Has The GOP Leadership Lost Touch With Their Principles?

I've been commenting on this for a while. Now, a far more prominent right-leaning blogger has posted on this. Bill Quick of the dailypundit.com has an interesting post in which his point that the GOP leadership in Washington has really lost touch with the basic principles of the party.

The genesis of this attitude, of course, is a D.C. elite of the GOP that is totally caught up in Washington power games, and has no cognizance of, or care for, the principles of the people who elect them. In this calculus, having a Democrat like Arlen Specter pretend to be a Republican, and even vote that way every once in a while, is better than being a party that stands up for the principles on which it was established of individual liberty, small government, fiscal conservatism, strong defense, and constitutional integrity.

That seems to be a real problem with those "professional" politicians who have been in DC for years. They get caught up in the games-of-power, trading votes for favours, etc., and really forget what party they belong to.

Clifton B of anotherblackconservative.blogspot.com, makes that point about Newt Gingrich's support of Dede Scozzafava, a RINO running for the NY-23 US House seat. (http://anotherblackconservative.blogspot.com/2009/10/newt-gingrich-shrugs-off-conservatives.html)

The GOP is clearly banking on people electing their {GOP} crummy candidates just to get away from the crummier Democrats currently infesting Washington. This is where conservatives must give the GOP a very hard bitch slap and reject their awful RINO candidates in every primary. If we want people who will truly represent us, then we have to support our own kind. In the very New York race for the seat that Scozzafava is running for a true conservative is running too. Doug Hoffman is running as well. Hoffman is actually starting to come on strong. Visit his site and give some support. Defeating these awful RINOs in the primaries is a must!

But the real problem is, as Mr. Quick indicates, that the GOP has been faithless to it's core principles. That as a party, those in Wash DC have become Democrat-lite...not fiscally concerned with the future,

Here’s the nut of it: The GOP establishment sees their problem as being that they are out of power. People like me see the problem as being that they are out of power because they have turned their backs on the principles those who once voted for them believe in. So the establishment backs anybody, no matter how faithless they are to Republican principles, if they think there is a chance for victory and a return to power. Unfortunately, those of us who see the lack of principle as the main problem don’t want to vote for such people, and so they lose, because they can’t answer the question “Power to do what?” to our satisfaction. All of this springs from a basic misperception: the GOP establishment believes that conservative principles are not a winning platform. They ignore that America is a conservative nation, and they ignore that their own biggest winner and most effective standard bearer of the past hundred years was an avowed conservative who ran on conservative principles, and never stopped espousing them during or after his presidency.

I firmly believe that it's well past time for the United States to enact an amendment to the US Constitution that limits the number of consecutive terms. My amendment, from an earlier post is this:

I hereby propose the following as the 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
1. No citizen of the United States shall be elected to the House of Representatives to more than four (4) consecutive, two (2) year terms to office.
2. No citizen of the United States shall be elected to the United States Senate for more than two (2) consecutive, six (6) year terms of office.
3. No citizen of the United States shall receive any retirement benefits from serving in either the United States House of Representatives or the United States Senate.
4. Congress shall not exempt itself from any laws of the United States of America, in whole or in part.
5. Congress shall be in session for a period of not less than 90 consecutive days in the Spring, and 90 consecutive days in the Summer of each year. Each sitting of Congress may be extended by the President for a period not to exceed 30 days. The Spring session shall start on the first Monday of March. The Summer session shall begin on the first Monday in June. An additional 45 day session to begin on the 2nd Monday of November shall be called by the President if so deemed necessary, this session may not be extended unless a period of National Emergency is formally declared by the President. {This section I think is necessary to basically force Congress to actually work...in the past decade they generally only spend 2 1/2 days per week actually working in Washington, DC. Most often only from Tues afternoon to Thurs afternoon!}

This should begin in part to eliminate, or at least reduce the professional politicians who have inhabited Washington, DC for the past 170 years. Many of those men and women have on the whole, been honest, but when you begin to have individuals holding office for decades and who have built up a "fiefdom" that isn't really answerable to the people. Additionally, Congress has made it virtually impossible to unseat an incumbent, as they are able though corrupt practices to build up a huge election "war-chest" of funds.