By MICHAEL TAVOLIERO
Our Alaska congressional delegation — Sens. Lisa Murkowski, Dan Sullivan, and Congressman Don Young — are DC sell-outs and should be retired with the upcoming elections in 2022 for Murkowski and Young, and the 2026 for Sullivan.
Think about it: We have a congressional delegation which continues to treat our state as a colony and our country as a collective influenced and controlled by Washington, DC.
Alaska’s evolution from territory to statehood was a result of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’ New Deal Democrats and post WWII national security preparation. Roosevelt’s presidency was one of the largest centralizations of power and control by the federal government. This was exactly what the US Constitution authors and our Founders warned us not to do.
Most of Alaska’s constitutional convention delegates were devoted followers of the FDR administration, in other words, they were prepubescent Marxists.
Granting statehood to Alaska involved getting it past the federal concerns of financial solvency. Without economic development through natural resource management, the hopes of private sector financial solvency were slim. Since statehood, the federal government has done everything it could do to shut down our economy.
Historically, Alaska’s success was a litmus test that produced more government as opposed to private enterprise. A utopian cornucopia promised by our constitutional convention resulted in statehood.
Robert B. Atwood, chairman of the Alaska Statehood Committee, addressing the constitutional convention in 1955 stated, “This document [Alaska’s proposed state constitution], once it is backed with ratification of the people, must be real and indisputable proof that Alaskans are ready, able and willing to undertake all the responsibilities of self-government.”
He continued, “Alaskans want all of the successes and all of the basic principles that have made this nation great, written into their constitution, perpetuated there and enlarged and expanded, and we all know they want none of the failures that have led to clumsy, inefficient, costly and complicated government. They don’t want duplications and unwise restrictions and all the other abhorrent developments that come from an inflexible constitution.”
Ironically, at statehood to now, our dependence upon the federal government grows as Alaska’s constitutional policy inflexibly failed to recognize basic American fundamentals.
Our state constitution and subsequent legislation and regulations require Alaskans to forget about such foundational principles as limited government, private property mineral and subsurface rights, and the capitalist economic system, and instituted a massive bureaucracy with immense regulatory control. With the requirement of the mini-Blaine amendment in our constitution as a prerequisite to enter the union, Alaska’s progeny now suffer one of the poorest performance outcomes and one of the highest costs in education of any state in the nation.
Think about it: In Alaska, is anyone not employed directly or indirectly by government?
Did you know that if you add all government employment (federal, state, local, contractors), Alaska has more government employees than any other state and any other nation per capita?
Alaska was one of the favorite petri dishes for the American Marxist’s hopes for utopia. It has surreptitiously been guised as a red state yet its own fiscal policies and its relationship to the federal government demonstrate the actions of a blue state.
The result in 1959 gave Alaskans the largest land mass state with the smallest population and greatest natural resource development potential in the union.
What an incredible opportunity!
Sadly, it entered the union of the greatest country in the world and in history with the legislative and regulatory baggage triggering one of the nation’s worse and most expensive state bureaucracies.
In 1959, Alaska, now possessing the sovereignty of a state, began the process of self-determination chained by Marxist ideology founded upon the ramifications of the Mini-Blaine Amendment, state controlled mineral and subsurface property rights, the Antiquities Act of 1906, the Jones act of 1916, absence of federal land conveyances, and the 16th and 17th amendments of the US Constitution and the list goes on.
The federal government’s regulatory power can object to any uses of state land. We have areas of Alaska specifically selected by the state as allowed in our Statehood Agreement, that have huge nationally strategic mineral resources that we can’t develop because of the federal government.
How many Alaskans know that we have yet to receive all the lands promised in our statehood act almost 63 years ago.
Isn’t it time to make this so?
Is Alaska really a sovereign state?
In June of 2019, Professor James Broughel of Mercatus Center, George Washington University, published “A Snapshot of Alaska Regulation in 2019.” What he revealed was Alaska’s administrative code had 52,570 restrictions, 5.8 million words, and would take 8 weeks to read. He stated, “Individuals and businesses in Alaska must navigate these different layers of restrictions to remain in compliance.”
Add to this, municipal or borough regulations are often more restrictive than those of the state. No matter how you frame it compliance with these restrictions cost our citizenry time, energy, and capital.
The hope of freedom under Article I of the Alaska State constitution was never realized by the spawning of Alaska Marxists who contravened that hope with empty promises and clandestine actions.
On March 11, 2020, Covid 19 took control of the Alaska’s state and local government apparatuses creating the greatest economic and social debacle in the state’s history. Almost everything about this pandemic, the government got wrong, yet regardless of our government’s failure its citizenry continues to suffer the monolithic tragedy of oppression and deprivation promulgated by government.
We can argue California, New York or other Democrat strongholds are more tyrannical, but look at Alaska. The greatest natural resource potential of any state in the nation and perhaps the world with locks, chains, and chastity belts on anything remotely productive.
Which leads me to the reality of our congressional delegation.
During the candidacy of Donald J. Trump and the first 2 years of his presidential administration, Congress was controlled by Republicans, an unbelievable possibility for conservative “hope and change.”
In response, the Alaska congressional delegation, Murkowski, Sullivan and Young, together with other Republican Marxists, did everything they could to cancel him.
The greatest opportunity for reform and the implementation of Trump’s contract with the American voter, his 100-day action plan to Make America Great Again, was directly sabotaged by Alaska’s congressional trio with every opportunity.
The only president ever to address the possibilities of Alaska’s nature resource development was stabbed in the back multiple times by Alaska’s own Republican congressional delegation.
Now, with President Biden, Murkowski, Sullivan and Young openly and shamelessly supported the Biden infrastructure package. If that isn’t proof positive that this trio is out of touch with Alaska, all three of them supported anti-fossil fuel, radical environmentalist Deb Haaland to be Interior Secretary. She subsequently suspended the Trump administration development of ANWAR.
That is a bookend litany of their deplorable actions, not their empty words. They sold out our state, our country, our voters and, most importantly, they sold out the future of our children.
This is such a sad tribute to the greatest natural resource development state in the nation. Increased federal dollars. Increased federal control. Decrease in our control of our state.
Senator Sullivan, Senator Murkowski, and Congressman Young, you have all lost your way.
It is time to retire.
Michael Tavoliero is a realtor in Eagle River, is active in the Alaska Republican Party and until recently chaired Eaglexit.
