How To Make Liberal Democrats Vote for Smaller Government

By Mark J. Fitzgibbons

Virginia Democrats have introduced legislation to scale back government power. That's right. Could it be that after recent election defeats the party of big and bigger government sees the error of its ways?

No, not exactly. The recently introduced legislation would limit the authority of Virginia's small-government constitutional conservative Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.

One Virginia state senator introduced legislation to curb the ability of Mr. Cuccinelli to file civil suits without authorization from the governor or legislature. It seems Cuccinelli's efforts to protect the Constitution with his round-one victory in the ObamaCare litigation was just too much good news for the senator.

Another bill was introduced in response to Cuccinelli's investigation under the Virginia taxpayer fraud statute relating to Climategate professor Michael Mann's infamous "hockey stick" research. Cuccinelli seeks documents about a grant of taxpayer dollars to a state university.

The Democratic senators want to limit how the conservative Mr. Cuccinelli investigates potential abuses of taxpayer funds. But just two years ago, Democrats in Congress were proudly touting vastly expanded powers and penalties under the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009, which was enacted in near tandem with the Democratic stimulus bill spending hundreds of billions of our taxpayer dollars.

That law created quite a few fears that the power would be abused that went mostly if not entirely unreported by the liberal media.

Democrats, however, were pleased with that new authority because both the control of disbursing stimulus money and the authority to investigate fraud were in the hands of fellow Democrats.

Democrats don't mind Democrats having the power of government. They just can't stand conservatives having that power.

So what's the trick to making liberal Democrats seek to decrease government power?

That seems pretty simple: Elect small-government constitutional conservatives.

Now, if we could only get Republican legislators to start limiting government power we'd be making real progress, no?