Finally, the tea-party voters he exploited to win office include a great majority that is deeply committed to defending the Constitution. Despite all this, we find Rep. Gosar advocating the view that most people don’t believe in the Constitution, in a gathering of the very people whose votes contributed to the electoral majority that sent him to Washington. Obviously, in his eyes, the constituents he’s supposed to represent don’t count for much.
Alan Keyes
In 2010, Paul Gosar was elected to represent Arizona’s 1st Congressional District in the U.S. Congress. With the help of a much-publicized endorsement from Sarah Palin, he rode to victory on the wave of resentment against Washington that fueled what came to be called the tea-party movement. Given this background, I naturally paid attention when I ran across a YouTube video in which Gosar recently told a gathering of conservative activists, “If all you’re going to do is stand just for the Constitution and nothing less, you will lose….Because not everybody believes in the Constitution.” (For a written report on his remarks, click here.)
In 2010, Gosar ran against an incumbent whose sins included support for Obamacare. Since then, of course, the view that key provisions of Obamacare are unconstitutional has become a focal point of opposition to the plan. In the recent U.S. Supreme Court action on the matter, Chief Justice John Roberts (a G.W. Bush appointee) expressed the opinion of a majority of the Court that this view is, in fact, correct. But the Court then proceeded to fabricate the irrational doctrine that an enforcement mechanism that is otherwise beyond the bounds of constitutionality can nonetheless be implemented as a tax, because Congress’ taxing power inherently escapes constitutional limitations. Since the power to tax is the power to destroy, this leaves the U.S. government free to destroy at will the livelihood of America’s inhabitants. In place of a constitutional regime based on the consent of the people, we are thrown back to the rule of fearsomely unlimited government power, implemented by way of taxes judicially morphed into unconstrained instruments of economic terrorism.
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