Voters Reject Big Government

William F. Buckley defined conservatism as standing "athwart history, yelling 'Stop.'" In last week's midterm elections, it wasn't just conservatives but citizens of all political stripes, from across the nation, who went to the voting booth and yelled "Stop" to the Obama/Pelosi agenda.

In what pundits described variously as an "earthquake," "tsunami," "landslide," or "bloodbath," Republicans won 60+ seats to retake control of the House of Representatives with the party's largest majority since 1946. Whichever party controls the White House typically loses seats in off-year elections, but this year's outcome was a shift of historic proportions, eclipsing even the Republican wave in 1994. The election of 2010 will go down in history as the largest gain for either political party in over 70 years.

However, the message of last week's election is not so much an endorsement of one party over another as it is a repudiation of big government. Americans are simply fed up with runaway spending, government overreach, and being ignored and dismissed in Washington.

The electorate has rightly grown increasingly alarmed at an annual budget deficit that has ballooned from $161 billion in fiscal year 2007 to $1.3 trillion in 2010. After just three years under a Democratically controlled Congress, we've gone from a projected 10-year, $800 billion surplus to an estimated $7.5 trillion deficit, according to Congressional Budget Office statistics.

Even as the worst recession in decades brought economic hardship to millions and endangered future prosperity, President Obama and his party have kept right on spending. Furthermore, the massive spending spree has been in the service of sweeping government programs to which the American people are fundamentally opposed.

Time and again, citizens have demanded spending cuts and limited government only to be met with law after law that increases spending and expands the size and scope of the federal government. Taxpayers did not want Congress to waste $787 billion of their hard-earned money for a stimulus program devoted to promoting liberal special interests and government jobs. Yet the liberal majority forced it through anyway. Citizens were even more vocal in their opposition to Obamacare, communicating in no uncertain terms that a European-style, trillion-dollar government health care takeover was too costly and intrusive. President Obama disregarded such concerns and rammed the bill through Congress using a combination of closed-door negotiations and legislative gimmicks.

As Charles Krauthammer put it, this legislative session has shown "a ruling party spectacularly misjudging its mandate and taking an unwilling country through a two-year experiment in hyper-liberalism."

There is no doubt that the mandate coming out of the 2010 midterms is one to cut spending, reduce the crippling national debt and restore the principles of limited government. Conservatives have long held these priorities, and I am confident congressional Republicans will waste no time in advancing them. If we don't, the American people will certainly hold us accountable.

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