Mayor Lou Barletta's Remarks to Allegheny County Lincoln Day Dinner 2-18-09

It's a tremendous honor to speak here at the Allegheny County Republicans' Lincoln Day Dinner.

I think it's pretty safe to say that 2008 was a bad year for Republicans.

We lost the White House. We lost more seats in the United States House. Democrats gained more power in the U.S. Senate. Statewide, Democrats are very close to taking total control of the legislative process. That's why it's so important for the Republican Party to make a comeback.

We need to start rebuilding this party, and we need to do it starting this year. We need to elect our judges and local Republicans, and we need to begin establishing strong networks for the campaigns we will need to wage in 2010.

There are factions of the Democratic Party that want to destroy the Republican Party. Some are trying to gag us by bringing back the so-called Fairness Doctrine.

Just last week, Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, said, "we need the Fairness Doctrine back." This comes as other senators and representatives - and Bill Clinton himself - say the Fairness Doctrine, which would gag conservative outlets like talk radio, is a good idea because it promotes balance.

Others, including groups like MoveOn.org spend hundreds of millions of dollars to promote Democrat ideals and attack Republican ideals. They create slick ad campaigns to bash conservative thought and promote liberal thinking.

For now, though, Democrats are content to make our party politically ineffective.

They're happy to create a one-party system where Democrats set the direction, draft the legislation, stifle opposing points of view, and pass the laws they want. And they're well on their way to doing just that.

Recently, the massive economic stimulus package sailed through the House of Representatives even though every Republican House member voted against it.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat leadership were proud that they drew up the stimulus package
by themselves — without any input from Republican House members.

In fact, the Democrats broke a key promise to pass this massive spending bill. They said the final version would be available for public review for 48 hours.

The bill was posted online for about 14 hours before members voted on it. Members on both sides of the aisle said they had no chance to read all 1,073 pages of the bill. Yet Democrats pushed it through anyway.

It's frightening to think that our elected leaders voted to spend almost 1 trillion dollars without knowing exactly what they voted for.

Democrats said the bill was so important that the review could not wait. They said anyone who questioned the lack of time to review the massive package was just raising procedural issues.

The Democrats spoke out of both sides of their mouths on the timing of this spending package. They said we needed it immediately or else the nation would slide deeper into a recession. We, the American taxpayer, even paid to fly a Democratic member of the Senate back from his mother's memorial service to cast the deciding vote in that chamber late Friday night.


But President Obama didn't sign the bill until yesterday. Why the delay? If the bill was so crucial to our nation's economic survival that neither House members nor the public were given the chance to review the bill before it passed, why didn't the president sign it Friday night?

If the White House thought it important to send a military plane to Ohio to carry this senator back to Washington for the five hour roll call,

Why didn't President Obama sign it before going out for his well-publicized Valentine's Day dinner Saturday night?

Democrats wanted to push this bill through the House and Senate before people could review it because it contains billions of dollars in wasteful pork.

The stimulus allows for so-called discretionary spending, which will fund pet projects like Nancy Pelosi's 30 million dollar mouse habitat, Harry Reid's multi-billion-dollar high speed rail line from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, and 2 billion dollars for a new power plant for Dick Durbin.

Democrats will say those projects are not funded in the stimulus package, but the language is so narrowly drafted that there are no other projects that meet the funding criteria.

There's 4 billion dollars for community groups like ACORN, and 400 million dollars for global warming research.

What's the saying - a billion here and a billion there and soon you're talking about real money?

And... there's no provision in the stimulus bill that will withhold federal funding for municipalities that have declared themselves sanctuary cities.

These places are not only ignoring federal law, they're opposing it, and they should not receive one penny of federal funding until those laws are removed from the books.

But don't worry - the average American worker will get to keep 13 dollars a week more in his paycheck.

We learned many of these details only after the vote, which is exactly how Democrats wanted it.

Democrats pushed this bill through to hide the wasteful spending from the American people and because they were so eager to begin their recess.

In fact, Speaker Pelosi held the vote on the stimulus in the early afternoon so she could catch a flight and begin a taxpayer-funded junket in Europe.

This is shameful. This is a disgrace.

And the Republican Party and our allies on the Democrat side of the aisle are powerless to stop it.

The Democrats have taken complete control of the political agenda in this country. While the Republicans controlled the House and while the Democrats did not have their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, both parties worked together to hammer out bipartisan legislation.

Not any more.

When asked about bipartisanship, Speaker Pelosi told the Washington Post, quote, "Republicans were not being realistic in their expectations."

It's clear that Democrats are playing for keeps. They're trying to exclude Republicans from the political process and make us irrelevant in the national discussion.

And, based on how things are going, they just might succeed. It's also clear that many members of the mainstream media are on the Democrats' side.

Imagine if our party had control of the House and Senate, and Republicans crafted a trillion-dollar spending bill without input from Democrats. Imagine the reports you'd see in the news media.

But this is not a new trend. Think back to the presidential election last year, and you may remember just how skewed things were.

You may remember how a certain television commentator who cloaked himself in the mantle of fairness, spoke about how the mere speech patterns of the Democratic presidential candidate gave him a thrill up his leg.

And we've all seen the fawning over our new president's Hawaiian vacation, with special attention paid to photos of him shirtless, on the beach.

Rather than question the qualifications of his cabinet nominees, the mainstream media wondered how often the president works out.

In the very week that two of those nominees withdrew from consideration, a columnist at The New York Times wrote the following:

"The other night I dreamt of Barack Obama. He was taking a shower...". That, ladies and gentlemen, is from this nation's newspaper of record.

Just two weeks ago, I was personally criticized for standing up for my city in a New York Times Editorial on Monday, and then a Los Angeles Times Editorial on Friday. Criticized coast to coast - now that's a good week.

So how did the Republican Party get to this point? How did we get so far off track? How did Republicans become politically irrelevant?

I'm embarrassed to say it, but we've brought it upon ourselves.

Not too long ago, the Democrats themselves faced a crisis. They were pinned with a label - Liberal. At the time, "liberal" had become a dirty word in American politics. But now, conservative has become the new liberal in the American political lexicon. Many Republicans are ashamed to say they're conservative.

After all, conservative now means greedy. Heartless. Backwards. And liberal means enlightened. Intellectual. Progressive.

To their credit, liberals have been successful in redefining themselves. They've reshaped their image without compromising their core beliefs. Look beyond the new talking points and find the center of modern liberalism and you will see it is exactly the same as it was more than a decade ago.

The difference is that liberals have now seemed to convince the American people that their ideas are the right ideas:

Higher taxes. Nationalized health care. More government programs and increased government spending.

What's more troubling to me is that now, "conservative" is taking on shameful new meanings: Weak. Gutless. Powerless. And just plain wrong for America.

Our problem as a party is that we seem to have lost our strong leaders. We've lost our passionate leaders. And that seems to be because we've lost our conservative roots.

Some in our party are convinced the way to regain political power is by moving to the middle.

Some Republicans believe the key to our future lies by moderating. With all due respect, those who believe that, could not be more wrong.

Throughout history, the Republican Party achieved greatness when we embraced conservatism and presented a clear, unified vision to the American people.

Ronald Reagan said that conservatism is not based on abstract theorizing, but on common sense, intelligence, reason, faith, and ideological courage.

So why should Republicans turn away from those things and consider moderation and its abstract theorizing?

Conservatism is based on personal freedom and responsibility. Why should Republicans abandon those?

Those are the bedrock principles of the United States of America. Why on Earth should our party forsake those ideals?

Ours is a nation of laws, yet there are those in our party who claim we should look the other way, or even rewrite those laws, in a quest to appeal to certain factions and voting blocs.

Why?

Are we so desperate for political power that we will sacrifice our core beliefs for it?

Yes, last year was a bad year for Republicans. But we have to ask why.

Many Republicans were not excited about the top of our ticket for most of 2008. That's because we lost our conservative base and we failed to excite conservatives.

Conservatives are not only the lifeblood of our party, they are also the dominant political force in our nation.

One must only look at election results when Republicans have endorsed true conservative leaders.

Ronald Reagan won two presidential elections in convincing fashion, and Reagan embodied the modern conservative movement in America. The American people responded to Reagan because he did not back down from his beliefs. He spoke from his heart. And he lead from the front.

In 1994, the Republican Revolution swept through the U.S. House after conservatives unveiled the Contract With America.

The contract - most of which Reagan's biographer would say came from his 1985 State of the Union - promised fiscal accountability and a reduction in government red tape. Americans - Republicans AND Democrats - responded, electing the first Republican majority in the House in decades.

We must learn from this. We must rebuild our party from the ground up.

We must craft our platform on the solid foundation of our most basic and treasured beliefs, like fiscal responsibility, national security, and personal freedom, a platform that says the government is merely a safety net and the defender of our liberties.

Now is the time, and now it must be done.

No one can deny that the 20th Century was the American century, but less than one decade into the 21st Century, no one can argue that our standing in the world has slipped.

Everything seems to be, not just standing still, but moving backwards.

Too many of our current leaders are so bogged down in partisan bickering, and by polls and focus groups, that no one has the courage of his or her convictions any more.

That isn't the Republican Party I know, and it isn't the United States of America I grew up in.

It's time the Republican Party comes out of hiding and embraces its conservative roots.

It's time we begin explaining our values directly to the people in our cities and our boroughs, our towns and our townships, without the left-leaning filter of the mainstream media.

It's time we reclaim our Republican Party, and in doing so, reclaim the United States for the American people.

Republicans can negotiate with our political opponents, but we cannot abandon everything we hold sacred. We should work with the other side, but we should not moderate our values.

Our modern Republican Party cannot pretend to be all things to all people, a party that tries to be inoffensive to everyone, a party that stands for everything, and nothing.

After all, Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, told us not to believe there "is some middle ground" between what is right and what is wrong.

Standing up for what you believe in is a difficult thing. Standing up for what you believe in is a lonely thing.

But if we stand for something of value, if we are more than just the token opposition, if we provide new, clearly defined solutions based on our conservative core beliefs, the Republican Party can achieve great things again, and we can lead America to a brighter, safer, more prosperous future.

If we stand up for what we believe in and stand up for our convictions, we will unite our Republican Party.

And if we show we are serious about providing new, fresh leadership for our commonwealth, and our country, Democrats and Independents will follow us as well.

Americans crave leadership. Americans crave strong leaders. Americans of all political stripes will respond to a new, revitalized, restored Republican Party with its roots in traditional conservative values and its eyes on a prosperous, secure future full of fairness, personal freedom and liberty.

This is the time! The differences between Democrats and true conservative Republicans have never been more visible.

We can't let this moment slip away. We must have vision, tempered by realism. We must have courage, backed by morality! We must have leadership, supported by responsibility!

We cannot be afraid to stand up for what we truly believe in! We cannot be afraid to lead! Together we can accomplish so much.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.

Best regards,