I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.
We don't need someone who can think. We need someone with enough digits to hold a pen.
All we have to do is replace Obama. ... We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don't need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget. ... We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don't need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate.
My ideal citizen is the self-employed, homeschooling, IRA-owning guy with a concealed-carry permit. Because that person doesn't need the goddamn government for anything.
We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals, and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship.
My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.
We will make it so that a Democrat cannot govern as a Democrat.
Government should enforce rule of law. It should enforce contracts, it should protect people bodily from being attacked by criminals. And when the government does those things, it is facilitating liberty. When it goes beyond those things, it becomes destructive to both human happiness and human liberty.
Democrats are people who raise your taxes and spend your money on weird stuff. They steal your guns, and they spit on your faith.
People are an asset, not a liability. The United States is the most immigrant-friendly nation in the world and the richest country in the world. This is not a coincidence. Those voices that would make us less immigrant-friendly would make us less successful, less prosperous and certainly less American.
What Mae West said about sex is true about taxes. All tax cuts are good tax cuts; even bad tax cuts are good tax cuts.
Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they've been fixed, then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don't go around peeing on the furniture and such.
The goal is to reduce the size and scope of government spending, not to focus on the deficit. The deficit is the symptom of the disease.
Every time you cut programs, you take away a person who has a vested interest in high taxes and you put him on the tax rolls and make him a taxpayer. A farmer on subsidies is part welfare bum, whereas a free-market farmer is a small businessman with a gun.
This always confuses liberals, that conservatives like the military and don't like the bureaucracy. That's because the military has their guns pointed out and the bureaucracy has them pointed in.
The future of the Republican Party, all the different folks looking to lead the Republican Party at the national level in the future, recognize we should do immigration reform.
One of the reasons some of the advocates of ever larger government and more government intrusiveness get nervous about discussions of the actual cost of government is that they fear if the people had a discussion about what government costs, the true cost of taxes, that they might not want as much government as they are presently getting.
We plan to pick up another five seats in the Senate and hold the House through redistricting through 2012. And rather than negotiate with the teachers’ unions and the trial lawyers and the various leftist interest groups, we intend to break them.
Spending is not caring. Spending is what politicians do instead of caring. Spending more does not guarantee success. Politicians like to measure spending because it is easier than measuring actual metrics of accomplishment.
I want to reduce the size of government in half as a percentage of GNP - gross national product - over the next 25 years. We want to reduce the number of people depending on government so there is more autonomy and more free citizens.
Home schoolers do not wish to force other parents to home school. Gun owners do not insist that others buy guns, or that hunting be promoted as an alternative lifestyle. It is not the National Rifle Association out lobbying to have government schools read books entitled 'Heather Has Two Hunters' to preschoolers. It is, in fact, the Left that now strives to use state power to impose its morality by forcing all taxpayers to pay for abortions and public "art" that mocks people of faith. It is the Left that forces parents to pay for government schools where they do not wish to send their children.
I think it's very important to always make sure that you're talking to the entire coalition and to as many Americans as possible; not to go chasing after one little group or another. The Democrats would bring new groups into their party and not notice that larger groups are going out the back door.
I was an anti-communist before I was political in other ways.
It's the Democrats whose position is that the only problem in Washington, D.C., is the peasants aren't sending enough cash in for the king to spend.
Look, the center right coalition in American politics today is best understood as a coalition of groups and individuals that on the issue that brings them to politics what they want from the government is to be left alone.
