Grassroots Central Updates

Since former Rep. Ron Paul’s last Presidential run, the Liberty Movement’s influence on the Republican Party has thickened and spread. Just in the past few weeks, multiple state GOPs have elected the Libertarian-leaning supporters to key positions within the party. As SLN reported, “The new additions to Michigan’s Republican Party are Andrew Fink, chairman; Amy Preston, vice chairwoman; Brad Shafer, secretary; and Eric Rothoff, treasurer.”

Michigan isn’t the only state that is seeing a change in ideology – Florida, Arizona and Iowa have all witnessed many “Ron Paul Republicans” become a part of the GOP. Specifically in Florida, Miami-Dade County has surprised many. Sunshine State News explained, “48 to 51 of the approximately 128 new committee persons seated Tuesday self-identify as supporters of Congressman Ron Paul’s Libertarianism/Conservatism…” going on to state, “Two Paul supporters were elected to the board of directors of Miami-Dade County’s Republican Executive Committee; one of the largest REC’s in the state: Rosa Palomino as vice chairwoman and Elizabeth Romney-Robayna as treasurer.”

In heavily contested and gritty Iowa, a fellow Rep. Paul and Liberty Movement supporter, A.J. Spiker managed reelection as the State’s GOP chairman. The Des Moines Register notes, “After Spiker was elected 11 months ago, he hired Paul movement members as executive director, communications director and finance director. Paul backers have the biggest footprint on the 18-member central committee.” In regards to Spiker and the GOP, The Iowa Republican Party website details, “His fellow former Ron Paul campaign vice-chair David Fischer was selected RPI co-chair.” Iowa’s GOP also elected Paul backer, John Kabitzke and Mark Donald to treasurer and secretary positions; showing a real thirst for civil liberties, sound money and non-interventionist foreign policy.

Long-time Republican and the co-chairman of the Iowa GOP, who lost to Spiker, Bill Schickel showed defiance against the Liberty Movement, saying, “The words are fine about reaching out and opening the doors of our party, but when our chair, our executive director, our communications director, our finance director are all from the Campaign for Liberty that sends a message that is disenfranchising to many, many of our Republicans,” to the GOP committee.

Finally, the state of Arizona has seen Ron Paul Republicans’ message resonate as well inside the GOP. In Mohave County, multiple Liberty Republicans claimed spots in the GOP. Joan Lewis was elected to 1st vice chair; Michelle Arnett received 2nd vice chair and Cassandra Mooneyham won secretary. According to Mooneyham, there were other counties as well that saw similar Ron Paul Republican achievements.

Mooneyham explained, “I see a trend toward holding our elected officials accountable. I also see many people who want to switch from a top down leadership to a bottom up within the Republican Party. They want the PC’s making the proposals to the State and National leadership versus the leadership dictating to the PC’s.”

As elections veer around for 2014 throughout the legislative branch, it is likely you may see many more Ron Paul Republicans take a seat on the Hill, in D.C.

http://spreadlibertynews.com/ron-pau...iowa-michigan/

Ron posted his latest Straight Talk from his Congressional twitter account.

Ron Paul ‏@RepRonPaul
‘Fiscal Cliff’ Vote Shows How Washington Really Works http://tinyurl.com/bjw75pg

‘Fiscal Cliff’ Vote Shows How Washington Really Works

Last week the Senate and House demonstrated again why their approval ratings are so low. The 154 page “fiscal cliff” bill was made available to Senators just three minutes before the vote was taken on the legislation. No one can read 154 pages in three minutes, so it is safe to assume that the legislation was passed without being read.

Then the House brought the lengthy and complicated bill to a vote just 22 hours after the text had been available, meaning a full reading of the legislation was not likely possible. This was a clear violation of the “three day rule” adopted by the 112th Congress, which in the name of transparency ordered the House to make legislation available to the public a full three days before a Floor vote.

Perhaps this race to a vote, amid cries of the end of the world without a solution to the manufactured crisis, explains why an even greater than usual amount of special-interest carve-outs made it into the bill.

Article 1, Section 7 of the US Constitution clearly states that “All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives,” but as has been done many times, the Senate simply attached its bill to an existing House bill and claimed that this Constitutional requirement had been satisfied.

If the process was dishonest and unconstitutional, the content of the bill was even worse.

The “rescue” legislation was packed full of special tax deals for well-connected corporations with the money to hire high-profile lobbyists – usually those who have spent a good deal of time as legislators themselves.

The principle of tax cuts and breaks themselves are not the problem, however. It is incorrect to view any return of tax money to its rightful owner as money taken from the government. Wealth belongs to those who generate it not to government. However, while well-connected special interests like Hollywood and rum manufacturers were being granted targeted tax assistance, the vast majority of Americans were being hit with a significant tax increase in the form of higher payroll taxes. Rather than cut a dime from federal spending, this bill granted breaks to the corporate elites and paid for the “lost revenue” by passing the costs on to the rest of us.

more at link: http://www.the-free-foundation.org/

http://blogs.desmoinesregister.com/d...nclick_check=1
Ron Paul congratulates Spiker and the Iowa GOP and asks for support for their efforts: https://www.facebook.com/ronpaul/posts/130980400397530
Note that they are harping on corporatist donors who expect favors in return not donating to the state GOP. That makes this effort important: http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...make-MONEYBOMB

https://twitter.com/Judgenap/status/287254953163120640

WASHINGTON — By standard measures, Ron Paul's legislative career in Washington has been unusually unproductive. In 23 years in office, just one of the 613 bills the maverick Texan introduced in Congress was signed into law, a proposal to sell the customs house in Galveston to a local historical association. [Note: this ignores his bill such as the only real audit the Federal Reserve has ever had, passing in the form of an amendment to a larger bill, rather than the original bill.]

That's a futility rate of 99.8 percent.

Just four measures he authored passed the House of Representatives. Only seven ever emerged from House committees.

“Conventional wisdom says I didn't get much done,” the 77-year-old congressman said in an interview. “I didn't get much legislation passed.”

But Ron Paul has never been a conventional politician, and his political career defies conventional analysis. The quirky libertarian from Lake Jackson might not have been a legislative titan. But the former Air Force medic who entered politics four decades ago to protect Americans' individual liberties against government encroachment has managed to become the best-known national figure in Texas politics today.

Paul, who retired from his 14th Congressional District seat this year to focus on his third longshot presidential campaign, has greater name recognition across the country than the state's two influential Republican senators, Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn.

Paul received millions more votes in his 2012 Republican presidential campaign than his home state's powerful governor, Rick Perry. He has attracted more campaign contributors than any Texan not named Bush. And he has more Twitter followers than the rest of the Texas congressional delegation.

Combined. [/QUOTE]

Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/pol...#ixzz2GlWbyoyM

Note Ron says these will CONTINUE to be posted weekly at that call in number. I hope the transcript will continue to be posted as well.

New Year's Resolutions for Congress

As I prepare to retire from Congress, I’d like to suggest a few New Year’s resolutions for my colleagues to consider. For the sake of liberty, peace, and prosperity I certainly hope more members of Congress consider the strict libertarian constitutional approach to government in 2013.

In just a few days, Congress will solemnly swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against ALL enemies, foreign and domestic. They should reread Article 1 Section 8 and the Bill of Rights before taking such a serious oath. Most legislation violates key provisions of the Constitution in very basic ways, and if members can’t bring themselves to say no in the face of pressure from special interests, they have broken trust with their constituents and violated their oaths. Congress does not exist to serve special interests, it exists to protect the rule of law.

I also urge my colleagues to end unconstitutional wars overseas. Stop the drone strikes; stop the covert activities and meddling in the internal affairs of other nations. Strive to observe “good faith and justice towards all Nations” as George Washington admonished. We are only making more enemies, wasting lives, and bankrupting ourselves with the neoconservative, interventionist mindset that endorses pre-emptive war that now dominates both parties.

All foreign aid should end because it is blatantly unconstitutional. While it may be a relatively small part of our federal budget, for many countries it is a large part of theirs--and it creates perverse incentives for both our friends and enemies. There is no way members of Congress can know or understand the political, economic, legal, and social realities in the many nations to which they send taxpayer dollars.

Congress needs to stop accumulating more debt. US debt, monetized by the Federal Reserve, is the true threat to our national security. Revisiting the parameters of Article 1 Section 8 would be a good start.

Congress should resolve to respect personal liberty and free markets. Learn more about the free market and how it regulates commerce and produces greater prosperity better than any legislation or regulation. Understand that economic freedom IS freedom. Resolve not to get in the way of voluntary contracts between consenting adults. Stop bailing out failed yet politically connected companies and industries. Stop forcing people to engage in commerce when they don’t want to, and stop prohibiting them from buying and selling when they do want to. Stop trying to legislate your ideas of fairness. Protect property rights. Protect the individual. That is enough.

There are many more resolutions I would like to see my colleagues in Congress adopt, but respect for the Constitution and the oath of office should be at the core of everything members of Congress do in 2013.

http://paul.house.gov/index.php?opti...talk&Itemid=69

Mr. Speaker I rise to oppose what will be the final National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) I will face as a Member of the US House of Representatives. As many of my colleagues are aware, I have always voted against the NDAA regardless of what party controls the House. Far from simply providing an authorization for the money needed to defend this country, which I of course support, this authorization and its many predecessors have long been used to fuel militarization, enrich the military industrial complex, expand our empire overseas, and purchase military and other enormously expensive equipment that we do not need and in large part does not work anyway. They wrap all of this mess up in false patriotism, implying that Members who do not vote for these boondoggles do not love their country.

The military industrial complex is a jigsaw puzzle of seemingly competing private companies; but they are in reality state-sponsored enterprises where well-connected lobbyists, usually after long and prosperous careers in the military or government, pressure Congress to fund pet projects regardless of whether we can afford them or whether they are needed to defend our country. This convenient arrangement is the welfare of the warfare state.

Because of the false perception that we must pass this military spending authorization each year or our men and women in uniform will go hungry, Congress has over the years taken the opportunity to pack it with other items that would have been difficult to pass on their own. This is nothing new on Capitol Hill. In the last few years, however, this practice has taken a sinister turn.

The now-infamous NDAA for fiscal year 2012, passed last year, granted the president the authority to indefinitely detain American citizens without charge, without access to an attorney, and without trial. It is difficult to imagine anything more un-American than this attack on our Constitutional protections. While we may not have yet seen the widespread use of this unspeakably evil measure, a wider application of this “authority” may only be a matter of time.

Historically these kinds of measures have been used to bolster state power at the expense of unpopular scapegoats. The Jewish citizens of 1930s Germany knew all about this reprehensible practice. Lately the scapegoats have been mostly Muslims. Hundreds, perhaps many more, even Americans, have been held by the US at Guantanamo and in other secret prisons around the world.

But this can all change quickly, which makes it all the more dangerous. Maybe one day it will be Christians, gun-owners, home-schoolers, etc.

That is why last year, along with Reps. Justin Amash, Walter Jones, and others, we attempted to simply remove the language from the NDAA (sec. 1021) that gave the president this unconstitutional authority. It was a simple, readable amendment. Others tried to thwart our straightforward efforts by crafting elaborately worded amendments that in practice did noting to protect us from this measure in the bill. Likewise this year there were a few celebrated but mostly meaningless attempts to address this issue. One such effort passed in the senate version of this bill. The conferees have simply cut it out. The will of Congress was thus ignored by a small group of Members and Senators named by House and Senate leadership.

There are many other measures in this NDAA Conference Report to be concerned about. It continues to fund our disastrous wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere for example.

The Conference Report contains yet another round of doomed-to-fail new sanctions against Iran. These are acts of war against Iran without actually firing a shot. But this time the House and Senate conferees are going further than that. The report contains language that pushes the US as close to an actual authorization for the use of force against Iran as we can get. The Report “…asserts that the U.S. should be prepared to take all necessary measures, including military action if required, to prevent Iran from threatening the U.S., its allies, or Iran’s neighbors with a nuclear weapon and reinforces the military option should it prove necessary.”

This kind of language just emboldens Iran’s enemies in the region to engage in increasingly reckless behavior with the guarantee that the US military will step in if they push it too far. That is an unwise move for everyone concerned.

This Conference Report contains increased levels of foreign military aid, including an additional half-billion dollars in missile assistance to an already prosperous Israel and some $300 million to help an increasingly prosperous Russia control its chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons. And Russia does not even want the money!

Overall, this authorization will give the president even more money for military activities next year than he requested. At a time when the news has been dominated by reports of our budget crisis, the “fiscal cliff,” and the “need” to increase taxes on Americans, Congress is foolishly spending even more on the military budget than the administration wants! I suppose that is what counts as a reduction in the language of Washington.

I urge my colleagues to oppose this, and all future, reckless and dangerous military spending bills that are destroying our national security by destroying our economy.



http://paul.house.gov/index.php?opti...oor-statements

http://www.rollcall.com/news/scienti...06-1.html?pg=1



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