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To become a paid subscriber of my politics newsletter it is $5 monthly or $36 annually. I email daily and my politics newsletters usually take 10-15 minutes to read. I cover the news of the day and the liberal media. I write about the upcoming elections and dive deep on the Biden scandals. I will also share my opinion of the Trump indictment. I don’t think you will regret reading my newsletter regularly as a paid subscriber, so please consider subscribing today.

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Mike Huckabee

The Leaders We Need

We all knew a kid in school who just had to run everything. Remember the classmate who insisted on picking the games you’d all play at recess, where you’d go after school, even who was “in” or “out” of your group? In high school, that kid had a compulsive need to be the leader of every student organization. You just wanted to say, “Hey! You’re not the boss of me!” Whatever happened to those kids? I wouldn’t be surprised if most ended up in government. We certainly have no shortage of people there who think they know how to live your life and spend your paycheck better than you do.

I’m convinced the world is divided into people who just want to live their own lives and those who, for some reason, have an uncontrollable urge to tell everyone else how to live. Unfortunately, to that latter group, government seems like the ideal place to work, and at the moment, they are getting 99.9% of all the attention from the media. As more of them gravitated toward government, Congress abdicated much of its legislating authority to unelected bureaucrats. Their bureaus grew like kudzu, and so did their regulations with the force of law (but no input from the people.) Then one day, we looked up and discovered we had a crushing national debt and were paying huge salaries to an army of people who enforce how big your soda should be and who couldn’t be fired and who is allowed to come into your daughter’s locker room. That’s when sane people realized that government is the LAST place these out-of-control control freaks needed to be.

The temptation for government to overreach is hardly new. In fact, it stretches back to the beginning of recorded history, and I bet even earlier than that. There’s a story in the ninth chapter of the book of Judges in the Old Testament about Gideon’s son Abimelech, who craved leadership and stature - not to serve the people but to control them and make them serve him. He said, “Give me dominion over your lives, and I will simplify your existence.” Wow, does that sound familiar? It’s basically the entire Democratic platform. Our government has taken us pretty far down that same road, but does your life seem any simpler -- or just a lot less free?

Anyway, back to Abimelech. He had a very smart younger brother, Jotham, who came up with a clever tale about three trees: an olive tree, a fig tree, and a vine tree. All three were fine trees that produced lots of fruit. All were offered the exalted position of “King Of All Trees,” but all three turned it down. The plant that wanted to be “King Of All Trees” was the bramble bush, a weak plant that produces no fruit at all. Jotham’s point was that only the weak and nonproductive have the desire to rule everyone else. Does that lesson not resonate like a gong right now?

When anyone aspires to a position of power, take a long, hard look. If that person seemingly crawled out of the cradle with an ambition to be President, then beware! Anytime someone talks about “running the country,” alarm bells should sound. No one – not the President, not Congress, no one person – “runs the country” or should aspire to.

That’s why the Founders took such pains to divide and limit federal power, and why we need to reinstate those limits that have been trampled in recent years, whether by Presidents ruling via executive order or out-of-control judges legislating from the bench or unelected bureaucrats abusing their power to try to influence the results of elections. If we allow any one person or entity to ignore those limits and assume the power to run everything, we won’t be able to stop them when they run America into the ground.

We should pick leaders who resemble the trees in the Bible story that don’t need or crave power but that have shown they bear good fruit. As it is said, by their fruits ye shall know them. Government has more than enough nuts already.

Why We Need Term Limits

You’ve heard the saying, "Two things you should never watch being made -- a law and sausage." I don't agree with half of that. I've been involved in lawmaking as a Lieutenant Governor presiding over the State Senate and as a Governor negotiating every step of the process with a legislature that was 90 percent Democrat. I've also seen sausage made.

I still eat sausage.

For the faint of heart and those without a strong stomach, seeing the process of politics become the process of governing can result in serious reactions. It's not a pretty process. It can be tedious, exasperating, and embarrassing. But let me let you in on a little secret: it’s supposed to be!

Recently, some Congressional Democrats have been publicly ranting over what an offense to “our democracy” it is that they can’t ram through their agenda with a one-vote majority. Some are pushing to blow up the system that slows down their efforts to enact what they claim “the people” (i.e., “them”) want, from eliminating the Senate filibuster to stacking the Supreme Court with partisan political appointees.

POLL: Do you support term limits? Vote here.

This is what John Adams called “the tyranny of the majority.” It’s not only poison to the American system, it’s also a really stupid political tactic. Apparently, Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin were the only Democrats who understood how dumb it is to strip all power from the minority when you’re just one election and one seat away from being the minority yourself (see the 2022 House elections.)

As hard as it may be to believe, making a law was never designed by our Founding Fathers to be quick and simple. When they wrote and approved the Constitution, they intended for the passage of a bill into law to be a hard slog. They feared that passion would overwhelm reason and thoughtfulness, and so they built in plenty of speed bumps to make sure that a bill never whizzed through Congress and got signed by the President as hurriedly as some celebrities go through rounds of rehab.

Now, I'm pretty sure that the Founding Fathers didn't want total gridlock in Congress, but as much as it may surprise you, they would prefer gridlock to haste. Why? Because they feared government in the same way I fear snakes, spiders, and sharks. They knew that the sheer power of it is an intoxicant and that most of the people who enter government will be like sixteen-year-old boys with keys to the liquor cabinet whose parents are gone for the weekend.Watching Congress make laws and oversee regulation is a lot like watching sixteen-year-olds with booze and a BMW. You get the distinct impression that they have no business with either one, and a crash is inevitable.

This is why I have long been a proponent of term limits, which are hardly a new idea. The concept dates back to ancient Rome and Greece, with the great Greek philosopher Aristotle observing, “It is not so easy to do wrong in a short as in a long tenure of office.”

This idea was most famously summed up many years later by English historian, politician and author Lord Acton, who said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” The current DC bureaucracy seems to be trying their best to become a living illustration that absolute power corrupts absolutely and turns you into a bad person.

In 1807, half-way through his own second term, President Thomas Jefferson warned that "if some termination to the services of the chief Magistrate be not fixed by the Constitution, or supplied by practice, his office, nominally four years, will in fact become for life."

The popular novelist James Fenimore Cooper summed up the prevailing American attitude in 1838 when he said that "contact with the affairs of state is one of the most corrupting of the influences to which men are exposed." This might explain why so many of them retire (if they ever do retire) as multi-millionaires after a life selflessly devoted to “public service.”

Historian Robert Struble notes that the American preference for turnover in leadership was so deeply ingrained that it took until the twentieth century for the concept of “career politicians” to take hold. Unfortunately, among the many bad ideas that arose in the twentieth century, like Nazism, socialism, and letting movie actors talk, came the argument that a lifetime of "experience" in government was a far more valuable asset than a fresh perspective or a knowledge of business, farming, or other fields in which the vast majority of Americans work. Not everyone swallowed that argument, including twentieth-century Presidents of both parties.

In 1953, after deciding not to run for a third term, Democrat President Harry Truman said:

“In my opinion, eight years as President is enough and sometimes too much for any man to serve in that capacity. There is a lure in power. It can get into a man's blood just as gambling and lust for money have been known to do.”

Interesting quote, considering that he became President only because he was Franklin Roosevelt's Vice President when FDR died in office shortly after being reelected to his fourth term.

Republican Calvin Coolidge, who was President in the 1920s, said:

“When a man begins to feel that he is the only one who can lead in this republic, he is guilty of treason to the spirit of our institutions...It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion. They are always surrounded by worshipers. They are constantly, and for the most part sincerely, assured of their greatness. They live in an artificial atmosphere of adulation and exaltation which sooner or later impairs their judgment. They are in grave danger of becoming careless and arrogant.”

Old “Silent Cal” must have been truly passionate about this subject because I believe those are the most words he ever said in one sitting.

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