Legislative District 7

Our Founding Fathers made it clear. If you do not have the power or authority to tell your neighbor to do something, then we cannot give that power to government. We need to roll back many senseless, arbitrary, and entrapment laws that have turned law some law enforcement officers into piggy banks for the state. We need minimum standards of respect and acknowledgement that all government employees are servants of the people and not centurions. I believe in protecting officers from their dangerous duty, but they need not look like an Infantry Soldier ready to storm the trenches.

We do need peace officers to preserve the peace in our communities. We need law enforcement to ensure that the laws that the people enact through their government are followed. And we need to teach people that respect for the constitutional laws of the people is paramount to the survival of our Constitutional Republic.

Roll back senseless laws that strip away liberties and have no constitutional validity. Second teach people their civic responsibility in standing up for their liberty by going to their local government meetings and participating in the process. This way they know and understand when legislators, commissioners, and local board members are carrying out their duties in a constitutional manner that takes their liberties into consideration.

Second the most important thing for people to understand that in this Nation your public safety is your own responsibility. We apportion a bit of our own power through our legislative process to empower a moral, fair, person to provide for our public safety through police, fire, and other agencies. Giving more of our power away to these agencies in the name of public safety is not the best idea if a people desire to be free. Having the state mandate what degree of power is given or taken away on a local level is the least supportive of liberty. Empowering local control for Counties and rolling back big government on a State and Federal level is where we should be focusing our efforts to bring back liberty.

Teaching the History of our Founding era using original sources such as diaries, letters, and material from the era to help develop critical thinking skills and a respect for the opportunities and responsibilities of liberty, is also crucial. When people understand that civil liberties require respect and work to maintain, and are not just an instrument of selfishness, then we can return much of the harmony that has been lost over the past few decades.

From my experience, conversation based on mutual respect, outlasts, and outperforms any lawsuit or injunction We need to learn to talk to one another again and stop fighting each other.

Empowering local government to ensure that they can enact the types of reform or accountability is the way we should go. It is important to note that we should not legislate morality, yet we must protect those who chose to live a moral life. The balance here is when a person's liberty infringes on the rights of others they are in the wrong. How do we ultimately want to deal with that as a society without creating a career criminal who has little hope of reform or restitution?