Jim Leach, RINO
27th June 2011
Former Congressman Jim Leach is Obama’s head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a poster-child for the proposition that the Federal government in the modern era has abandoned any pretext to be a government of derived and strictly limited powers.
Jim Leach was allegedly a Republican Congressman from Iowa for 30 years. In that time, according to Wikipedia, his accomplishments were:
- the creation of an international AIDS Trust Fund,
- debt relief for the world’s poorest countries,
- authorization of an International Monetary Fund quota increase,
- making the Peace Corps an independent federal agency,
- requiring the federal government to use soy ink,
- prohibiting Internet gambling,
- restraining federal employee growth, and
- redressing certain Holocaust asset losses.
Eight bullet points — of which only 25% are even plausibly Republican. Chop off the last two, and Barney Frank would be hard put to beat it.
This is the challenge for the Republican party: Develop a program that differs from the Democrats, and stick to it; not running candidates who are merely ‘Democrat light’. Unless and until it does that, it is doomed to failure.