To sell his tax-code tweaks, new regulatory schemes, and insatiable ardor for big government, President Obama invoked Abraham Lincoln in his State of the Union address: “I’m a Democrat. But I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more.” Was Lincoln the father of big government? In a new Special Report, Allen C. Guelzo, Ph.D., of Gettysburg College lays out the argument that the modern state’s paternity lies with the Progressives. If big government means …
Last week President Barack Obama’s most recently minted czar, Special Advisor to the President for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Elizabeth Warren, spoke to 400 bankers at the swanky Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, DC. Her message, according to The Washington Post: “Behave, play nice, and we’ll get along just fine.” Specifically, Warren promised to take a more “principles-based approach” to regulation, rather than clearly articulating “thou shalt not” rules that banks could rely on. For this Progressive White House, an enlightened expert, like Warren, given broad new powers by …
What author wouldn’t cherish a plug of his book by an attractive, poised public speaker who really knows how to excite and inspire a crowd? And we don’t mean President Barack Obama citing “The Defining Moment,” Jonathan Alter’s book on FDR. This was Rep. Michele Bachmann, revving up CPAC with a speech that wound up quoting, um, liberally from “We Still Hold These Truths,” Heritage scholar Matthew Spalding’s book on America’s founding principles. The Minnesota Republican, as this clip shows, apparently likes how Spalding describes a very different defining moment: the …
Do Americans have a right to government-run health care? Is it “the consent of the governed” to be forced to obey the dictates of unelected bureaucrats? Does religious liberty allow our government to impose a secular culture? These are among great questions of the day to which Americans ought to apply the guiding principles of our nation’s founding, Matthew Spalding, a constitutional scholar at The Heritage Foundation, argues in his new book “We Still Hold These Truths: Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future.” Spalding is sure to talk about “We …
