By Brooke Rollins, President & CEO
Texas Insider Report: AUSTIN, Texas – Dear friends of liberty: Our American Founders knew full well that the most serious threat to American liberty is American government. That’s why, even as they crafted a national government strong enough to meet the threats and challenges of the ages, they also sought to constrain it, curb it, and keep it within the bounds of freedom. The result was a Constitution that was mostly a list of things the federal government could not do.
And ever since, there have been forces in Washington, D.C., trying to erase that list altogether.
That’s why the Internal Revenue Service’s release of our donor records back in summer 2012 was so troubling. And that’s why the revelations of IRS targeting of conservatives and liberty-oriented groups this past spring, which contextualized our own troubles, was even more disturbing. (If you missed The Wall Street Journal’s unsigned editorial on that, it’s here.) What the IRS did to us and to so many others was wrong, immoral, and illegal. But it was also something else: a brazen assertion, in deed if not word, that might makes right.
My friends, I want to share with you the news—in case you’ve not heard it, or didn’t see my Houston Chronicle piece last week—that we are fighting back. The Texas Public Policy Foundation has joined a class-action lawsuit, initially launched by the Citizens for Self Governance and since joined by many others across the country, to seek redress and recompense from the IRS for its targeting of us and so many others. We’ll be represented in this fight by Graves Garrett Law out of Kansas City, Missouri, which brings to the table their own solid pro-liberty credentials.
This is big—and it’s just the beginning. We expect this legal battle to be a long one. I will keep you closely informed as we proceed—because what’s at stake is the principle of equal treatment under the law, and the rule of law itself.
This Foundation, in short, is putting its faith and its strength into reminding Washington, D.C., that—as Abraham Lincoln said at his famous Cooper Union address—”right makes might.”
We’ve never been more needed in Texas or America—and this is why. The great contest of our era is that between the power of liberty and the power of Washington, D.C. Our Founders established the national government to secure our liberties, and they were wise in circumscribing its scope and reach to constrain it to just that. But it has long since exceeded those boundaries, in so many spheres—and we know that Washington, D.C., will never correct Washington, D.C. It is the states, with the Lone Star State at the fore, who must and will lead the way in restoring our Constitutional order.
And leading the Lone Star State in that fight will be this Foundation—and all of you who so generously support it. Thank you for being with us in this fight—and thank you for your dedication to the cause of liberty.
