi a couple hundred yards inland, so that the gambling casinos have got a free access directly to the river banks. Well, that’s fine if they want to do that down there. But don’t saddle the federal taxpayers with doing that. CSX Railroad just spent $200 million fixing that same stretch of railroad, just after Katrina. And why the taxpayers should now have to pay another three-quarters of a billion dollars to move it again, I don’t know. They’re good Republicans most of the time, except when it comes to some of these things back home.
Kokai: In the grand scheme of things, should conservatives be disillusioned?
Feulner: I think we should be disillusioned with some of the day-to-day votes and some of the day-to-day leadership — frankly — that we’re getting out of Washington. As I travel around the country, I hear people say, “Well, if they’re going to filibuster, why isn’t a filibuster like the good old filibusters we remember when Jesse Helms was in the Senate or Sam Ervin was in the Senate?” One was a Republican. One was a Democrat. But back then, if there were filibusters, then by gosh, the Senators stayed up for 24 hours in a row, and they had quorum calls. And they made it inconvenient for their colleagues and really pressed home an issue. Now they’ve got this two-track thing where you immediately file cloture. And it’s all gobbledygook and nobody really knows what’s going on the floor. And it’s not very effective leadership. And on the other side of the Capitol, you’ve got a House leadership that seems to be unable to count to 218 to get their majority together. And so they’re kind of cutting and running on some things. Now they have done some things we wish the Senate would take up — like repeal of the death tax and things like that. We hope they’ll be coming up fairly soon, but the leadership is kind of wanting. And now it’s coming from the backbenchers. There are people who’ve had some real courage in the past, in terms of speaking out — whether it’s your own Sen. Elizabeth Dole, talking about the real challenges we face on entitlements and Social Security and how we’ve got to come up with a new and better system that involves private accounts, and getting the government out of the business of providing the only source of income for so many seniors. Then what happens? The president tries to push it and gets shot down on pure partisan bases, and now we’re hearing that Social Security’s eventual bankruptcy is going to be three years closer than it was just a year-and-a-half ago. The Congress has got to come to grips with some of these things, and that means the American people have got to demand more of their elected representatives.