Days of Exile for Conservatives
Two recent news items affecting Pennsylvanians offer a reminder that for conservatives in the Commonwealth, these are indeed days of exile.
The graver of the two was the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court’s ruling on April 20 discovering a new right to abortion in the state constitution. Not only did the court invent this so-called right, but its ruling also demands that Pennsylvania’s taxpayers pick up the tab for those who cannot afford the cost of dismembering the most vulnerable members of the human family. Irony abounds in the timing of the decision, which arrived barely two months before the nation observes what happened in Pennsylvania nearly 250 years ago. At that time, those who founded this nation understood the application of “the laws of nature and nature’s God,” recognized and adopted the revolutionary principle that all of us are “created equal,” that we are endowed by a Creator with an “inalienable right” to life, and that governments are instituted to secure such rights.
The Commonwealth Court rejects everything the nation is preparing to celebrate. This activist decision is an affront to the Founders. It is an affront to Abraham Lincoln, who revived the philosophy of the Declaration to defeat another abominable deprivation of human rights in the nation’s history. It is an affront to the thought of Pennsylvania-educated Martin Luther King Jr., who, like Lincoln, understood the natural-law underpinnings of our founding and recognized that unjust laws are no laws at all. And it is an affront to President Kennedy’s aspirational understanding of what made our country unique—that our rights come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.
We should not be fooled by politicians who celebrate this decision and then head to Philadelphia this summer to observe the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration. They reject the cornerstone principles that gave us the freest nation in history. Without those philosophical supports, collapse is inevitable.
The other news that should dishearten conservatives is the failure of the current American government to have learned—or even to have been cognizant of—the repercussions of utopian efforts to order the world. This week it took more than $90 to fill the 20-gallon tank on my Chevy Traverse. At the beginning of the year, it cost $60. That is a 50 percent increase in a basic staple needed for daily living. Every American family that relies on gas-powered vehicles—which is most of us—faces the same pocketbook pressure, and this budget pinch is a direct result of President Trump’s unilateral decision to take America into war with Iran.
Would gas prices have risen had Congress authorized the war? Most likely, yes. But at least the debate leading up to such an authorization would have considered another Middle East war’s impact on America’s economy and weighed that cost against the threats Iran presented. Such a debate would have played out James Madison’s idea in Federalist No. 51 of “ambition counteracting ambition.” Importantly, had that course been followed, there could have been genuine buy-in from the American people. This is precisely what the Founders envisioned with the Declaration’s recognition of the need for the “consent of the governed” and the Constitution’s seemingly now dead-letter reservation to the people’s representatives of the power to declare war.
These two snapshots reveal the crisis in political thought besetting our nation. On one hand, Republican leadership has adopted a governing philosophy that struggles to find guiding principles. On the other, the left—evidenced by the radicalization of Pennsylvania’s courts—continues its militant assault on the country’s founding. Team B attacks while Team A flounders. This is the vacuum into which Team C—conservatives who understand the Declaration, the Constitution, and the link between the two—must lead. The demand for rededication to these principles has not been this urgent since the 1850s and 1860s, during the crisis of the “house divided.” And as in the crisis of the mid-nineteenth century, should we return to the nation’s founding truths, there is the promise of a “new birth of freedom.”
*Congressman Keith Rothfus served 3 terms in the U.S. House. He is a Notre Dame Law School graduate living near Pittsburgh where he and his wife raised their family.
