Rick Perry Believes in a Liberal Conspiracy Against the Constitution
“Anyone who disagrees with Rick Perry is part of the Big Conspiracy. Ben Bernanke is “treasonous.” Climate scientists are scamming grant money. Supporters of Social Security aren’t wrong, or confused, or simply reasoning differently than Perry — they are telling a “monstrous lie.”
So it’s not surprising that Perry’s view of the Constitution is conspiratorial as well. At Monday’s tea-party debate, he was asked about his statements in Fed Up!: Our Fight to Save America from Washington that Social Security is and always has been unconstitutional. He said he’d rather talk about current matters than “spend a lot of time talking about what those folks were doing back in the ’30s and ’40s.”
But in the book he does just that. It turns out that the last century has been — well, a conspiracy, a plot by progressives, liberals, and sinister Supreme Court justices such as Anthony M. Kennedy, “who wakes up each day basking in the glow of the power to swing the Court.” (Note that even as conservative a figure as Kennedy is not simply mistaken, or of a different opinion — he must have evil motives.)
This vast conspiracy stretches back a century. First, “the American people mistakenly empowered the federal government during a fit of populist rage in the early twentieth century by giving it an unlimited source of income (the Sixteenth Amendment) and by changing the way senators are elected (the Seventeenth Amendment).” This was a brilliant success for conspirators whose “idea of change is to exploit fear in order to exercise greater control rather than watching to see where the American imagination takes us.”
According to Perry, there actually was some kind of Depression, but the government’s response was not compassion or an attempt at recover; it was another plot. “An arrogant President Roosevelt and an emboldened Congress saw the opportunity to use a crisis to expand Washington’s influence,” and the result was not jobs and hope for millions, but further steps toward dictatorship. No result of his treason is more damaging than Social Security, “a crumbling monument to the failure of the New Deal” that we have “been forced to accept for more than 70 years now.”