From: US Taxpayers Party
Subject: Declaration of Candidacy For Michigan US Senate
Contact: 517-588-9129
My name is Bret Lee McAtee and as one speaking to my fellow citizens of Michigan and to friends who live outside the great state that is my home, I am today formally declaring my candidacy to represent Michigan in the Senate of these United States of America. I intend to run for that office on the U.S. Taxpayers Party ticket, which is the Michigan affiliate of the Constitution Party.
Some of my close confidants have asked me why a minister would want to enter into this senatorial race. The answer is that I desire, with this candidacy, to bear testimony to future generations, render respect to past generations, and to provide challenge to our present generation.
I believe there is a need to bear testimony to future generations by being one of many who seeks to ring the tocsin to awaken a slumbering and benumbed people from their religious, political and moral torpor. Future generations, in order to establish their own moral bearings, will need examples of very ordinary men risking much to protect the inheritance of the constitutional republic that was passed on to us by our Founding Fathers. These earlier Fathers, by their actions, bore their own testimony to future generations and in doing so risked all and so provided examples for us, their future seed. The bearing of testimony to future generations by those honored and now long dead, secured for many generations the privileges of life, liberty and property. It is fitting and proper that we honor our Fathers, who bore testimony to us by their actions, by turning, and bearing testimony to future generations with actions that in some small measure reflect the testimony of those greater and more faithful Fathers.
I run for US Senate, in part, to communicate to my children and our children and generations yet unborn that there are never odds so long, nor challenges so large, nor wrongs so firmly established that excuse us from being faithful to the God of our Fathers. This God who animates us now is the God who animated so many of our Fathers before us and crafted them into the faithful men they were. So I run to bear testimony to the unborn who, though now only prospective members of the community, still require faithfulness on our part to them, just as our Fathers were faithful to us when our part of the community was yet only prospective.
I also am running for the US Senate seat in order to render respect to the wisdom of past generations. It seems that there is little concern in Washington for the constitutional government that was bequeathed to us by those who intended for the Constitution to be taken seriously. The politicians of our times are unlike such men as Thomas Jefferson who could say in reference to the Constitution:
"It would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights... Confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism. Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence. It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power... Our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no further, our confidence may go... In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
Elected officials from the two major parties are drunk with power and ignore the Constitution at every turn. This is seen in their making policy in areas that are constitutionally forbidden them and in a taxation policy that is confiscatory. Their being drunk with power is seen in how they completely ignore the 9th and 10th amendments to the Constitution, and in their refusal to stop the ethnocide that is abortion. That the intoxicating effect of power has gone to their heads is seen in their refusal to protect free speech as seen in their passing of the Campaign Finance Reform bill, and in their constant meddling with our 2nd amendment rights. Their drunkenness has made them unwatchful and irresponsible as seen in their refusal to craft a sane immigration policy and their unwillingness to be honest with us regarding the soundness of our fiscal house. Their inebriated state has made them unable both to speak boldly against the turning of the American Republic into an empire, where perpetual war is waged for perpetual peace, and to protest manfully the exportation of our manufacturing base overseas. My fellow citizens of Michigan, we must realize that these politicians who are drunk with power are like any other drunkard. They will not stop with their erratic and drunken behavior until someone takes the bottle from them. A vote for McAtee for US Senate will help remove one of those power drunk politicians from office thus beginning to restore political and cultural sobriety.
But in all honesty my fellow citizens, our situation is not completely the fault of power drunk politicians, for we citizens are the ones who are responsible for no longer rendering respect to the wisdom of our Fathers when it comes to binding men down with the chains of the Constitution. We have chosen not to render respect to the wisdom of our Fathers who spoke to us of limited, decentralized and diffused government preferring instead unlimited, centralized and concentrated government, and in doing so we have taken the chains that Jefferson said should be applied to bureaucrats and apparatchiks and instead, by our voting habits, have fitted those chains to our own ankles and wrists so that we are slaves bound to the whims of our governmental taskmasters. This is not the way of a free people.
We have known the ways of the two major parties for too long and yet we have, by our votes, continued to play the confident bartender to their power drunken ways. We have known of the despotic tendencies of Republicans and Democrats alike and yet, when entering into the voting booth and pulling levers for them, we serve up yet another round of rotgut to their pleasure and to the harm of our children and us. It is time for the co-dependency of the American voter to stop. A vote for McAtee for Senate in November of 2006 is one small step in seeing it stop.
Finally, I am running for Senate in 2006 in order to challenge the present generation. My challenge is simple and direct. My challenge to my generation is to move away from our collective self-centeredness. This generational self-centeredness shows itself in our disregard for our future and disrespect for our past. When we as voters demand from the government that they take care of us at the cost of putting our posterity in debt, we are self-centered. When we as voters do not demand to put an end to the scourge of abortion and then sanction cannibalizing the unborn for the sake of the aged, we are self-centered. This self-centeredness is criminal, and any parent who would treat his own offspring the way we have treated our posterity as a whole would be jailed for child abuse. If it is true that we will reap what we sow, I shudder to think what is in store for us because of our self-centeredness in reference to our children.
Finally, that our self-centeredness is disrespect to the past is seen in our abysmal lack of knowledge regarding who we are as a people. Too often, we care only about the here and the now and as such we have ripped up the legal, societal, and cultural boundary markers of our Fathers without even trying to understand that the reason our Fathers put them there was in order to protect us.
So, in this campaign, I intend to challenge the present generation by holding before them their responsibility to those now dead and those yet unborn. I intend to expose the inter-generational covenant that every society has and to ask the voters, if, in our times, we are holding up our God given covenantal responsibilities to our grandfathers and to our grandchildren.
Voters of Michigan, I believe the hour may be late and that we are in the waning phases of one of the greatest contests in our history. This contest is between those who would chain down elected officials with the Constitution against despotic elected officials who would chain down the liberty of Americans. It is a contest that will determine for years whether we will be ruled by the reality of transcendent law or ruled by the corruption of fallen men. It is a contest that must end in either government being our servant or government being our master.
If elected I can only promise you the satisfaction that comes from electing somebody who intends to take the Constitution seriously, and the pouring out of scorn that will come from people who think such a mindset is antiquarian, anachronistic, and archaic.
I cannot and will not offer financial plums to various interest groups. I cannot offer vast influence in the halls of the US Senate. I cannot promise that I will bring home the pork because I believe that sow needs to be slaughtered. What I can and do promise is to be an unremitting advocate for a culture of life. What I can and do promise is to earnestly contend against the molestation of your wallets by those who would practice economic perversion in the way of increased taxation. I can and do promise to do all I can to starve the beast that has become the federal government. I can and do promise to do all I can to lift the burden that the State has put on the small business owner. I can and do promise to seek to end tax payer financed corporate welfare, international give-away programs, and United Nations financing. I can and do promise, pursuant to the 9th and 10th amendments, to try and return real governmental power and authority to the states. In short, I promise to take seriously the senatorial oath to support and defend the Constitution in its original intent.
In 1976, Gerald Ford, a citizen of Michigan, accepted the nomination of his party to be President with these words: “[Our Forefathers’] vision was of free men and free women enjoying limited Government and unlimited opportunity. The mandate I want in 1976 is to make this vision a reality.”
We are 229 years removed from their original vision and 29 years removed from President Ford’s speech, but the vision remains, and it comprises the heart of this Michigan citizen's campaign for US Senate.
My prayer is that the voters of Michigan will do their part in making the vision reality.
Bret Lee McAtee
Constitution Party of Michigan - www.ConstitutionPartyMI.net