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Opinion | Morgan Liddick: Decoding Citizen Kaine

Morgan Liddick
On your right

So it’s Tim Kaine. Hillary has chosen the junior senator from the swing state of Virginia as her running mate, hoping that the colorless if congenial Democrat apparatchik who has never lost an election will help drag her across the finish line in November.

It’s an illuminating choice — and not just for the senator’s avuncular persona. It’s another piece of the machine, another step in the Democrat party’s march toward totalitarian Progressivism. This one smiles nicely, true — but the punishment cells are there behind the eyes nonetheless.

Consider the senator’s response to the First Amendment Defense Act, put forward in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s action to “legalize gay marriage.” The FADA was provoked by several incidents in which activists sought out people who might have religious objections to participating in gay weddings, in order to use the power of the state to compel them to do so. If one is of biblical sentiment, think of early Christians being forced to make sacrifice to the Divine Augustus, on pain of flogging. Sen. Kaine waived the bill off with a comment that “equality means equality, and that in matters of official recognition or law, people shouldn’t be treated as less than equal because they’re LGBT.” As to the power of the state being used to compel people to violate their religious beliefs, well … The senator evidently has no problem with that. In Tim Kaine’s America, the individual has no right to be left alone; no protections against the power of the government to compel action or to shoulder its way into one’s beliefs and life.



There is his animus toward the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, which he has attacked from the Senate floor as part of an organized assault on public institutions that do not toe the Democrat party line on climate change. Sen. Kaine not only agrees with Virginia’s Attorney General Mark Herring that any such organization should be investigated, but he also seems to support Rhode Island’s Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s proposal to charge them under Racketeer and Corrupt Organization statutes — the ones used to jail mobsters.

Why? Not because the VIPP is spreading falsehood. Even the senator admits that their information is “technically true.” No, it is because they dare challenge Democrat orthodoxy about man-caused climate change — thus denting the argument for increasing the size, scope and power of government.



Think about that rationale for prosecution a moment and while your blood runs cold, consider the other attacks on First Amendment rights that have been undertaken in plain sight during the Administration of Barack Obama. Remember: Hillary Clinton would continue his practices, using many of the same people. Consider:

IRS officials who investigate and deny tax-exempt status to any group that seems both vocal and conservative. Department of Justice officials who entertain the possibility of prosecuting such groups, and conspire with the aforementioned Senator Whitehouse to do so — as revealed in emails unearthed in Freedom of Information requests. An Attorney General who threatens prosecution of anyone who dares breathe a hint of anti-Muslim rhetoric in the wake of two Islamic Jihadist terrorist attacks here at home, but refuses to prosecute a government official whose gross incompetence put US national security at risk because the latter was a Democrat.

Need we any further proof that the politicization of our federal justice system is an accomplished fact?

Thus, the Democrat ticket — and we should be under no illusions about who is running: A presidential candidate who has been obsessed with personal gain for decades and has used every device in service to avarice, down to trading on her public offices. And a vice-presidential contender who thinks it entirely appropriate to use all the power of the state against those who disagree with the dogma of the moment, grinding opponents into powder at the slightest hint of deviation from the party line.

It doesn’t matter that the running mate seems a nice guy. It means nothing that he is personable and easygoing. From first to last, the Democrat ticket is the vanguard of compulsion and forced conformity. Neither has sympathy for alternative views; neither has time for opposition or resistance.

The individual is nothing. Conscience is irrelevant. Personal principles and private belief are meaningless. All must be sacrificed in the rush to establish the American utopia, where everyone will finally be equal not legally — not in capacities, industry, intelligence or even outcomes — but in their servile relation to the state, directed by those better and wiser than those they rule.

And you will like it. Or else.

Morgan Liddick writes a weekly column for the Summit Daily.


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