FedUpUSA

Archive for the ‘Senator Jim DeMint’ Category

If you wanted a bell to ring at the “be prepared” point, it just did.

South Carolina U.S. Senator Jim DeMint will replace Ed Feulner as president of the Heritage Foundation. Mr. DeMint will leave his post as South Carolina’s junior senator in early January to take control of the Washington think tank, which has an annual budget of about $80 million.

Sen. DeMint’s departure means that South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, a Republican, will name a successor, who will have to run in a special election in 2014. In that year, both Mr. DeMint’s replacement and Sen. Lindsey Graham will be running for reelection in South Carolina.

Do not underestimate the meaning of this or its timing.

I know people will, and will try to look at this as simply a “move that will popularize conservative values.”  You’re wrong folks.

If you’ve followed Mr. DeMint over the years you know that he “gets it”, and that when not on the floor he is rather blunt with his constituents and anyone else who cares to pay attention.

Sometimes a bell does ring at important inflection points.

This is, in my opinion, one of those times.

Expect a Tickercon change within the next two weeks.

Jim DeMint gets the gold star for the day. [Ben Bernanke's Congressional hearing today.]

It probably just went over the head of everyone in the room on the Joint Economic Committee, but Bernanke didn’t miss it.

Paraphrased, Jim DeMint said: If you stop the deficit spending the economy craters (~10% of GDP) and if you continue doing it the economy will crater (since you will eventually hit the wall and be forced to stop, and it will be even worse.)

In other words, the policies being promulgated are not and cannot be effective.

Anyone who claims that nobody in Congress “gets it” is wrong.  There are a few people who do, Jim DeMint being one of them.

But notice that nobody is talking about taking our medicine and ceasing the lies — the puerile and false claim that we can “recover” from a debt addiction through yet more debt.

That’s mathematically impossible, DeMint knows it, and he’s said it in public.

Now let’s see if anyone — such as the Libertarian Presidential Candidate — will get out in front of this issue and start talking about both what needs to be done and what we can, and cannot, do to mitigate that which must come.

One has to wonder.

Coburn has been called a “Tea Party Turncoat”, but is he?  How about Jim DeMint?

As I’m sure followers of my articles are aware, I’ve been extremely critical of what appeared to be a direct change from fiscal responsibility or anything like it (never mind cessation of knobbing the banksters) right into “GGG” – the shop-worn and tired “Guns, Gays and God” nonsense.

Well, perhaps some who claim to be “Tea” have realized that there’s no future in “GGG” if you try to use that as a sop for what you were elected to do?

Hmmmm….. maybe.

I have often said that when the facts change so do my opinions.  And it appears that perhaps – just perhaps – my opinions need to be revised, at least for a few Senators and Representatives.

Let’s start with Steve Southerland.  I’ve been very critical of him, going after him full-bore after what I considered a shameful and intentionally-misleading “presentation” he gave in Destin with Jeff Miller. He’s my “Critter” in DC, replacing the utterly worthless Alan Boyd this last election.

But he voted no on the Boehner bill.  While he did not completely explain what he would vote for in his press release, he did say this:

“I believe Speaker Boehner deserves credit for crafting the best solution he thought possible after enduring months of stonewalling and political parlor tricks from the President and Senate Democrats.  However, I am concerned that the House Budget Control Act hands President Obama a $900 billion debt limit increase without the guarantee of a federal balanced budget amendment or the trillions of dollars in spending cuts and caps necessary to protect America’s AAA credit rating.

Close enough for now.

Then there’s Coburn, who I Tickered earlier today.  His speech on the Senate floor needs to be heard by every American.  He’s spot-on and nobody in The House or Senate can honestly refute a word of it.  Kerry, who tried, simply made a fool of himself.  Click that link and watch it for yourself.  Yeah, he has been wrong before – TARP, for example.  But we all have erred and if we refuse to forgive sins when people’s actions change, we go nowhere as a country – or as individuals.

Finally, we have DeMint, who the AP is reporting on:

But unlike the fractious movement as a whole, DeMint is specific and focused on what change, exactly, he wants: passage — not just a vote — of a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. Without it, he says, no consideration should be given to raising the nation’s borrowing limit. Even, he says, if the country runs out of money for paying all its bills after Aug. 2.

There it is.  The correct position, in my view, and exactly what those who originally began sending Tea Bags and otherwise raising hell have all been about since the beginning (myself included) – no more government “hot checks” and games.  No more “baseline” budgeting that would land you in prison anywhere except in Congress.  No more claims of “cuts” when they’re spending increases.  No more bailouts, which are simply more “hot check” games.  And no more providing services we are unwilling to fund with current tax revenues.

I’m sure I’ve missed a number of Senators and Reps in here and I can’t possibly cover them all individually – after all, there were other “NO” votes in The House.  Among them where Michele Bachmann and Connie Mack.  The full list of Republicans who voted against, all of whom can be presumed to be demanding an actual balanced budget, is:

Justin Amash (Mich.), Michele Bachmann (Minn.), Paul Broun (Ga.), Jason Chaffetz (Utah), Chip Cravaack (Minn.), Scott DeJarlais (Tenn.), Jeff Duncan (S.C.), Trey Gowdy (S.C.), Tom Graves (Ga.), Tim Huelskamp (Kan.), Timothy Johnson (Ill.), Jim Jordan (Ohio), Steve King (Iowa), Tom Latham (Iowa), Connie Mack (Fla.), Tom McClintock (Calif.), Mick Mulvaney (S.C.), Ron Paul (Texas), Tim Scott (S.C.), Steve Southerland (Fla.), Joe Walsh (Ill.), and Joe Wilson (S.C.).

While there are still plenty of liars in Congress, including people like Jeff Miller (R-FL-1) who claim to be a “fiscal conservative” yet voted for Boehner’s fraudulent claim of “cuts” it also appears we have a few people who claim to be “Tea Party” affiliated and/or fiscal conservatives who have found religion.

I don’t care where they found it or why.  Maybe they read all the Tickers I’ve been faxing to them the last couple of weeks; some have gotten a whole load of them.  Maybe they sat down with Excel, as I’ve challenged everyone in Congress to do for four years, and simply run the numbers.  Some of them recently got a targeted “care package” coordinated by myself, Steph’s FedUpUSA and Bill Still, addressed and sent by a cadre of Patriots on Tickerforum who all deserve a standing ovation for their efforts – and maybe those Congressfolk actually read and viewed the material.  Maybe they heard a voice in a “burning bush” or maybe they woke up in a cold sweat and realized that all the lies, obfuscation and games were running out and their political necks were headed for the guillotine known as the “Ballot Box” next year.

Whether their enlightenment came in a church, in a field, reading Tickers, watching videos and reading printed letters, waking in a cold sweat, praying on their own or with others in the House as it was said some of them were doing before the Boehner vote, it doesn’t matter.  What matters is that it happened and that there is a small but growing group of Senators and Representatives who have had their “Come to Jesus” experience on what we must do as a nation.

If you’re a person of prayer, now is the time.  To stiffen these men and women’s backbones and enlarge their gonads.  Pray that a love of true freedom, fiscal reason and responsibility ring like brass church bells and their resolve not fail.  That the truth – the cold, hard mathematical truth that cannot be avoided and must be faced be explained to the American people head-on.  And that the very public and essential debate be held by and with the American people on exactly what services we are willing to pay for with taxes in the present tense, dollar-for-dollar, and that the Federal Government be cut back to exactly that size and not one federal employee or department beyond it.

Winston Churchill once said that “Americans will always do the right thing ….. after they have exhausted all of the alternatives.”

Well, we’ve exhausted all the alternatives.

It’s time.

This is getting rather tiring… (from Jim DeMint and Olympia Snowe)

….

There has to be another way, and there is. Republicans in the Senate are united in our concern about our nation’s fiscal future. Before we consider saddling our children with even more debt, we must enact significant spending cuts and enforceable caps on future spending. For the long term, to prevent both this Congress and its successors from hijacking the promise of American prosperity, we also need a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, like the one we and all 47 Senate Republicans have introduced.

Nonsense.

The correct answer is to say no right now.

To not saddle anyone with one dollar of additional borrowing.

Doing so requires not one bit of legislation.  In fact, it simply requires that The House and/or Senate refuse to legislate.

Without an increased debt ceiling Treasury cannot spend more than it takes in.  Neither can Congress.  Neither can the Executive.  Nobody can.

It’s the simple solution, it’s the right solution, and it’s the necessary solution.

If Congress wishes to pass a balanced budget Constitutional Amendment, that’s fine.  Congress can consider same any time it would like, and then submit to the states for ratification.

But in the meantime, until that’s law, the simple solution is to SAY NO.

This fiscal conservative is tired of the excuses and lies of Washington DC and will accept nothing else.

The Market-Ticker

If there is one thing that the one-time GAO audit of the Fed disclosed, is how woefully insufficient the extremely superficial data discovery was. Another thing uncovered was just how needed this disclosure was: it provided extended material into how the Fed subsidizes banks (both domestic and international) on an ongoing basis, not to mention substantial number crunching for the blogosphere. Either way, if Bernanke was hoping that the Frank-Dodd bill would take care of the Fed opacity, pardon, transparency issue in perpetuity, he may be disappointed: Ron’s son, Rand, has just announced he is introducing legislation to, well, Audit The Fed, precisely along the lines of what his father did previously and generated massive support from everyone in Congress. Once again Ben Bernanke is about to become a major thorn on the side of the political puppetry.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Senator Rand Paul introduced legislation allowing for a full audit of the Federal Reserve. This legislation is a Senate version of similar legislation long-championed by and introduced this session in the House of Representatives by his father, Congressman Ron Paul of Texas. Co-sponsoring the “Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2011” (S. 202), are Senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina and David Vitter of Louisiana.

“We must take a critical look at the Fed’s monetary policy decisions, discount window operations, and a host of other things, with a real audit – and not just pay lip-service to the idea of an audit,” Sen. Paul said today. “At a time when we’re seeing great volatility in small Euro-zone economies like Greece, Portugal, and Ireland, it is more crucial than ever that we have real transparency at our own central bank.“

The bill will eliminate the current audit restrictions placed on the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and mandate a complete audit of the Federal Reserve to be completed by a firm deadline, finally delivering answers to the American people about how their money is being spent by Washington.

ZeroHedge