If I were to use my thumb to cover up Mike Colson’s title as listed in the March 5 Post Register, I would have quickly mistaken him for a liberal Democrat. No serious Republican talks about government the way Colson does, let alone the chairman of the Bonneville County Republican Central Committee, until now.
Colson describes the formation of public policy as a choice between “ideology” and “governing.” Which is to say that anyone elected to office, in his view, must put aside ideology and focus on governing. This is simply false. Republicans do have an ideology – conservatism – and that’s rooted in the belief that government should be limited to its proper role of protecting life, liberty, and property.
There is nothing wrong with the GOP electing people who believe in limited government and whose votes execute that belief so that there’s less to govern and more freedom for the masses. That’s what Trump is doing, mostly through executive action. You’d think it would be easy to do the same thing in Idaho government, too.
But Colson says he wants his Republican Party to be “dedicated to bipartisanship” and focus on “compromise, pragmatism, and progress.” The way he describes it, it is up to Republicans to compromise with Democrats to create government programs, and then for Republicans who win elective office to worry about how to administer the programs that the uni-party created. It’s like saying that the mission of the Republican Party should be to execute on the vision of the Democrats. Weird.
This is how we got in the mess we currently find ourselves at both the state and national level. In Washington, D.C., the government is so big, it takes a billionaire genius, Elon Musk, to help figure out just where all the money is going. We’re $37 trillion in debt, so the task is enormous. The government is funding things that no one can articulate clearly and going toward shocking uses. This is the result of Democrat policymaking and Republican presidents and members of Congress fighting to maintain the status quo of zero accountability.
At the state level, controlled for decades by Republicans, we have much the same problem. We have too many regulations; taxes are too high; our schools produce poor results on the regular basis; and special interests (Corporate Welfare) control the doings at the state Capitol to such a degree that bad policy gets passed in the interest of currying favors with wealthy powerbrokers. And Colson would have you believe it’s up to Republicans to reach across the aisle to continue the elaborate ruse that government is super small and limited to just essentials.
The state government is a $14 billion enterprise, touching all aspects of society. Believe it or not, there was a time when we didn’t have so much government, when government was not involved in healthcare, or education, or regulating just about every job known to man. Despite what Colson says, society won’t fall apart if government is small and focused.
Republicans in Idaho control close to 90% of the state Legislature, every statewide office, and every congressional seat. Shouldn’t government reflect conservative principles instead of the principles of the minority Democrats?