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Conservatives Back Bush but Not All His Policies NewsMax.com WiresARLINGTON, Va. – Conservatives from across America gave full-throated cheers today for prominent lawmakers who praised President Bush as a wartime leader and for his policies on tax relief and abortion, but warned that big-spending "entitlement" programs and possible overreach by the Patriot Act could doom the conservative movement and possibly the GOP’s congressional majority.
“Over my dead body will Congress repeal the sunset provision of the Patriot Act,” up for renewal in the spring of 2005, House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., warned during the opening session of the Conservative Political Action Conference. He said his committee would “take its oversight responsibilities seriously.” Sensenbrenner, who has frequently raised civil-liberties concerns about the Patriot Act, spoke upon receiving CPAC’s Defender of the Constitution Award. At the same time, the Wisconsin lawmaker defended sections of the Patriot Act for ridding the statutes of anti-national-security provisions imposed by the post-Watergate Church committee of the 1970s, such as prohibiting the CIA and the FBI from sharing intelligence. He said the law responded correctly in allowing law enforcement powers allowed to be used against drug trafficking and racketeering to apply to terrorists as well. He chided the administration’s Justice Department for failure at first to respond to legitimate bipartisan questions from the committee. The congressman noted that after he had called them on it, Attorney General John Ashcroft and other DOJ officials responded more fully in succeeding written inquiries. In a similar vein, Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., pointedly chosen as CPAC’s leadoff speaker in large part because he was one of only 25 Republicans to vote against the massive new prescription-drug program, took pains to say conservatives should still back Bush as one whose capture of “the butcher of Baghdad” caused America to “stand tall,” who promoted the general welfare in “the only way that ever works [tax cuts],” and who helped the right-to-life movement by signing the bill banning partial-birth abortion. But Pence said there were “troubling signs” of a ship off course. He singled out the drug bill, which threatens to saddle the taxpayers with “trillions of dollars” in a new entitlement, and the No Child Left Behind Act, which some conservatives have dubbed the “No Democrat Left Behind Act,” largely because to pass it, the White House collaborated with Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and meet his demands, especially the senator’s opposition to school vouchers, which President Bush had favored.
It was a “difficult choice,” Congressman Pence lamented, that he and his fellow congressional conservatives were asked to choose “between the president we love or oppose the expansion of big government we hate.” Pence recalled thanking President Ronald Reagan in 1988 for all he had done for the country. Reagan’s modest response then was: “I don’t think I did anything. The American people righted this ship, and I was just the captain they put on deck.” It is again “time to right this ship!” Pence told his wildly cheering audience of thousands of conservatives. Several administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, were scheduled to address the conference. At the same time, there were scheduled panel discussions on such topics as “GOP Success: Is It Destroying the Conservative Movement?”
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