We, the citizens of the United States of America, call upon those seeking to represent us in public office to sign the Contract from America and by doing so commit to support each of its agenda items and advocate on behalf of individual liberty, limited government, and economic freedom.
1. Protect the Constitution
2. Reject Cap & Trade
3. Demand a Balanced Budget
4. Enact Fundamental Tax Reform
5. Restore Fiscal Responsibility & Constitutionally Limited Government in Washington
6. End Runaway Government Spending
7. Defund, Repeal, & Replace Government-run Health Care
8. Pass an ‘All-of-the-Above” Energy Policy
9. Stop the Pork
10. Stop the Tax Hikes
Tea-party activists held rallies across the country Thursday, the deadline for filing federal tax returns, to highlight what they said were onerous taxes and a bloated federal government. The activists protested Democratic policies and displayed varying attitudes toward prominent Republicans. Some groups invited marquee conservatives, such as former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who addressed around 500 people in Austin, Texas.
Ryan Hecker, who organized the Contract From America, said the Republicans’ 1994 proposals represented the nation’s last intellectual economic conservative movement. The new list, he said, was “created from the bottom up.” “It was not crafted in Washington with the help of pollsters,” he said.
On April 15th, hundreds of local Tea Party and limited government groups around the country will join together to announce the launch of the “Contract from America,” a grassroots legislative blueprint for 2010 and beyond. Originally proposed by Ryan Hecker, a Houston Tea Party activist and National Coordinator for the initiative’s chief organizing group Tea Party Patriots, this project is intended to present a different kind of agenda for our federal lawmakers: unlike the Contract with America introduced in the 1990s, everyday citizens proposed and voted on every plank of the Contract from America.
This document will give representatives and senators a legislative agenda and core set of priorities to follow in 2010. As it’s grassroots-generated and bottom-up, I believe that this time around elected officials will be held to their promises. If they don’t follow through, there will be many unhappy grassroots leaders ready to protest.
Armey, head of an activist group called FreedomWorks, is -himself endorsing an alternative grassroots approach he’s calling the Contract From America. “Bless their hearts,” he says of McCarthy and Boehner. “They’re making a good effort. But I don’t think the political space is there for them to offer a contract.”
Newt Gingrich talks with Sean Hannity about a new grassroots initiative called the Contract from America, a collection of policy proposals developed and chosen by the American people.
There is a palpable sense of excitement about the prospects for a return to the bold colors of conservative leadership in America today. This excitement isn’t just due to the vulnerability of the left, although it is vulnerable. And it’s not just because of the American people’s disavowal of the Obama-Reid-Pelosi liberal agenda, although Americans have repudiated it. It’s because of the strength of the solutions being generated by a concerned American public, solutions that are being taken up and championed by conservatives.
Sixteen years after House Republicans launched one of the most iconic marketing campaigns in recent political history from the steps of the U.S. Capitol, the idea of packaging some core principles and policy positions and presenting them as a kind of congressional platform is back. And so is the idea of calling them a “contract.”
