...revolution at this link:
http://www.fff.org/freedom/0296a.aspTake a look at Part 7:
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The Failure of the Republican "Revolution," Part 7
by Jacob G. Hornberger, August 1996
With the Republican takeover of both houses of Congress in 1994, the Republicans announced that a new "revolution" had swept America, led by Senator Robert Dole and Representatives Newt Gingrich and Richard Armey. Of course, there was the famous "Contract with America," but the provisions of that document involved minor tinkering with the system, at best. The Republican "revolutionaries" and their conservative supporters went much further.
After decades of failure, the Republicans proclaimed, it was now time to dismantle the New Deal, Great Society welfare-state programs that had caused so much misery and destructiveness to the American people. Conservative editorials appeared in newspapers all across the land explaining the immorality of government's using its power to take money from one person to give it to another. Speeches filled the airways about the necessity to reign in the bureaucrats who were endlessly harassing the American people and eating out their substance. Now that Republicans were finally in charge of Congress, hundreds of departments and agencies were going to be dismantled. At the very least, we would finally see the end of the Departments of Education, Energy, and Commerce. It was time to return to the Constitution, as our Founders envisioned it, the Republicans announced.
Yes, it was the rhetoric of old. Republicans were harkening back to their libertarian roots. The New Deal programs and the Great Society programs that had been built and expanded ever since the 1930s were finally going to come to an end.
The Republicans were right about one thing: If the welfare state and the regulated economy had been repealed, it would have been one of the most monumental revolutions in American history.
Unfortunately, however, the Republican "revolution" lasted about three weeks.
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