A New Direction for the GOP.

What is going to happen to the Republican party? We are the party of ideas and answers. What good is going to come after this slaughter of an election in 2008? How bad was it? Not only did the Democrats win the White House, picked up more seats in both the House and the Senate, won Gubernatorial elections but also state and local races across the country. To illustrate this point, back as an undergraduate in 2000, I took a class in State and Local Government. My professor made a comment that the New York State "Assembly will always be Democratic and the (New York State) Senate will always be Republican". Not even ten years later and almost a 1/2 century of New York State Republican Senate rule, the New York State Senate went from Republican to Democratic. For any one not familiar with New York State politics, imagine San Fransisco or New York City turning Republican. It would have been the same odds 10 years ago. We need to move the party into a new direction. But how?

One idea is that we move the party more towards the libertarian school of thought. For example, is it fiscally conservative to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to incarcerate one scum bag for one year? Billions of dollars are wasted every year on prisons that do not work. I am not advocating releasing prisons empty, but there are a large number of non-violent criminals, especially drug offenders, that would be better off serving their communities or working off their punishment. This would be more fiscally conservative to pay for than incarceration. Programs could include treatment, counseling, or innovative work programs. We could tax the drugs (and regulate them) and turn a loss into a revenue. Plus eliminating the petty crimes that go hand-in-hand with illegal drugs, it seems like a win-win.

We could put these people to work, doing constructive jobs around the country instead of costing the American-taxpayer billions of dollars. If that happens, then we never have to worry about not having room for the real violent individuals who should be locked up indefinitely to protect society. My right not to have a psycho hurt myself, my family or my friends outweighs a violent-repeat offender's right for freedom.

I know that Republicans are supposed to be tough on crime but maybe we should redefine what a crime is? To think that it would be impossible to turn the current Republican party Libertarian, just think, nobody thought 25 years ago that the Republican party would turn into such a spending machine and non-fiscally responsible tool of special-interests. This is not a fault of just President Bush or the Congress, but for all of us that did nothing about it. Shame on all of us. We need a party of better ideas not just pork spending. What do you think? In what new direction should the party move?