BY CHRISTOPHER G. ADAMO – On May 10, 2011 a Wyoming grassroots organization created a political firestorm within the state’s Republican Party by sending an e-mail to its office holders that asked two highly inflammatory questions, along with a declaration of its intentions to publicize any responses to those questions. Furthermore, having dealt for years with the standard liberal tactic of officials who dodged queries of this type by simply ignoring them, the organization also advised recipients that non-responses would be regarded as negatives.
The reactions from within the party were immediate and furious. Some accused the organization of engaging in “bullying and intimidation,” while others threatened legal action against it. Still others, straining the boundaries of credibility and severing any tenuous ties with reality, asserted that the organization was engaged in some manner of moneymaking scheme and that the letter was an integral part of it.
So just what was the nature and motivation of this insidious organization? And what were the provocative and malicious questions that caused all of the uproar? “WyWatch,” the group that undertook this evaluation of the condition of the Wyoming GOP, is a totally volunteer organization of citizens who have become concerned with the degradation of their society, and the seeming inability of their state’s ostensibly “conservative” government to forestall or reverse this ongoing decay.
As to the questions, in their entirety they were “Do you agree that the [Wyoming Republican] Party platform establishes terms under which elected and appointed officials exercise their power?” and “Do you agree with the principles enumerated in the Party Platform?” Furthermore, it is noteworthy that the correspondence contained a space in which respondents could elaborate on their sentiments, whether in support or opposition to the questions.
While some who received the e-mail did indeed merely answer the questions in the affirmative or state their contentions with certain concepts suggested therein, others clearly construed a mere request for information regarding their personal stances as an affront and an outrage, whereupon they caterwauled their opposition to it.
Though seemingly an isolated event in a single low population state, it would be wise for the conservative grassroots across America to take note of this occurrence and recognize its ramifications for the rest of the nation. As the nation undergoes the current political upheaval, similar incidents are unfolding in a thousand different settings from one coast to the other, all bearing witness to the same set of conflicting attitudes among aspiring power brokers pitted against those who are ultimately forced to live under the laws and regulations imposed on them.
Once one wades past all of the hysteria, it becomes apparent that the single element of the WyWatch inquiry which generated so much resentment was its demand for accountability. For years, public officials in the Cowboy State have remained relatively unaccountable to the citizenry, with the sole exception being a necessity to steer clear of any frontal attacks on the Second Amendment. But apart from that, a wholly self-serving and autocratic Republican Party has coalesced over the years, and has been relatively free to drift inexorably left, delving ever deeper into bureaucratic bloat and governing excess, all under the rubric of Wyoming being America’s “most Republican” (and presumably most “conservative”) state.
As a result freedoms are regularly being encroached upon, and cultural norms are disappearing while the legislature and state government fritter and chatter. Wyoming is now one of only two states west of New York that has no defense of marriage statute on the books. And state government spending per capita is among the highest in the nation, with no consideration of any serious effort to reverse the trend. Over the years, the state legislature has instead seen fit to studiously protect the public from the horrendous and burgeoning menace posed by whole milk taken from privately owned cows.
No doubt, those at the “inner circles” of power in Wyoming had expected their unchecked revelry to continue indefinitely. Private citizens are expected to put out the yard signs when instructed to do so, and on the appointed days go blindly into the voting booths and pull the lever with the “R” next to it, no questions asked. But with the advent of such organizations as WyWatch, the prospects of a future so devoid of accountability is definitely in jeopardy.
Back in Washington, the same mindset can be observed among the Republican “establishment,” albeit on a much grander scale. Last fall, in one of the biggest electoral upheavals in U.S. history, Congress was returned to Republican hands as a direct result of Tea Party fervency and devotion to the cause of rescuing America. But now its time for the peasantry to sit back and leave those newly empowered professionals in the House to carry on their business as usual, continuing the funding of Obamacare, accepting the Democrats’ new baseline of trillion dollar budget deficits and, in a sad likelihood, raising the nation’s debt ceiling to whatever point Obama and his minions find comfortable.
For some, the elections of 2011 were the opening shots in a battle for the future of America. To others however, they merely represented a high water mark in the political ebb and flow that occasionally favors one side and then, often capriciously, shifts to the other.
This time, far too much is at stake to accept such a cavalier assessment of the nation’s precarious condition. Definitively constitutional questions are being juggled by courts with outcomes entirely determined by the political leanings of judges and the ideologies of the particular presidents who appointed them. Boundaries on political activity are no longer constrained by the quaint precepts of the “rule of law,” but are instead imposed or ignored as a direct result of their benefit or liability to the current administration and its lackeys at the Department of “Justice.”
Accountability for all political office holders, from the national down to the local level in the smallest townships, is key to any restoration of the greatness of America. And those who strive against it, regardless of the party affiliation they find most convenient, must be relegated to the ranks of “unfit” to hold office, whether they be wolves in sheep’s clothing, or are merely naive and sufficiently unprincipled to sacrifice their core values for a proverbial “place at the table.”