Sen. Marsha Blackburn: Republican convention a time to show conservatives' strengths, values

There’s an old saying that goes, “You can take the girl out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the girl.” Well, if the past six months are any indication, the same rule applies to conservatives who head to Washington and immediately come under fire for acting like conservatives.

The opposite tends to hold true for Democrats, whose party became nearly unrecognizable as the coronavirus raged through their coastal strongholds, and riots broke out in their Midwestern ones.

At a time when Congress should have been on its best behavior, Senate Democrats gave in to their worst possible instincts and seized the opportunity to turn their big government safety net into a state-sponsored straitjacket. Meanwhile, crucial relief funding gathered dust on the Senate floor, held hostage by liberal hopes.

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Unfortunately for the Democrats, however, the majority of Americans don’t put much stock in those hopes, or what their fulfillment would mean for the future of this country.

The left’s obsession with centralized power, and absolute compliance with its edicts, doesn’t translate in the minds of everyday Americans who lean first on their faith in God, and not on a pile of meaningless regulations. Our beliefs don’t change with the times, or the culture. Instead, they are our foundation.

Radical efforts to suddenly and at times violently upend the founding principles of limited government and individual freedom clash with these ideals, and the people remain deeply suspicious of the true intent behind emergency plays to expand state power.

Can you blame them? For months now, Democrats have subjected the country to vague platitudes in hopes that the American people wouldn’t ask too many questions about what it would take to achieve those promised ends.

The times may have changed, but our values have not.

But Tennesseans, and all Americans, know by now that past is prologue. Our experience with Democrat plans to provide “affordable access to health care” saddled us with ObamaCare’s devastating mandates. Their arguments for “environmental reform” manifested in the ridiculous and wholly unworkable Green New Deal. And their recent calls for “election security” boil down to federal control over processes that local officials have handled well for decades.

All reactionary policies, all offered with the intent to expand dependency on government, and validate the growing expectation among many young people that the government not only can but should act as the solution to all our problems.

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As conservatives, and as Republicans, I believe we have a duty to prove that theory wrong.

Since before the COVID-19 outbreak, we’ve seen the left attack symbols and institutions they believe comprise the foundation of the conservative movement. Their rhetorical barrage revealed a misguided sense of confidence that, if they could only take out our advocacy organizations, or dilute the influence of organized religion, they’d finally be able to silence conservatives for good.

But in the coming weeks, Republicans will have the chance to show the nation that this strategy will ultimately fail, because it ignores the fact that conservative ideology is made of stronger stuff than slick branding and a loud donor base.

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Firing a shot across the bow of a top pro-life organization or vandalizing churches won’t eliminate our commitment to protecting the unborn or defending our right to worship freely.

The times may have changed, but our values have not, and there’s nothing that the left’s manufactured moral panic can do to diminish them. In fact, it might just galvanize them.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE BY SEN. MARSHA BLACKBURN