Free Give Us Liberty by Dick Armey Page B

buy the additional votes needed to pass it and send it back to the House to be rubber-stamped. These “emergency” provisions included Section 503 of the act that, according to the official Library of Congress summary, “Exempts from the excise tax 31 on bows and arrows certain shafts consisting of all natural wood that, after assembly, measure 5/16 of an inch or less in diameter and that are not suitable for use with bows that would otherwise be subject to such tax (having a peak draw weight of 30 pounds or more).”
    The Democrats, the liberal apparatchiks at the Center for American Progress, the SEIU, and the Obama administration’s partisan advocates in the media all love to ask the same question of the Tea Partiers: “Where were you when the Bush administration was violating the principles of fiscal responsibility, accountability, and limited government?”
    The answer for many is, “On September 29, 2008, I stopped yelling at the TV, got up off the couch, picked up a mouse and the phone, and decided it was time to take America back from Washington.”
    As the Washington political establishment was about to discover, these newly minted citizen activists were just getting started. As the economy faltered and the government grew, this nascent group of activists began to forge the modern-day Tea Party movement.

Chapter 4
What We Stand For
    A LTHOUGH T EA P ARTY ACTIVISTS come from a variety of backgrounds, they are united in a core set of beliefs. That is the inherent strength of the movement. When you have principle to guide your activism, you do not need an organizational hierarchy.
    You’ll notice this is a short chapter, and that is intentional. It just doesn’t take a lot of words to say that we just want to be free. Free to lead our lives as we please, so long as we do not infringe on the same freedom of others. We are endowed with certain unalienable rights and delegate only some of our power to the government to protect those rights. Defenders of limited government understand that the U.S. Constitution lists the specific powers it delegates. If it’s not mentioned, we retain that power. This is why the original U.S. Constitution was only four pages. In a telling contrast, the recently proposed European Union Constitution was 100 times longer at 400 pages. That’s because it does take a lot of words for rulers to tell unfree people which rights they will be given and how they must lead their lives. That’s why Obama’s health care legislation was more than 2,000 pages long.
    Members of the Tea Party movement are focused on defending individual freedoms and economic liberty because one does not exist without the other. The overwhelming majority of activists are just responsible citizens trying to defend something they cherish: constitutionally limited government. This is a movement stirred into action not out of partisan bitterness but as a reaction to what they view as a government that has grown too large, spends too much money, and is interfering with their freedoms. When you speak with activists, no matter where you find them, four recurring themes inevitably become clear.
    1. T HE C ONSTITUTION I S T HE B LUEPRINT FOR G OOD G OVERNMENT
    F IRST AND FOREMOST, THE Tea Party movement is concerned with recovering constitutional principles in government. Our nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to protecting the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of the individual, not of the collective or groups of special interests. The miracle of the Constitution is the simple genius of limited government and its singular devotion to protecting individual liberty.
    Our Founding Fathers designed a constitutional system based on private property and the rule of law to protect the individual from an overbearing federal government. An American’s freedom is based on individual rights endowed by our Creator, secured by the Constitution.