The Honorable Michele Bachmann

Member (MN-6)
U.S. House of Representatives

Biography

Michele Bachmann - Employment- Member, United States House of Representatives (MN-6); former member, Minnesota State Senate; federal tax litigation attorney; researcher and public speaker on the federal Goals 2000/School-to-Work System and the centralization of education for human labor resource development; former research assistant, Dr. John Eidsmore; nationally known speaker on tax, education and marriage; former litigant, multiple civil and criminal tax cases in the U.S. Federal Tax Court; small business co-owner. Special Mention- Regularly featured speaker on local and national talk shows on tax, education and pro-family issues. Education- B.A., Political Science and English, Winona State University; J.D., Coburn Law School (1986); post-doctorate degree, Tax Law, College of William and Mary Law School (1988). Personal- Mother of five; 23 foster children; married to Marcus; they live in Stillwater, Minnesota.

A View from Congress

Thank you, Becky, for that kind introduction. And thank you, Steve, for everything you do for our movement. I know I speak for everyone here tonight when I say just how grateful we are for your leadership, both of you.

I’d like to thank everyone for joining us tonight at this lovely dinner. In particular, my husband Dr. Marcus Bachmann. Honey, it’s good to see you. I realize you could be watching the broadcast of Barack Obama’s speech from Mount Olympus (aka Invesco Field in Denver). Did you know the Democrats have literally recreated, as their stage set, the acropolis at its height of glory for Barack Obama’s speech tonight? If that’s the case, then I suppose the press and delegates were given memos that the appropriate attire for the final night of this coronation is Toga.

I can’t decide if the Democrat convention will look more like a raucous version of ancient Greece – or like John Belushi chanting "toga, toga, toga" at Animal House. The reality is that Denver was anything but lively earlier this week.

Even James Carville was literally laughing at the Democrat Party’s convention for its lack of vibrancy and its complete lack of a theme. He said Monday, "if this party has a message it has done a blank of a job of hiding it tonight I promise you that."

Well, Carville may be surprised, but I doubt anyone here is. A Party that intentionally place Speaker Nancy Pelosi front and center before normal American people as its chairman with a nine percent approval rating is a party worthy of itself. A Party that I have come to call the Party of Perpetual Adolescence.

I suspect we’ll see something different here in Minnesota next week. This will be an opportunity for the American people to see a Party with its feet firmly planted on the ground and rooted in deeply held Constitutional principles. A party I hope to call, the Party of Personal Responsibility.

I was thrilled to learn that the theme of this CNP meeting would be "first principles." In the fog of policy debate and the flash of election-year battle, we can lose sight of those core values which define who we are as a nation and a people.

This happens so easily, because our news is streaming live from Internet blogs and 24-hour cable TV. Politicians speak in sound bites, and the public has become so jaded that what was once relegated to the gossip pages has become breaking headlines. Paris Hilton loses her dog. Bill Clinton pouts. Is there anything new here?

Don’t get me wrong: There’s nothing wrong with a soundbite. The ability to encapsulate a complex policy matter into a comprehensible phrase that captures the public attention and imagination is a brass ring.

The founders of our nation and the great enunciators of our first principles were brilliant. They were simultaneously succinct and profound, eloquent and right. Their words were succinct, but certainly wouldn’t make the cut for a seven second answer required by the Larry King’s of the world.

But their words embody America’s first principles:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, - rights that only God can give. Government can neither give them nor take them away. They are the providential jurisdiction of God.-

…that among these are -the most personal of all rights, the one which ascribes dignity and worth and lays down the basis of all other decision making. The ultimate human right – Life.

Liberty- The right to be free in our conscience and in our decision making- and the pursuit of Happiness – economic liberty. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, …Government doesn’t impose its will on the people, the people empower government to maintain for them an ordered liberty.

These few words set in motion a chain of events that rocked the world to its core and turned a corner forever in the drama of human history, the likes of which had never been seen before. There was simply no going back once the principles embodied in those words were shared. With humankind long enslaved and separated from all that its Creator had intended for it. (Freedom)

Which is why we gather here tonight to commit ourselves to those first principles – protecting life, liberty, private property, equality, inalienable rights granted by our Creator and preserved by a government whose sole purpose is to preserve them.

Government is not a philanthropic organization. We’re not the church, we’re not the family, we’re not job creators. We’re not Kings, and we’re certainly not good looking celebrities. Nor should we lay a laurel wreath on the head of an anointed god who can save us from the responsibility of paying for our own healthcare and retirement. We’re just traffic cops whose sole purpose is to set rules and then get out of the way so private businesses, churches and families can find solutions for themselves.

The brain trust of founders who gave us our first principles fearlessly declared that our breaking of the bond with Great Britain was justified by the spiritual principle of Natural Law, which is -- the universal and God-given understanding of morality and human rights which applies to all people and all nations for all time throughout the world.

This easily explains why when we fail to recognize our nation’s religious foundations, these same rights and freedoms become increasingly vulnerable. Worse, when we turn our God-given liberties over to our man-made government, we threaten those very liberties with extinction. When we forget the origin of our rights, when we forget the principles from which our rights sprang into being, add to that turning our back on the fundamental tenets of faith, -Then That’s It- we’ve abdicated the liberties endowed by our Creator. As John Adams said,

"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

Adams said what we know from scripture, that self government only works for a people who understand and put into practice, self-control. But the party of perpetual adolescence, meeting tonight in Denver would have us believe that we exist to serve our government and to pay for every Marxist idea they come up with. Some of them cannot possibly fathom that Government was established to protect our liberties from Government!

Unfortunately, those "some" currently control Congress. And, those "some" are at Invesco field tonight, having a toga party at their recently erected Greek temple as they seek to occupy the White House. And, those "some" if they succeed will do all they can to ensure a long legacy of their choosing at the Supreme Court of the United States.

My friends, as a first-term Congresswoman, I’ve enjoyed a front row seat at a virtual freak show of misguided policies, potentially devastating initiatives, and simply a moronic agenda that has ruled Congress this past year and a half. To the point of spending $25 million of your dollars in foreign aid shipped to foreign countries, to pay for foreign cats and foreign dogs. I’m note making this up. The next day the Democrats passed another bill because they forgot to add millions more for foreign birds. And, I can tell you unequivocally that it is because the Democrat majority is wholly ineffective in accomplishing anything that our Republic still stands. Thank God for gross incompetence.

But even in its gross incompetence, the Congress has done great damage, the repercussions of which we will feel for generations. They are intent on making Uncle Sam the insurer of last resort, the banker of last resort. The continued abuse of political pork barrel, spending hard-earned American tax dollars like Monopoly money. The inability to pay as they go. Yes, they’ve earned the title: the party of perpetual adolescence.

And, there were narrow misses, too. Because we had a republican president we dodged the bullet of big labor’s. Card check, a bill which takes away the right of the secret ballot, still lurks in the shadows. Amnesty for illegal aliens remains on the agenda. And, then there is the jaw-dropping eight trillion dollar energy tax, AKA the cap and trade system just waiting its turn.

George Washington plead with us, "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force! Like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action." How prescient those words were.

If government is left to irresponsible action – and this election could very well decide if it will be – all is at stake. Political liberty will be further chipped away. And, with it economic liberty will be lost. And, as economic liberty erodes, so, too, will go political liberty. The two are entwined, woven together by the Creator who provides them both. You cannot have one without the other.

We cannot have political liberty without economic liberty. And, I am certain that a president Barack Obama would give us neither.

Let us take for example, cap and trade, or what I like to call Tax-and-Spend.

According to a June 2008 article in Congressional Quarterly, "virtually every corner of the U.S. economy has a stake in a cap-and-trade global warming bill. By putting a price on carbon dioxide, Congress would fundamentally change the way Americans use energy and would transform the economy."

If the disaster of these proposals aren’t enough to scare the begeebers out of us, it is how blithely Congress has set about to enact them. Global warmism is not a scientific consensus; it is a belief system. And though it would dramatically impact "every corner of the U.S. economy," it was approached by the Democrat leadership as if it had been indisputably arrived at by a mathematical formula.

According to that same Congressional Quarterly article, the Senate proposal alone would have collected to $8 trillion from what Washington has deemed as ‘polluters’, which is another way of saying you and me, over the next four decades and redistribute the money to a host of their pet industries and interest groups."

It’s hard to fathom what eight trillion dollars means in real dollars and cents. But, it is simple to comprehend its impact on human freedom. It is another way of saying that the federal government would impede the liberty of Americans while simultaneously picking the pockets of those very Americans to pay for it. 

One lobbyist quoted in the article – a lobbyist, by the way, whose firm was billing nearly $1 million to represent clients in the climate change legislative battles – said that "Limiting [carbon dioxide] emissions puts a rationing effect on all activity in the economy and all human activity. So whether you’re selling outboard motors or feeding poor people in Africa, it’s going to affect you." We will have to purchase permission from the government to use energy! That’s audacity!

Again, these statements are bandied about Washington with the same urgency and import as a lunch order. Legislation that would ration all human activity, ration all economic activity had the salience of tuna salad on wheat around the capitol. "Let’s take over the economy," says Barack Obama! Are we so bored, so apathetic we can’t rise up and say "Throw the bums out!" The current Democrat leadership in Congress is serving the radical green religion. That group, plus trial lawyers, plus big labor, plus planned parenthood are the real power behind the power today in D.C. Period.

And that is emblematic of the historic crossroads at which we find ourselves. This election will reverberate for generations. It’s not simply a fight between two dueling political parties. It is a fight between two wholly divergent views of the world.

It is a fight between those who believe in freedom and those who believe in bureaucracy. Between those who believe in family and those who believe in government. Between those who believe in traditional morality and those who believe in secular relativism. It is between those who believe in a sovereign America and those who believe in global governance. It is, ultimately, a fight between those who believe in building on our history and values and those who wish to break them down – tearing down, destroying the first principles of our nation.

If you want evidence that government intervention creates rather then solves problems, just look at the single most pressing issue of our time: the energy crisis. The only reason we even got to the crisis point was because systematically, year by year, Congress regulated, taxed, blocked, banned, restricted, interfered, outlawed and locked away America’s energy resources. You name it, Congress got in its way. When global demand started to stretch global supply to the breaking point – and America didn’t have nearly enough energy of its own – we found ourselves in an energy crisis.

If we want to get out of this crisis, we need Congress to undo all of the damage that it has done. We must open the door to every single American energy resource – as we should have done years ago.

And with middle-class America in real pain and our economy under increasing pressure – not to mention our national security in jeopardy – the Democrat’s total inaction in the face of this emergency is dereliction of duty. The key to the energy industry is to pursue a full throttle All-of-the-Above American energy strategy that utilizes every resource we have – coal, oil, nuclear, wind, solar, natural gas, conservation, for crumbs sake, hamsters running on exercise wheels, – everything. If it’s energy we want. Let’s go for it!

We are the only industrialized nation on the planet that bans 85% of offshore exploration of energy– even though our deepwater reserves include a massive 88 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion feet of natural gas, with another 90 billion in the Arctic. And, thanks to nature’s genius, oil shale, we have more oil in just three states – Colorado, Utah and Wyoming – than there is in all of Saudi Arabia. In fact, America owns twenty-seven percent of all coal supplies in the world.

My friends, I visited ANWR a mere month ago. The pipeline that spreads across Alaska is underutilized. It has capacity that goes unused only because Congress lacks the will to use it. Even Jimmy Carter recognized how perfect ANWR was for meeting our energy needs. He set aside that small area – the size of a postage stamp sitting on a football field – for drilling. And, it sits there unused today. It is a dark, frozen tundra, devoid of the warm and fuzzy little creatures the environmental lobby pretends are setting up residence there.

I went to ANWR and the caribou I saw weren’t looking picturesquely from Area 10-02 of ANWR. They were huddled around the Trans-Alaska Pipeline at Prudoe Bay, looking for a date!

Furthermore, let’s finally unshackle clean, safe nuclear power. France derives 80% of its energy from nuclear power – yet we haven’t built a nuclear power plant since the 70’s. I have to admit that I never in a million years thought I would stand before a CNP audience and tout the French for their exemplary public policy, but on this matter, they are quite right.

Congress must legalize the spirit of American innovation and allow the alternative technologies that now live in the minds of imaginative and creative scientists and entrepreneurs to take up residence in reality.

I wonder if Obama’s ultimate vision for Americans getting to work is driving a Fred Flintstone-like car, with some fancy footwork. Maybe that’s how he wants to solve the obesity problem. But, the true American vision is more like a George Jetson-like existence. If in the span of mere decades we can go from computers housed in buildings to computers you carry in your pocket, surely we will solve our energy needs. The point is: don’t let the geniuses in Congress dictate acceptable energy choices. End the prohibition era on American energy and stand back.

If we pursued an all-of-the-above energy strategy we could forever rid ourselves of foreign oil, get gas back to two dollars-a-gallon or less, create millions of jobs, and achieve long-term energy independence for this country and our children. And it won’t take twenty, fifteen, or ten years to do it. Artificial delays and timelines were imposed by Congress. In some cases, it takes seventy-nine days to get a well. ANWR within three years.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has blocked any vote on offshore or ANWR drilling even though both have the strong support of the American people and would bring significant relief at the pump. She dismisses the idea of All-of-the-Above because it necessarily includes drilling.

The Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, estimates that a 1% increase in global supply would lower gas prices 10%. ANWR alone has the ability to add a million barrels a day to world supply, well over the 1% mark. These are numbers that the American people understand. And, as they watch the numbers tick upwards at the pump, they know what they want Congress to do.

But even now, as public pressure builds for a real energy strategy from Congress, Nancy Pelosi responds with gimmicks. She wants to give the appearance of support for drilling but in truth, if she really meant it she would join the House Republicans who remain in D.C. speaking on the floor of the House even today, calling for American energy independence.

The sun has set on many great nations and empires. As glorious as our republic is, all institutions of man are fallible. Tomorrow is not guaranteed even for America– tomorrow is earned.

And if we are going to secure that tomorrow then, with this election we must be dauntless, tireless, and relentless. If history has taught us anything, it is that inaction is the gateway to calamity. When good people stand idle, national ruin is not merely a possibility, it is a certainty.

Dare we ignore President Reagan’s poignant warning, "that if we should fail, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening?"

The price of liberty, it is said, is eternal vigilance. And together, that burden whether we like it or not, is ours to carry. Let us today re-dedicate ourselves to the first principles of our nation.

As the founders said of those principles:

"And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor."

I pledge the same to our founders and pledge the same to you, my fellow freedom fighters. I thank you for your dedication to the cause of freedom. And, I thank you for your courtesy in inviting me to speak tonight. God bless you and our great nation.

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