As many Americans grow frustrated with career politicians in Washington racking up huge amounts of debt with seemingly no plan to repay it, one former senator has a plan for the people to take back the government from the bureaucrats.
“You have this mega government which cannot be held accountable, and what has to change is it has to be downsized,” former Sen. Tom Coburn, author of the new book “Smashing the DC Monopoly: Using Article V to Restore Freedom and Stop America’s Runaway Government,” told Rev. Eric Walker, host of the show Igniting a Nation.
“One of the things is that restoring, through an Article V convention, limiting the terms of the members of Congress, forcing a balanced budget with generally accepted accounting principles, and limiting the scope and jurisdiction of the federal government, will return our freedom but also our power to be wise and prudent at the state level,” he said during the recent interview.
“Smashing the DC Monopoly” is Sen. Coburn’s proposal to use Article V of the U.S. Constitution to call a convention of states to bypass Congress and pass constitutional amendments.
Two-thirds of the state legislatures must pass an application for Congress to call an Article V Convention. Twelve states out of the 34 necessary have submitted such an application.
All the state applications must deal with the same topics. Among the currently proposed amendments are term limits on members of Congress and a balanced budget amendment, requiring the federal government to operate within its means rather than borrowing huge sums of money to keep running.
This could be an effective way to “drain the swamp” in Washington, as President Trump has repeatedly sworn to do.
“The question I would ask to all my colleagues in Washington is why aren’t y’all working on balancing the budget?” Coburn asked. “Why aren’t you working on restoring a common sense, viable Medicare – one that the average millennial is not going to have to pay $1.7 million for over the next 50 years? Why aren’t you working on reforming Social Security and Social Security disability? Why aren’t you getting the fraud – $400 billion worth of fraud – out of the federal government? Nobody’s working on those things. Why? Because those aren’t popular things to work on, but they’re very important for our future.
“The polling shows that most Americans think that Washington is sick,” Coburn continued. “When you have that kind of lack of confidence, what you know is people know things aren’t right. So the question is, how do you fix it? What’s the solution? I left the U.S. Senate because I didn’t see a solution there, but I left it to work on Article V because I see it as the only solution that we have to restore our future and to restore the limited government that was intended to govern us.”
Coburn believes that without a significant movement by the American people to return to a government that looks more like that envisioned by the Founding Fathers, the nation’s very liberty is at stake:
“There’s a battle for freedom going on. We have unelected officials tell us how we have to live our lives. We have unelected officials tell us how we have to run our business. We have unelected officials tell us what we can and cannot do with our own land. We have lost freedom. This is about reestablishing the autonomy of the states to make decisions that are in the best interests of the citizens of their states,” he said.
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