Sen. Blunt visits Moniteau County

U.S. Senator Roy Blunt spoke to about 30 local leaders and job creators concerning what the U.S. government is doing and should be doing in a meeting at Burgers' Smokehouse south of California, Wednesday, Jan. 4.

"The Senate is almost totally dysfunctional as is the Constitutional part of government," Blunt said. "The regulators on the other hand are fully functional."

In answer to a later question, Blunt said, "Better a broken down Senate than one which was doing what it was doing in the first two years of the Obama administration.

"It's better to not be doing anything than to be doing bad things."

Reminding those present that he was a history teacher and the first non-lawyer elected to the Senate from Missouri in 40 years, Blunt spoke of presidents whose administrations set up a direction the country followed for about 25 years or so. He included Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan.

"It's retooling time again," he said. "In the next year — we've been debating this for two years now — we're going to decide in the next year if we're going to become Europe or we don't."

"And we'll just see how it works out."

Blunt said there were a lot of things people should have been concerned about in the last two years — such as the health care bill — the bigger thing that happened in 2009 was the country of Greece and the problem with the European counties about what happens when the government gets bigger than the country's economy can support.

"We don't want to give up the challenges of life and give up the opportunities of life, which are the same thing," Blunt said. "Its a big choice and I'm not quite sure how it works out."

He thinks the odds are pretty good that the country will specifically decide it doesn't want to go in that direction, becoming some European country "where the government makes more and more decisions and opportunities are more and more defined by what the government decides about you and your family and your life."

A decision in which, the country says, "Yes, actually we do in fact want to be the United States of America as opposed to just a bigger version of some European country. It doesn't necessarily mean that's an evil choice, but I think it's the wrong choice."

"It's a big moment and we're going to see what we're going to do."

He said that if he is right, although all elections have consequences, this is bigger than anything we're going to talk about in 25 years or so.

(For more of this story check out the Jan. 11 issue of the California Democrat.)



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