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Jim DeMint Remains Defiant After Heritage Foundation Ouster

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Ousted Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint was defiant Tuesday, saying that his work at the conservative think tank helped shape many of President Donald Trump’s core ideas.

“When I came to Heritage in 2013, I told our staff and millions of members around the country that over the next four years, we had the opportunity to lead a resurgence of conservative policies and communications to win the hearts and minds of the American people,” DeMint, 65, a former South Carolina Republican senator, told Politico in an interview.

“I’m grateful to have worked with some of the greatest minds and talents in America and believe we’ve accomplished together what we set out to do.”

Heritage’s 22-member board voted to remove DeMint Tuesday, capping speculation since last week about his future with the organization.

He later released, through a spokesman, his own assessment of his helm at the foundation, Politico reports. (Read more from “Jim DeMint Remains Defiant After Heritage Foundation Ouster” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

DeMint: Gruber Should Be Given a Medal for Honesty

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Credit: KEVIN DIETSCH/UPI/Newscom

Credit: KEVIN DIETSCH/UPI/Newscom

Key Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber has been under a hot spotlight recently for disparaging comments he made about his fellow citizens.

In a series of videos taken at various conferences and lectures between 2010 and 2013, Gruber claimed that the effects of Obamacare had to be hidden from Americans because of “the stupidity of the American voter.” The Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor said that “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage” in writing such legislation and likened its critics to “my adolescent children.”

Adding, well, injury to the insult, it’s been discovered that Gruber received almost $6 million in taxpayer dollars for his various services in designing and consulting on Obamacare.

This rolling disgrace culminated Tuesday in a particularly stern hearing by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which gave the penitent Gruber a thorough dressing-down.

Ouch.

While I hate to disagree with the formidable Rep. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., I think Gruber should be given a medal for honesty!

Don’t get me wrong: Gruber’s erstwhile opinions about his fellow Americans are despicable. But he was only echoing a common sentiment among the American Left: You are too stupid to run your own life. It’s just rare that they tell us directly.

Read more from this story HERE.

Jim DeMint: ‘Big Government Benefits the Rich’

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FRONT COVER-FALLING IN LOVE WITH AMERICA AGAIN-JIM DEMINT_2When the Census Bureau released its most recent ranking of the U.S. communities with the highest median household incomes, seven of the nation’s ten wealthiest counties were in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

In an interview about his new book, Falling in Love With America Again, Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint told CNSNews.com he had a theory that might explain this. “[B]ig government benefits the rich and big business,” he said.

In the book, DeMint describes the cozy, symbiotic relationship that often exists between people working for the federal government and people representing big business.

“In Washington,” DeMint wrote, “it’s a rule of thumb that government staffers charged with overseeing an industry want to go to work for that industry one day, for a huge raise. ‘Cashing in,’ it’s called, or ‘moving to K Street’ (the downtown Washington artery that’s synonymous with the lobbying business).”

Here, from his interview with CNSnews.com, is DeMint’s explanation of how people come to Washington to do public service and end up getting rich:

Read more from this story HERE.

Will Obamacare Bring Down Progressivism?

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Photo Credit: Heritage Foundation The implosion of Obamacare indicts not just the law itself, but the whole edifice of progressivism—a philosophy rooted in the belief that government, supposedly administered by “the best and the brightest,” can run things better than individuals. That idea is now, again, being proven incorrect.

The hubris in the progressive assumption was on display at the end of President Obama’s now infamous press conference of November 14. Without the aid of a TelePrompTer, the President who dared to overhaul one-sixth of the U.S. economy made this candid admission: “What we’re also discovering is that insurance is complicated to buy.”

It was the Cinderella-at-midnight moment of the Obama presidency—the moment when the gold chariot turned into a pumpkin, the stallions into junkyard dogs, and the liveried carriagemen into mice. The follow-up question—one I hope will be answered in the affirmative—is whether the magic will wear off not just for the President but for progressivism.

Those on the left of the political spectrum started reviving the term progressivism in earnest about a decade ago, after they had thoroughly discredited the word “liberal.” (Liberal, incidentally, is a perfectly legitimate term rooted in the word liberty. In its original use—its present use on the other side of the Atlantic—it meant a dedication to free markets, exactly the opposite of what it now means here.)

Once it became associated with big government, high taxes, wasteful spending and crippling debt, “liberal” became a liability with voters. So the left adopted an old label—“progressives”—and set about to position themselves as political leaders who would throw off the antiquated ideas of the past and move the country forward. In the meantime, they did an excellent job of redefining conservatives as people who were stuck in the past, backward–looking, and too judgmental about new ideas and lifestyles.

Read more from this story HERE.

Jim DeMint: The Conservative Alternative to Obamacare (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTube We’ve been very critical of Obamacare because it’s hurting Americans. But that has caused some to ask, “What’s your alternative?”

The truth is, we’ve always had alternatives, but our critics weren’t ready to listen. Now, the disastrous rollout of Obamacare has a lot of people asking for alternatives to government-run health care. And conservatives are ready.

With each passing day, it becomes clearer that Obamacare will not reduce premiums for average American families, bring down health care spending, or truly improve health care in this country. Instead, people are receiving notices from their insurance companies that their policies are being canceled or their premiums are skyrocketing.

At The Heritage Foundation, we are envisioning a health care system where you and your family come first.

Read more from this story HERE.

DeMint on Immigration Reform: ‘If People Read The Bill, It Will Be Blocked’ (+videos)

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Former senator and current Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint on Sunday predicted that the Gang’s of Eight’s immigration reform bill would be blocked “if people read the bill.”

“I think if people read the bill, that it will be blocked,” DeMint said on ABC’s This Week. “Because once you get into it, just like Obamacare, it is not the way it’s been advertised.”

Watch videos here:

Read more from this story HERE.

DeMint: Taxpayers Would Pay for Amnesty

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Now that the “Gang of Eight” has introduced a comprehensive immigration bill in the U.S. Senate, the cost to taxpayers of implementing amnesty for an estimated 11 million unlawful immigrants has come into focus.

The core problem with amnesty is clear: It encourages more unlawful immigration in hopes of future amnesties, and it treats unlawful immigrants more favorably than more than 4 million law-abiding people who wait outside our borders, following the rules, for their chance to come to contribute to the economic and social well-being of America.

A properly structured lawful immigration system would help our economy. This is why Heritage and conservatives have long argued for reforming the legal immigration system to make the process more efficient, more merit-based. We need an immigration process that attracts high-skilled workers and encourages patriotic assimilation to unite new immigrants with America’s vibrant civil society.

Amnesty for unlawful immigrants is totally different. Amnesty would impose significant tax burdens on Americans that are completely unnecessary to capture the positive economics that would be associated with a properly reformed lawful immigration system.

The Heritage Foundation is one of the only organizations looking at this cost to taxpayers. Our expert, Robert Rector, is one of the nation’s leading authorities on government social programs, and he is currently calculating what amnesty will cost taxpayers over the long term. It is based on a methodology also used by the National Academy of Sciences.

Read more from this story HERE.

Sen. Jim DeMint To Resign From US Senate, Become Head of Heritage Foundation

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South Carolina U.S. Senator Jim DeMint will replace Ed Feulner as president of the Heritage Foundation. Mr. DeMint will leave his post as South Carolina’s junior senator in early January to take control of the Washington think tank, which has an annual budget of about $80 million.

Sen. DeMint’s departure means that South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, a Republican, will name a successor, who will have to run in a special election in 2014. In that year, both Mr. DeMint’s replacement and Sen. Lindsey Graham will be running for reelection in South Carolina.

Mr. DeMint was reelected to a second term in 2010. The 61-year-old senator had announced earlier that he would not seek a third term.

Mr. Feulner, who is 71 and planned to step down, is to be named chancellor of Heritage, a new position, and will continue in a part-time capacity as chairman of the foundation’s Asian Studies Center.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Kennedy Center Awards and the Crisis of the Times

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The Obamas’ theatrical giving of the Leftover-from-the-Sixties awards at the Kennedy Center – Led Zeppelin, which today provides the nerve-wracking background noise in grocery stores and Dustin Hoffman who hasn’t had a real job since 1967 – fully manifests the crisis in Washington, D.C. South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint asked recently about something else with some honest frustration, “We need new people.” You’d think President Obama would do better as he is second generation himself and doesn’t belong to this crowd and in his campaign autobiography clearly crowned the Leftover-from-the-Sixties Democrats as his target to displace so as to awaken again a new and vital liberalism. So how’s that working out?

Markos Moulitas, with hopes of ushering in a generation of Iraq war veterans into the political process, well represented new and better thinking and suggested Virginia’s then governor Mark Warner, Virginia Senator Jim Webb, General Wesley Clark and Vermont Governor Howard Dean at a time when Obama began to rise and Hillary hovered around zero percent at Daily Kos (really).

“Will these Clinton-era Democrats ever go away?” asked Kos in a Washington Post essay in the day. The answer is not so easily will they go into the good night, and herewith lays the crisis. Young conservatives should ask today as well as once – oh, so long ago – governor of Florida Jeb Bush, who landed his helicopter near the White House last week in symbolism more course and conspicuous than any we have seen the likes of since the Soviets claimed to have invented corn flakes, “Will these Bush era Republicans ever go away?”

The answer to both questions is YES but DeMint is right to ask. Conservatives are better off with a presence and suggestion of new people: Senator Rand Paul of Tennessee, Senator Mike Lee of Utah, Joe Miller sure to rise in Alaska and the most talented and energetic Ted Cruz, the new senator from Texas, and possibly the one to establish the new paradigm in conservatism. Because today’s Republicans are not conservative: They are anti-liberal. And today’s Democrats are not liberal, they are anti-conservative. Like Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty they go over the waterfall together.

There is no conservative party in America today but Ron Paul is Gray Champion to the new thinking which arose in the Tea Party and will awaken in what Grover Norquist calls Tea Party II: In six words, states’ rights, sound money, constitutional government. It forms a new matrix for new people and a new generation.

We enter this month an end game as per the Mayan Prophecy. The fall is at hand, but things don’t break because storms challenge New York or comets obliterate the earth. They break because cultures, liberal or conservative, refuse to let go. They cannot adapt to new thinking and cling instead to the old, the worn through, the irrelevant. And this year they marched David Letterman into the Kennedy Center. David Letterman? Previous awards have gone to Leontyne Price, Fred Astaire, George Balanchine, Ella Fitzgerald, Henry Fonda, Martha Graham, Tennessee Williams, Count Basie, Alvin Ailey, George Burns, Merce Cunningham, Isaac Stern, Cary Grant and Jimmy Cagney. These celestials today welcome Letterman into their sanga. Can there be any greater harbinger of the end times?

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Bernie Quigley is a prize-winning magazine writer and has worked more than 30 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and book, movie, music and art reviewer. His essays on politics and world affairs have appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philadelphia Daily News and other newspapers and magazines. He has published poetry in Painted Bride Quarterly and has written dozens of magazine articles. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He has written hundreds of columns for “Pundits Blog” in “The Hill” a political journal in Washington, D.C. He lives in the White Mountains with his wife and four children.

Ted Cruz’s Victory Foretells Conservative Takeover of GOP

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Photo credit: Gage Skidmore

Richard A. Viguerie, Chairman of ConservativeHQ.com, made the following comments yesterday about Ted Cruz’s incredible victory in Texas:

“The victory of Ted Cruz in the Texas Republican Senate runoff primary means that the torch is being passed to a new generation of principled small government constitutional conservatives and that the ‘let’s make a deal’ Republican Party of old will soon go the way of the Dodo bird.

“Ted’s nomination sent a strong signal that a new conservative Republican Party is being born and, by 2016, principled conservatives will replace most leaders in Congress and the Party at the national, state, and local levels. GOP leaders should ‘ask not for whom the bell tolls — it tolls for thee.’

“The Cruz campaign was a contest in which the people–grassroots conservatives and Tea Partiers — routed the establishment and the special interests.

“Inspired by such national conservative leaders as Sarah Palin, Phyllis Schlafly, Ed Meese, James Dobson, by Senators Jim DeMint, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Tom Coburn, and by organizations such as The Club for Growth and FreedomWorks, the grassroots conservative and Tea Party voters of Texas took on the combined power of Governor Rick Perry, every Texas GOP state senator save one, and the good old boy network of Austin and DC lobbyists–and they won.

“By nominating Ted Cruz, the Republican voters of Texas today sent a strong message that what they want is an end to the crony capitalism, business-as-usual spending, and disregard for the Constitution that have dominated Washington no matter which party was in power.” Read more from this story HERE.

Another view:  Tea Party’s influence could reshape Senate Republicans

By Jennifer Steinhauer.  The tea party is very much alive in the drive for Republican control of the Senate, portending a potential shake-up in the mindset of the chamber.

The easy Republican primary victory in Texas on Tuesday of Ted Cruz, the 41-year-old Sarah Palin-blessed upstart, virtually assured the latest tea party candidate a seat in the chamber next year. And he will not be alone when it comes to those backed by the movement that propelled Republicans to control of the House in 2010.

Among 17 contested Senate races and in Texas, more than half a dozen of the Republican candidates — or those currently running ahead in their primaries — are tea party-embraced. The infusion of new conservative blood could alter the complexion of the Senate, increasing the sorts of conflicts between moderates and far-right Republicans disinclined toward compromise that have characterized the House for two years.

From Indiana — where Richard Mourdock recently toppled the veteran Republican Sen. Richard Lugar — to Wisconsin — where two tea party candidates are slowly unmooring the Republican front-runner, former Gov. Tommy Thompson — to Nebraska — where Deb Fischer surprisingly beat out a more established Republican candidate — tea party-backed contenders are surging. In Missouri, three Republicans are fighting to portray themselves as the candidate most strongly aligned with tea party values.

Even if Democrats maintain control, newcomers like Cruz are likely to quickly coalesce with veteran conservatives like Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina and freshmen like Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, enlarging the ranks of members who stand well to the right of their party’s central platform. Read more from this story HERE.