Dr. Tom Price (R-GA) is the current chairman of the Republican Study Committee, and has represented the 6th Congressional District of Georgia since 2005. We at www.thelobbyist.net are honored he gave us a few minutes of his time to speak about a number of the important issues facing this country.

Siggins: I saw you speak the other day at The Heritage Foundation and I was really impressed with the stuff you and Senator DeMint had to say about the budget and about dependency.  It was really good to see.

Price: Wasn’t that something? I found that to be a sobering but also an uplifting exchange just because there are wonderful paths to get out of this craziness if we just seize them.

Siggins: I write for thelobbyist.net, and the founder of the site is a Georgian and is a big, big fan of yours. And we started a new site called ConservativeCongress.com and it’s a sister site and our goal is to bring conservatives to Congress and we put our stamp of approval on those who want to balance the budget, deregulate the federal government and increase our energy independence and reform.

So I guess my first question would be: I know there were issues when the Republicans held all three branches regarding drilling.  I know that ANWAR was held up by filibustering…all sorts of issues.  With health care attention has been diverted away from energy.  But assuming you take back the House which you said the other day “will,” not if.

Price: Right!

Siggins: How do you think Republicans will move forward on drilling, on wind farms, on nuclear power, and getting us away from sending our money to terrorists and the like?

Price: Well it’s kind of the Raison d’etre for your new organization.  The secret is to have a conservative congress and that’s what we need.  And it requires us to have a conservative Congress and leadership that will move us in the right direction.  The remarkable thing to me is the solutions to the challenges that we face are really not that complex.  It’s relatively simple.

In August of ’08 when we took to the House floor when the Speaker shut the House down and we stayed for that month because gas had at that point spiked to $4/gallon.  We laid out an all of the above energy plan that I believe will still solve the challenges that we face in the area of energy.  It’s a plan that would allow us to utilize our own resources in very robust and vibrant ways and environmentally sound and sensitive ways.  Whether it is offshore exploration or onshore exploration or clean coal or oil shale.  All of those things in addition to the use of nuclear power so that we get off our dependence on foreign oil which is huge and growing.

Secondly, conservation has to be a key component.  And incentives for conservation of individuals.  And championing conservation.  The root word for conservation is conservative!  We ought to at least champion that!

And then thirdly it is to not game the system, not have the federal government be the ones who pick the winners and losers- but to incentivize a robust investigation in research and development for the new energy.  That’s what we ought to be doing, not picking winners and losers. The last winner the federal government picked, and I use the term ‘winner’ loosely, was corn based ethanol and that’s not working out too well.

Siggins: That’s not working at all.  Didn’t that cause starvation in Africa a couple years back?

Price: When you distort markets, markets betray you.  So the secret is not to distort markets.

Siggins: Newt Gingrich spoke at the Heritage Bloggers Briefing two weeks ago.  And he talked about this being one of his top three priorities.  Do you think energy will be one of the top three priorities for Republicans?

Price: Well it has to be, because the bi-product of our current energy policy is to make us more dependent of foreign oil, and also to increase our debt and our deficit.  We are just shooting ourselves in the head three times, not just once, so we have got to reign this in.  This is common sense stuff, there are simple truths to our public policy and one of our simple truths is if spend more money outside of your nation than inside of your nation then you have a balance-deficit that is moving in the wrong direction.

Siggins: Speaking of the deficit- I was brought in to Heritage to work on The Debt Paying Generation, which is those between five and thirty, including myself, who would just be crushed by upcoming taxes, lack of benefits et cetera et cetera. Senator Demint mentioned some of what he considers to be relatively painless solutions the other day, to help with the deficit and balancing the budget.  What do you think are some of the major solutions, or I would say the top three solutions, but also, would you include cutting the Pentagon Budget, or at least streamlining it, as part of one of those solutions.

Price: Well I was so pleased to see so many individuals under the age of forty as I mentioned in our briefing the other day, because you’re right, this is exactly where this is going to hit and it’s going to decrease the ability of you and your peers to have the kind of opportunity that my generation has had.  That is why it is morally incumbent upon us to solve this before we pass the baton completely.

There are relatively simple things to do to turn this whole thing around.  The first to do is to end the uncertainty here in Washington.  When businesses, the job creation engine of this nation, especially small businesses don’t know whether the government is going to come in and punish them or reward them or reward their competition or change the rules of the game completely, then they just hunker down and that’s what’s happening right now.  So you can’t get an economy moving, and you’ve got to get an economy moving to end this remarkable death spiral the President and his cronies have us on.

Siggins: Sure.

Price: It’s imperative to decrease the tax burden on individuals and businesses. As you know, we have the second-highest business corporate tax in the entire industrialized world; that makes us competitive with nobody, from the nature of setting up businesses and the job creation- creators. We ought to…I would put a moratorium on business tax at least for two years, and ideally, I would do away with it all together. The lack of incentives that we put on individuals to invest, to utilize their money in ways that puts it at their own decision at various levels of risk so that they can enjoy various levels of reward, but the taxation we put on that, either through capital gains or dividends- the president wants to increase all of these things, [it] is just foolishness if you want to actually get the economy going. So there are simple things you can do just by changing the rules of the game and making it more certain to revitalize and make our economy robust again.

Siggins: Sure, sure- and I agree with everything you’re saying. I guess my last question would be…getting the economy growing is great, and I don’t usually like to cite Paul Krugman, but he even said that even if the economy grows at a 5% rate a year, or 3.5% rate a year, it’s going to take many, many years to get back to 5% unemployment, or 4.5% unemployment like we had five or six years ago.

Price: Sure.

Siggins: So…jobs are going to- jobs, jobs, jobs is going to be the fall election, obviously, and you just described some great ideas to increase jobs, but we can have all the jobs we want to, but the entitlements, upcoming inflation, are just going to crush everybody. So how do you think Medicare, Social Security and- I’ll be the only conservative ever to say this- military spending can be reformed, if you think military spending needs to be reformed. How would you go about that, and I know I only have a couple more minutes with you. I just wanted to get your thoughts on that.

Price: You absolutely need fundamental reform. I’ve got kind of a ten-point plan that I alluded to the other day, and one of them is fundamental reform of our entitlement system. And by that I mean not just decreasing the monies in but increasing the freedom and the liberty of those within the systems themselves, which is, I believe, a very positive tradeoff. And so in Medicare and Medicaid you got to, we’ve got to have a system that allows the people in those programs the opportunity and the privilege to voluntarily move to a system that’s more responsive to them, and you can do that in very predictable ways. Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap for America’s Future” outlines the way in which one can do that relatively easily. And does it take time? Sure it takes time, because you don’t want to- I’m opposed to forcing individuals off of those programs because people…we are forty years into this dependency society, at least, if not more. But there are ways you can do it that make a whole lot of sense from a financial standpoint and increases [an] individual’s liberty and freedom.

From a defense spending standpoint, we spend less now in defense than we did when we were probably not as challenged as we are right now. I think we can spend more wisely, and I think we can do so in ways that get bigger bangs for the buck, if you will, no pun intended, but I think it’s imperative that we do that.

The statistic that I used the other day that I think is important to remember is that we have spent $16 trillion in this nation in the war on poverty. $16 trillion since the mid-sixties. We’ve increased poverty and we’ve destroyed sectors of our society’s culture, and that’s a reckless and irresponsible, and I believe to be, immoral- in that same…in our entire nation’s history, in our entire nation’s history, we’ve spent a little over $6 trillion, in 2008 dollars, on all of the wars we’ve ever fought. So it’s important to keep things in perspective. We no longer survive as a nation if we don’t have appropriate defenses and national security. So the number one priority of Congress has to be that- we just need to spend smarter.

Siggins: Okay. Well, sir, thank you very much for your time- I really appreciate it.

Price: My pleasure. I look forward to seeing you again.

Siggins: All right. Take care.

Note: The interview can be heard in its entirety here. I would like to thank our founder Nick Brown, as well as one of our contributing editors, RJ Caster, for their help with transcribing the interview.

I just attended a forum that got my attention with “Is it time for a Catholic Tea Party?” (The idea is outlined in a column here.)

Deal Hudson, President of Catholic Advocate, was the main speaker- he feels that Catholics have let Evangelicals take the lead on life and gay marriage issues, and Catholics need to step up, donate money, vote for the right candidates, take the body shots, etc. He also felt that the USCCB has erred in some ways that it advocates for policies, and particularly regarding voter guidance. He talked a lot about the goals of Catholic Advocate (see their website here), in particular getting Catholic Members of Congress who are pro-life and in favor of traditional marriage. There was a time for questions, and a couple of people expressed great frustration at how lay Catholics, priests, bishops, etc. have failed to properly bring the message to voters and elected representatives. There was also talk about shutting off funding of organizations that are clearly not Catholic in action or faith.

I left for a few minutes, but when I came back there was discussion of how to properly balance life issues- for example, do the Iraq war, global warming and immigration issues outweigh abortion in regards to voting for a candidate?

Marco Rubio swung by to speak for a few minutes, and made the following points (paraphrased):

1. America is not the world’s police. That said, we are the only superpower that can stand against our enemies, even though our enemies constantly change- i.e. they may not have a capital.

2. Our domestic issues are related to our foreign policy issues, such as our owing debt to countries that don’t respect life.

3. Social/moral issues and economic issues are related. For example, our schools are not doing well, because of broken families and broken neighborhoods.

4. How can we help Rubio win:

A. Donate money. The campaign average is $100.

B. Spread the word.

C. Volunteer in the summer for the campaign.

I managed to get a two-minute interview with Deal Hudson, and asked him a couple of questions (paraphrased, as best I can remember):

DS: Why is gay marriage listed as one of your top issues, as opposed to immigration reform, healthcare reform, religious freedom, etc.?

DH: Religious freedom is above gay marriage. Regarding the other issues, gay marriage is important to keeping families, the basis of society, strong. No, it is not going to destroy traditional marriage, but it will subvert it. Marriage is not about committed relationships- it is about a singular kind of commitment created by God. (This last section, after the hyphen, is the best summary of what he said that I can remember. He did not say “God” in his comment, but I am interpreting off of memory. I do apologize for the lack of a direct quote.)

DS: We don’t live in a theocracy- how can we create a policy on gay marriage based upon our religious faith?

DH: Leave religion out of the policy debate. This is about the raising of children. Keep the argument focused on that.

The room was fairly full, with about 25 people in attendance. It was very interesting. I recommend checking them out- again, their website is here.

*This was originally posted at THE LOBBYIST.

Under President Bush, one of the most controversial of his administration’s anti-terrorism tactics was wiretapping. It ticked off some on the right, worried some in the middle and made the left rage uncontrollably. Now, after falling in line with the Bush administration last year on wiretapping, against his campaign promise- and, according to this writer, even going further than the Bush administration- President Obama’s Department of Justice is going after cellular phones.

The article gets technical, but essentially the Justice Department will be defending its claim in court tomorrow that “warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no

reasonable expectation of privacy” in their–or at least their cell phones’–whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that “a customer’s Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records” that show where a mobile device placed and received calls.

This is kind of a scary proposition. I was never very comfortable with wiretapping under Bush, and the more I’ve learned the less comfortable with it I am. However, at least that seemed to have been aimed at people setting off alarm bells within the intelligence community through the use of certain words, calls to certain countries, etc. In this case, the Justice Department seems to claim that the use of privately-owned cell phones negates personal privacy and, unfortunately, is not alone in doing so. According to the article,

U.S. District Judge William Pauley, a Clinton appointee in New York, wrote in a 2009 opinion that a defendant in a drug trafficking case, Jose Navas, “did not have a legitimate expectation of privacy in the cell phone” location. That’s because Navas only used the cell phone “on public thoroughfares en route from California to New York” and “if Navas intended to keep the cell phone’s location private, he simply could have turned it off.”

One can almost see the legitimacy of the judge’s argument- it is a public road that the person was making a call on. However, in that case, wouldn’t the right to privacy be irrelevant in all cases where citizens are pulled over? After all, almost all roads are public, and the vast majority DWI, DUI, speeding tickets and other driving-related punishments are done on these public roads. Yet, the citizen’s right to privacy is protected in these cases.

When it comes down to it, the Department of Justice is far out of line. Get a warrant to look at records, or don’t look at them at all. If need be, set up a system where the legal permission may be granted in an accelerated fashion. This current claim by the DOJ is bogus, and President Obama needs to remind Attorney General Holder that he serves the people, not his own sense of power. If Obama refuses to do so, then we the people need to remind him he also serves us.

Yesterday, at The Heritage Foundation Bloggers Briefing, Heritage education researcher Lindsey Burke presented on a number of education funding increases- and one decrease- in President Obama’s FY2010 budget that were not backed by the evidence the president and Education Secretary Arne Duncan said they would use.

Burke cited several examples of this government waste and unnecessary size increase. First, she handed out a Backgrounder by Heritage’s David Mahlhausen, Ph.D., and Dan Lips explaining how Head Start not only doesn’t work, but is one of 69 federal preschool and child care programs that receive about $25 billion annually. Of course, that’s not enough for the federal government, which is trying to put another program into the system for eight billion dollars more. (Burke’s own Web Memo about the increased federal role in early education goes into more detail about H.R. 3221, which is the bill that added the new bureaucracy and eight billion dollars.)

The second example of government inefficiency comes from Lips, who put out a Heritage Web Memo explaining President Obama’s plans to cap student loan payments and provide loan forgiveness after 20 years in the private sector or 10 years in the public sector. Also explained were how federal student aid probably does not help college affordability and actually may hurt it. The most important point, though, that Lips makes is that two basic market-based reforms to colleges could very well save a lot of money(Lips does not state how much would be saved).The first is to institute credit-by-exam programs more frequently. The second is to increase online education programs at universities and colleges across the country, thereby encouraging more people to take part in higher education courses without the egregious cost of being in the classroom.

The third part of Bruke’s presentation was her analysis of how the DC Opportunity Scholarship (the DC School Voucher Program) is ending. According to Burke, the program, which puts 1,700 poor minority residents of Washington, DC into a voucher education program, is to receive only nine million dollars in President Obama’s budget, despite requiring $12 million annually to function. Furthermore, explained Burke, this is expected to be the final infusion of federal dollars into this very successful and popular education program, despite the president’s promise to at least let the current batch of students graduate before cutting off funding.

As Benjamin Hodge analyzed earlier this year, the voucher program has a plethora of supporters across the political spectrum. In my own following of the debate, I have seen Senators Lieberman (I-CT) and Collins (R-ME) introduce a bill last year to reinstate the vouchers, Heritage and CATO fighting tooth and nail to keep the program going, and The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal using their pages to support the program. George Will, the DC City Council and numerous RedState contributors have also supported the program, and it has a 70% popularity among parents whose children participate. Unfortunately, Congressional Democrats have decided to kill the bill rather than face down the teachers unions.

To me, the DC Voucher debate is the most important of the three education issues Burke raised. According to Burke, it is the only federally-funded voucher program in the country. While some may see it as only a small program (according to numbers Heritage ran, the $7,500 per student cost is half the cost to educate the average student in DC. Burke said the average cost in America is about $10,000 per year), it not only saves the taxpayers millions every year (about 1,700 students are currently in the program), but it starts the process to reforming our very broken education system. Burke, the Post, CATO and numerous other sources have cited data published by Obama’s own Department of Education showing the program has measurable results, particularly reading and math, and it keeps students out of high-risk schools where they are both unsafe and unsuccessful.

It is a travesty that this very successful program is being allowed to die. It helps many hundreds of poor students (particularly minorities) get a better, safer education. It helps these students be better prepared to move forward in careers, healthier lives, etc. It saves the taxpayers money. It sets an example of how a voucher program should work, an example to which states across the country should pay attention. Lastly- and let’s be honest here- it gives Republicans and conservatives the opportunity to show how our ideas are better than that of the Democrats and liberals for education reform, improving the lives of poor minorities, blunting the destructive teachers unions and bringing real competition and efficiency to how federal dollars are spent on education.

This is almost certainly the last gasp for the voucher program. It has the support of the Lieberman/Collins bill, but not that of the vast majority of Congress (which is why it is expected to be phased out). Given the study Heritage did on the high number of Members of Congress who have attended private school, or have their child attending private school, one has to wonder why Congress, especially with a massive majority of Democrats in power, is letting teachers unions have more input on their votes than poor minorities looking to improve their station in life. (Oh, and President Obama’s daughters also attend private school…) It is up to us, the voters, to protest and advocate on behalf of DC’s young people, and make certain our Representatives and Senators know to ignore the president on the DC Voucher Program, both for the moral reasons adn the fact that we will hold this against them come November.

For more information on why we should support the DC Opportunity Scholarship, go to VoicesofSchoolChoice.org, where the Heritage-produced video “Let Me Rise” can be found, as well as a link to the Washington Post editorial stating that a majority of the DC City Council supports the voucher program.

*Originally posted at www.race42012.com.

I know this is not political, but a Haitian man was found alive after 27 days in rubble.

Scientists say that survival beyond 10 days, for someone who is trapped, requires an unusual combination of circumstances, including an uninjured, healthy victim and access to water and air. But a defining feature of the Haiti quake has been the remarkable number of people rescued from collapsed buildings.

Last night, the best Super Bowl ad for impact might have been the Tebow commercial. The Brett Favre 2020 retirement one was good, as well. However, the best ad, pound-for-pound, was the one showing American children pledging allegiance to China over the amount of debt we owe them. (Conversely, the census ad was pretty bad.) It was witty, on point and stylistically completely out of the ordinary in just slamming America with just how much debt we owe. (I regret that I cannot find the ad itself anywhere to post here.)

Fortunately, there is something of a solution to our debt problem- Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) Roadmap 2.0. It has gained a lot of respect on all sides of the political spectrum, including but not limited to the Congressional Budget Office, Ezra Klein and Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag, as well as George Will. Klein admits he would rather balance the budget in different ways than Ryan, but gives him great credit for taking a political risk, accomplishing the difficult goals of making Medicare solvent and eliminating the federal debt and being a real Republican leader. Orszag, unfortunately, does his job as an administration shill and compliments the Ryan plan right before disdainfully throwing it under the bus.

Hopefully the Super Bowl ad was a slap in the face to 100,000,000 Americans. If Republicans and conservatives can continue to hype the Ryan plan and make it part of the mainstream political debate and discourse for the foreseeable future, we can turn that slap into a wake-up call to action for our nation’s future. Fiscal and personal discipline, the proper role and size of government, etc. can make a comeback, as long as plans like the Roadmap are at the front and center of national policy debates.

Yesterday, Hot Air posted the pre-Super Bowl ad of Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow and his mother. The ad was easily the least controversial I saw throughout Super Bowl Sunday- especially compared to the many Bud Light and men in underwear commercials, or the taxpayer-funded census ad and the American debt commercial, during the actual Super Bowl.

However, nobody in the general public had seen the real ad until the game. You know, the one feminists and pro-abortionists went crazy over because Tim and Pam Tebow, along with CBS, were allegedly pushing a radical pro-life agenda. So after seeing the pre-game ad, I was prepared for anything- you know, maybe a mention of God or perhaps even a a hug between a mother and her son?

Turns out I was wrong. Tebow actually tackles his mother- which is pretty funny, no matter what the fruitcakes say- while she is expressing concern about his safety and toughness. She then pops up before he does and “lectures” him about interrupting her sharing their story. He apologizes, stands to her left with one hand on each shoulder, and asks her if she still worries about him. She says that she does, because he’s “still not as tough as I am.”

All in all, this is a knockout, home run, touchdown, hat trick, whatever you want to call it, for Focus on the Family and the pro-life movement. Whether intentional or not, by not releasing the ad’s content until the Super Bowl, Focus on the Family let the crazies on the left run wild with speculation. The pro-life movement now looks kind, gentle and loving, if you even picked up on the sub-text of the ad. Focus on the Family, which has the background of the Tebow ad on its main page, in particular looked like a non-controversial organization to those who have never heard of it. The only mention of the organization is a few seconds at the end directing people to the Tebow’s story on Focus on the Family’s main page.

However, the victory does not end there. The Tebow ad has been discussed for some time on blogs, in articles, on The O’Reilly Factor, The View, The Laura Ingraham Show, Megyn Kelly’s “America Live” and of course on the websites of Life News and Planned Parenthood. Why? Because feminists and pro-abortionists went off the deep end to take the ad down. Had they waited for the commercial to come out before making a statement, they could have attacked from a base of knowledge. Had they ignored it, the ad might have caused a piffle of notice among Super Bowl watchers and been promptly ignored. However, by taking the path more traveled by attacking the ad with every weapon possible as soon as possible, they guaranteed the ad would be carefully observed by millions of Super Bowl commercial watchers.

When it comes down to it, the pro-life movement is increasingly in line with the views of Americans, especially young Americans. By making the Tebow ad a mainstream point of discussion for many days before the Super Bowl, pro-abortionists have made themselves look both the fools and out of touch with mainstream America, and placed the pro-life movement squarely in touch with the softer, kinder side of Americans, who by and large only want what’s best for everyone. This ad, or more precisely the pro-abortion reaction to it, will most certainly guide Americans to the side of the abortion debate that is truly about helping women and children, and helping families make the right decisions about life.

*I originally posted this at Race42012.com.