Miller: It’s Not Federal Overreach, It’s Tyranny (+video)
This past Friday, I joined the two other candidates vying for the Republican nomination to the U.S. Senate in the first televised forum of the campaign season. One of the questions put to us at the “Alaska Asks” forum, which aired on the local NBC affiliate, addressed the role the federal government should play in our state. I said, in contrast to my opponents, we are not dealing merely with an issue of federal overreach, but a form of tyranny.
The Constitution does not authorize the federal government to control over two-thirds of Alaska’s land, nor approximately 85 percent of Nevada’s. The stand-off in that state and the government shutdown last fall, during which Alaskans were denied the opportunity to hunt and provide for their families on these lands as an act of political retaliation, highlighted a federal government that exercises far too much control over our daily lives and livelihoods.
The federal government’s continued stranglehold on Alaska’s resource development, as other states like North Dakota boom economically, is unacceptable. The EPA’s armed raid of a family mining facility in Chicken, Alaska last fall demonstrates just how out of control Washington is.
We need fundamental reform. Tweaking at the margins and increasing the go-along-to-get-along caucus in the Senate will do nothing to address the daunting challenges we face.
Ronald Reagan said nearly 50 years ago, “Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction.”
Let us do our part to ensure America remains the land of “the free and the home of the brave” in our time, and let us set an example for generations yet to come.
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It the highlights below, the candidates field questions concerning the federal government’s blocking of resource development in Alaska, Senator Rand Paul’s “Life at Conception” Act, and the constitutional issues raised by the surveillance state.
