The expanding “rights” to federal freebies peddled by 2020 Democratic hopefuls and surrogates such as New York Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are perverting the Declaration of Independence and would create a whole new “deep state” of unaccountable bureaucrats, according to Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee.
In his latest book about the founding of the nation, the soft-spoken conservative Republican roared against top Democrats, accusing them of co-opting the language of America’s most important documents to pander to voters in patriotic tones.
“As with so many other concepts to which the progressive Left latches onto, the concept of ‘rights’ has been so perverted by them that it bears little resemblance to the idea of ‘rights’ as the founding generation of Americans understood them,” he wrote in “Our Lost Declaration,” due out later this month.
“Those rights were designed to protect the individual against aggression from others and especially, in the eyes of the founders, aggression from their government. The rights weren’t gifts to be bestowed on citizens by government but rather a statement that the citizens had those rights conferred by nature and God,” wrote Lee.
Lee cites “rights” promised by Ocasio-Cortez; Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; and Kamala Harris, D-Calif.; on free education, guaranteed salary, and untamed abortion. He charges that if they get their way, Americans will lose their original rights to an administrative deep state.
“This is a dangerous notion,” Lee told Secrets. “I fear that language because it is the exact opposite of a right, of rights consistent with things the government can’t do to you. It can’t be reinvented as something the government must provide for you,” he said, adding, “calling it a right doesn’t make it so.”
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Lee has always been a student of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and his latest book suggests that the Declaration and its promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is timely and important.
And not just because it lays out the founding rights, but because the Declaration is mostly a list of oppressions by the British government that look like a preview of today’s deep state.
“It’s like a monster that continues to live and breathe and grow no matter who is supposed to be guarding it,” he wrote. “The government outlined by our founders, which received its earliest articulation in the Declaration of Independence, has grown unchecked to the point where a powerful central government is once again exercising outsized power and influence over the American people, except this time it’s of our own making,” said Lee, author of four other influential books about freedom, the Constitution, health care and the Founding Fathers.
He said that successive presidents have expanded their power, and Congress has rolled over. He gave President Trump credit with cutting the bureaucracy and regulations that reached a high under former President Obama.
Fighting further executive and Washington power is why he wrote the book. Lee said he wants Americans to shake out of their sleep and fight the Left’s move to socialism with promises of free programs.
“Those of us who call ourselves conservatives are the ones that want to keep government small, to prevent the growth of the administrative state. But what does that really mean, especially in an era where outright socialism — and the massive government expansion it entails — is becoming increasingly popular in the mainstream American political conversation. Our complacency is tantamount to consent,” he said.
