Tom Perriello and the Myth of the Moderate Democrat

Un-Constitutional

by Robert Tracinski

Thursday night, I witnessed an unusual sight: a Democratic incumbent speaking to a local Tea Party group. Tom Perriello, the congressman for Virginia's fifth district, spoke to a monthly meeting of our local Charlottesville group, the Jefferson Area Tea Party.

I almost had to give Perriello credit for courage, for having the guts to venture into the lion's den while other Democratic congressmen are scrambling to evade their constituents. Almost. But when I saw Perriello at work, I realized that this wasn't the courage of a principled leader who is willing to go forthrightly into the enemy's camp and defend his principles. It's the brazenness of a practiced card-sharp who is confident he can shuffle the deck fast enough to fool the suckers.

But I took the opportunity to ask the congressman one simple question that, in my mind, cuts through to the core issue, reveals the real radicalism of Democrats' attack on liberty, and exposes the myth of the moderate Democrat.

Perriello's whole method was not to answer our questions or address the ideological differences between us. His method was to evade our questions and defuse any sense of confrontation, to mollify us with soothing sounds while disguising his real intentions. I found myself chuckling part-way through his opening presentation when I realized how crudely, childishly obvious his method is. The formula is to emphasize areas of seeming agreement with his audience—even with a Tea Party audience—but always to keep his answers vague, general, up in the clouds. After all, if he was forced to get down to specifics, the illusion would vanish.

For example, his opening statement stressed his opposition to the TARP bank bailouts. He expanded this with some populist Main-Street-versus-Wall-Street rhetoric and then ended with a hint at pseudo-patriotic protectionism, talking about keeping jobs in the US and the need for an economy that "making things" again. Notice how he hit some notes that are calculated to resonate with the Tea Partiers: no corporate handouts, more American jobs, and an appeal to patriotism. But if you ask "what did he say specifically," he mentioned only one actual policy: "closing a tax loophole for companies that ship jobs overseas." "Closing a tax loophole" is a code phrase for "raising taxes." Leave it to a Democrat to look at a struggling economy and the long-term strangulation of American manufacturing, and to fall back on the only solution he can think of: whose taxes can we raise?

But of course, if he had just said "my solution to the economy is to raise taxes," that would have given the game away. So the rest of his presentation was there as protective camouflage to hide his actual, concrete meaning.

Then I got a chance to ask my question. For obvious reasons, I've been working for a long time on the art of asking questions to politicians. The main challenge is to keep them from floating off into the safe zone of vague generalities and instead to pin them down to concrete, specific reality. In other words, a good question has to be a short-circuit Perriello's whole methodology.

Here was my question. (I'm writing this from memory; the exact wording, as I asked it to Perriello, may have been slightly different.) "You hear us talk a lot at Tea Party events about the Constitution, and the reason is that we view the Constitution as granting limited power to government. But part of what started this movement is that we look at the Democratic Congress, and they don't seem to think that there are any limits to their power. I could cite recent quotes here from Charlie Rangel or from Pete Stark, but basically their interpretation of the Constitution is that they have the power to do anything they like to us, so long as they say it's for the 'general welfare,' which is no limitation on anything. So my question for you is: what limits does the Constitution place on the power of Congress—and can you name anything that Congress has done, since Democrats have held a majority, that you think goes beyond those limits?

Note what this question is designed to do. Perriello's method of blowing smoke is to stick to generalities and never contribute anything specific or commit to a positive statement on the big issues. So the point is to ask him a question that requires him to contribute something specific, to offer us a concrete product of his own thinking. If he is allowed to speak in empty generalities, he could tell us that, sure, he thinks there are limits on government. But ask him to name, from his own thinking, real examples of specific legislation, and you're likely to get a much more revealing answer.

And that's precisely what we got. As I expected, he confirmed that there are limits on the power of Congress—in theory. But even there, he talked in terms of the authority of federal government versus state governments, and the division of power between the legislative and executive branches. But he made no mention of the essential issue, the one that has the Tea Parties up in arms: the government versus the people. The limits imposed on government by the rights of the people were not even on his radar screen.

And as for the specifics, Perriello paused for a moment and confessed that no, nothing came to mind. He couldn't think of a single thing—not one piece of legislation—that the Democrats had proposed in the past four years that might go beyond constitutional limits.

That was the answer I expected, and though it might not seem like it, that was the "gotcha" moment I was looking for.

Bear in mind the recent frenzy of legislative activity. Perriello's fellow Democrats voted overwhelmingly for TARP, which disbursed massive borrowed funds for no specific use and with virtually no direct control by Congress. (And despite his anti-TARP rhetoric, Perriello has voted lockstep with Democratic leaders on the big items of their agenda, from cap-and-trade to the health care bill. Do you really believe he would have held out on TARP?) Then there was the giant stimulus bill. There was the health care bill which imposes massive new controls on health care, dictating whether we buy insurance, what we buy, what it must cover, what it costs. There is the cap-and-trade takeover of the entire energy industry, dictating what we can drive and how much we will have to pay to heat our homes. There is "card-check" legislation that would eliminate the secret ballot for union elections. And there was the DISCLOSE Act, an attempt to impose controls on political speech that specially targeted opponents of the Democratic agenda.

And those are just the highlights of a genuinely gargantuan, sweeping agenda. But nothing strikes Perriello as having gone over the line. And if that's the case, then there is no line.

And I don't think Perriello was trying to evade the question. I don't think that he realized there was some legislation that was iffy, and he was trying to avoid mentioning it. He really seemed to be trying to come up with an example, and he genuinely drew a blank. But this is not how you would react if you were actually in the habit of thinking about the constitutionality of legislation. If you were in the habit of asking, about every bill that comes up: where is the authority in the Constitution for this bill?—then you would have that knowledge stored away as an important fact about any particular piece of legislation. Even if you didn't think any proposal violated the Constitution, you would at least be prepared to talk about why it was constitutional.

Perriello's response is the reaction of someone who clearly doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about the Constitution. It doesn't figure in as a consideration in drafting, debating, and voting for legislation.

This fits with his response to an earlier question from a tea partier who asked about the state lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of ObamaCare. He did the usual tap-dance: he was glad, he said, that those suits had been filed, but he was confident they would be rejected in the courts, and this was the way the question should be settled, by arguing it out before the courts. But he just asserted that the law would be found to be constitutional, providing no argument for why that is so. That is the typical method of this Congress. It's not their job to think about the Constitution. Their job is to charge full steam ahead, grabbing as much power for government as they can, and finding out later how much the Supreme Court will allow them to get away with. It is the policy of leaders for whom the Constitution is not a moral law to be taken seriously, but an annoying roadblock to be overrun.

Since we're in Thomas Jefferson country here in Charlottesville, it's appropriate to contrast this attitude to that of Thomas Jefferson, who rejected the idea that guarding the Constitution was a task to be outsourced to the courts. Instead, he held that each branch of government had the responsibility to enforce constitutional discipline on itself. He took this so seriously that he almost decided against the Louisiana Purchase on the grounds that the Constitution gave him no explicit authority to acquire new lands for the United States. He went ahead with the purchase on the grounds that it was an emergency—he didn't know how long the French would be willing to sell—and he then asked Congress to pass a constitutional amendment authorizing his action after the fact. Since it was already a moot issue, and because the purchase had overwhelming support, Congress didn't bother. But has one ever seen such solicitous concern for constitutional limits from our current leaders?

All of this highlights the reason why, for all of his glib political skills, Perriello didn't win any friends Thursday night. Perriello's method is intended to make him look like a reasonable "moderate." But there is a reason he votes with the Democratic leadership on all of the really important pieces of legislation, and that is because he accepts the Democrats' radicalism on one central issue: their view of the unlimited power of government and their contempt for constitutional restraints.

That is what the public is beginning to realize, and that is what is going to sink the left and lead—I suspect—to a wipeout of "moderate" Democrats like Perriello in November.

The public is learning that the "moderate Democrat" is a myth. It's a myth because the actual choice is between two radical alternatives: limited government, or unlimited government. If you side with unlimited government, as Perriello does, then the flood gates burst open, and it doesn't matter whether you support every little bit of the left's agenda: you have let that agenda loose in the world by denying the constitutional limits that were intended to restrain the government from taking our precious liberty.

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