Conservatives To Sign 'Mount Vernon Statement': Principles For The Obama Era

A group of more than 80 conservative leaders plan to sign a document on Wednesday that signals a retrenchment to "founding principles."

The document will be called The Mount Vernon Statement in honor of the location of the signing ceremony. The signers include a who's who of conservative heavy weights -- names like Grover Norquist, Ed Meese, Richard Viguerie, Edwin Feulner and Alfred Regnery.

The proclamation, based on the Sharon statement -- a conservative declaration signed in 1960, that is credited with helping "launch and define the conservative movement that led to the recruitment, development and election of numerous conservative leaders" -- breaks down what the conservative activists see to be the primary responsibility of government.

"The change we urgently need, a change consistent with the American ideal, is not movement away from but toward our founding principles," the statement reads. These founding principles, the drafters believe, can be broadly-defined as Constitutional conservatism. They then provide a short bulleted list of the way they believe these principles should apply to government.

* It applies the principle of limited government based on the rule of law to every proposal. * It honors the central place of individual liberty in American politics and life. * It encourages free enterprise, the individual entrepreneur, and economic reforms grounded in market solutions. * It supports America's national interest in advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world and prudently considers what we can and should do to that end. * It informs conservatism's firm defense of family, neighborhood, community, and faith.

The drafters describe their reasons for the timing of this new manifesto:

"In light of the challenges facing the country and the need for clarity in the age of Obama, The Mount Vernon Statement, modeled on the Sharon Statement issued on Sept. 11, 1960, is a defining statement of conservative beliefs, values and principles penned by a broad coalition of conservative leaders representing a wide spectrum of the movement including fiscal, social, cultural and national security conservatives."

Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform, gave his reason for signing on to the statement in a piece written for Fox News:

What I find most interesting and attractive about the Mount Vernon statement is how simple, easy to understand and explain this commitment to individual liberty and limited government is. The truths we endorse once again have not changed since the American Revolution. They will not change in another 200 years.

Others, however, have criticized the Mount Vernon Declaration as vague, idealistic and nostalgia-filled document that doesn't actually say much.

Salon's Gabriel Winant offered his take on the declaration of principles:

The GOP activists can get away with wishing it was 1776 because they don't actually have to go home and face angry electorates after acting out an anachronistic fantasy. Congressional leaders like Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., can't afford to play pretend all the time. Back in 1776, nobody needed Medicare, because the average lifespan was around 35. In 2010, just citing "self-evident" truths ain't going to cut it.

But some Republicans may not agree with that assessment. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) said on Wednesday that GOP leaders should sign on to the statement or "be replaced"."

"If our leaders cannot agree to the Mount Vernon Statement, they are part of the problem," DeMint tweeted.

The signing is set to take place at Mount Vernon's Collingwood Library and Museum on Americanism at 2:30 p.m. ET.

Comments

[pghperson]

02:25 AM on 02/25/2010

Ugh. Who do they think they are, the founding fathers in 1776? This is a ridiculous enterprise on their part, signifying nothing; and they're not going to go down in history as problem solvers. Just obstructionists. I have a better question for them in this "Age of Obama" - When are you people going to spend your time thinking about actual SOLUTIONS to problems in the US? You are wasting time, valuable time. The format of this thing! Are they thinking it will confuse a bunch of teabaggers to get with their program? They're right. It will. Who wants a ride on The Faux Patriot Express?
Not me.

[Gnosis33]

12:32 PM on 02/21/2010

Constitutional conservatism, what is this? The people who have drafted and signed this document, the Mt. Vernon Statement, the Republicans, Conservatives, Tea-Baggers are now becoming revisionists. They seem to have completely missed their history and government classes and are now practicing Dick Cheney's habit of rewriting history. The Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights were not conservative. These documents were considered very radical, penned and signed by radical liberals intent on overthrowing the government of the time. At the end of the American Revolution all the conservatives remaining in this country packed thier bags and sailed back to England. Our great documents were written by forward thinking men who wanted to provide a new hope in the New World. Let's get back to this frame of mind and stop highlighting our differences and work on our similar goals; that of moving our country smartly into and through the 21st century.

[FTBUTAME]

11:56 AM on 02/22/2010

You should be in Vegas with that much Smoke & Mirrors. Nice act!

[TaiTai]

11:42 PM on 02/22/2010

It's true - they were not 'conservative' in their day. They also believed in progressive taxation.

http://legacy.signonsandiego.com/news/business/calbreath/20081026-9999-1b26dean.html

Try to tell today's conservatives that the tax burden should fall more heavily on the rich and that the lower rung should pay nothing - as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson believed.

[knosiswar]

11:19 PM on 02/18/2010

The great good news about America--the American gospel, if you will--is that religion shapes the life of the nation without strangling it. Driven by a sense of providence and an acute appreciation of the fallibility of humankind, the Founders made a nation in which faith should not be singled out for special help or particular harm. The balance between the promise of the Declaration of Independence, with its evocation of divine origins and destiny, and the practicalities of the Constitution, with its checks on extremism, remains the most brilliant of American successes.

The Founding Fathers and presidents down the ages have believed in a God who brought forth the heavens and the earth, and who gave humankind the liberty to believe in Him or not, to love Him or not, to obey Him or not. God had created man with free will, for love coerced is no love at all, only submission. That is why the religious should be on the front lines of defending freedom of religion.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/45970/page/2

[knosiswar]

11:10 PM on 02/18/2010

Still, Jefferson's declaration of independence grounded America's most fundamental human rights in the divine, as the gift of "Nature's God." The most unconventional of believers, Jefferson was no conservative Christian; he once went through the Gospels with a razor to excise the parts he found implausible. ("I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know," he remarked.) And yet he believed that "the God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time," and to Jefferson, the "Creator" invested the individual with rights no human power could ever take away. The Founders, however, resolutely refused to evoke sectarian--specifically Christian--imagery: the God of the Declaration is largely the God of Deism, an Enlightenment-era vision of the divine in which the Lord is a Creator figure who works in the world through providence. The Founding Fathers rejected an attempt to rewrite the Preamble of the Constitution to say the nation was dependent on God, and from the Lincoln administration forward presidents and Congresses refused to support a "Christian Amendment" that would have acknowledged Jesus to be the "Ruler among the nations."

http://www.newsweek.com/id/45970/page/3

[knosiswar]

11:07 PM on 02/18/2010

However dominant in terms of numbers, Christianity is only a thread in the American tapestry--it is not the whole tapestry. The God who is spoken of and called on and prayed to in the public sphere is an essential character in the American drama, but He is not specifically God the Father or the God of Abraham. The right's contention that we are a "Christian nation" that has fallen from pure origins and can achieve redemption by some kind of return to Christian values is based on wishful thinking, not convincing historical argument. Writing to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790, George Washington assured his Jewish countrymen that the American government "gives to bigotry no sanction." In a treaty with the Muslim nation of Tripoli initiated by Washington, completed by John Adams, and ratified by the Senate in 1797, we declared "the Government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion. ... " The Founders also knew the nation would grow ever more diverse; in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson's bill for religious freedom was "meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination." And thank God--or, if you choose, thank the Founders--that it did indeed.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/45970/page/2

[carlosgriffin]

09:26 PM on 02/18/2010

It would be an honor to sign this proclomation. And no, I am not a racist, nor do I know any racists in my circle of friends or family.

[johndab]

05:53 PM on 02/18/2010

SOMEBODY GET THESE OLD FARTS A CHECKERBOARD TO AMUSE THEMSELVES.

[booker52]

05:44 PM on 02/18/2010

Do they plan on trying to bring back Jim Crow as well?

[BoyInBOYCOTT]

05:39 PM on 02/18/2010

Anything Klan affiliated Tony Perkins and Neocon Norquist would sign, should be written on parchment appearing toilet paper, and flush after wiping your behind on it.

[Maney]

05:26 PM on 02/18/2010

Here we go again - doublespeak. Once again they're SAYING all the things they think they need to say to get power and once gotten they will be DOING all the things necessary to run up a debt that even GWB would envy. Talk, Talk, Talk. -- Do you believe they'll do what they say they're going to do? I don't think so - there's no profit it in for them.

[gypsysailor]

05:14 PM on 02/18/2010

Sounds like the Republicans are trying to take out another CONTRACT ON AMERICANS kind of like 'give a hoot' Newt did in 1994.

If they win and keep to stuff like this then sleep light and listen for the jackboots to come to your door.

[funkyirishdem]

05:13 PM on 02/18/2010

Republican Hypocrisy 101


you are for it ------------------------we are against it until we are for it again ...no against it ..for it ..against
you paid for it ---------------------- we will take the check ( it magically appeared ..say cheese)
you want a vote --------------------we fillibuster until we get what we want
you nominate somebody--------we put a hold on them until somebody see's ( then we just say sorry)
you passed it (and it works) ----we would have done the same thing
you want to have a meeting ----we don't show up because we were excluded from the table
you won the election -------------we scream we want our country back! (from you)
you are for family values---------we are as well until we get caught with our pants down
you are for religion ----------------we are too as long as it iis run by white men with multiple wives

you are for all ethinic backgrounds -----we are integrated too (one or two of us are black but the rest are overwhelmingly white )

DId I miss anything ?

feel free to add ;O=)

[Enjay 1]

04:19 PM on 02/18/2010

Don't these Repubs understand their job is to REPRESENT THE PEOPLE in their district / state

- NOT THE PARTY-

If any of my representatives sign that --- they won't get my vote.

[Tempestite]

03:42 PM on 02/18/2010

Is it my imagination or has John Boehner completely lost control of his position as House Minority Leader? The rift within the GOP seems to be so deep that it has become irreconcilable. Now, if Obama, Biden, Pelosi and Reid can stop injuring themselves the Dems should have an easy go of it.

[asiclilpup]

03:15 PM on 02/18/2010

rehashed garbage. goes to show us that the reFUGLIES have nothing new. their only campaign issues are anything that Obama does