Massachusetts News
By Eric Darbe

December 1--"For 37 years Ted Kennedy has symbolized a bloated federal government – a government which caters to special interests and neglects ordinary working families."

Those are the words of Philip F. Lawler, who is running for the United States Senate in 2000 as a member of the Constitution Party. He promises a "vigorous grassroots campaign" to unseat Massachusetts senior Senator, Edward M. Kennedy.

Phil Lawler was born and raised in Dedham, where he attended parochial schools before graduating from Harvard. He was Director of Studies for the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC and worked on the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, returning to his home state in 1986 as the editor of The Pilot, the official newspaper of the Boston Catholic Archdiocese. Lawler currently serves as the editor of the Catholic World Report, an international monthly news magazine and Catholic World News, an Internet syndicate.

He recently spoke with Massachusetts News.

MassNews: What issues have prompted you to run for office?

Lawler: I suppose the key issue has always been abortion. But, abortion in the context of the broader issue of general contempt for the Constitution that I see in our government, particularly on the liberal end of things. 

MassNews: What about the Constitution Party, what can you tell me about them? 

Lawler: Very little. This is an effort to build a movement. The Constitution Party is registered as a political designation, not an officially accepted party. That means you can’t go to your town clerk and register as a member of the Constitution Party. But, it’s my belief and the belief of the people who convinced me to run that we can’t restore any semblance of political sanity to Massachusetts unless we have a principled, organized, conservative movement. The Republican Party has completely deserted us, so we need a vehicle. 

MassNews: Did I read somewhere that the Constitution Party is part of the Reform Party?

Lawler: You did, and that’s wrong. That was the Globe’s story; that’s just an error. 

MassNews: Were you ever Republican; and if you were, why are you not now? 

Lawler: I sure was a Republican. I’ve been a Republican for most of my adult life. I worked for Ronald Reagan and I still look upon him as a hero. I was an honorary member of his inaugural committee.

When I got back to Massachusetts however, I saw the Republican Party turning into an institution that I couldn’t support. Particularly under Governor Weld and more recently under Cellucci, the party made a positive effort to make people who are pro-life and pro-family feel uncomfortable and purge those people from the party. I was purged. I think the Republican Party in Massachusetts has run away from Republicanism.

MassNews: Do you have any specific ideas for legislation that you would want to propose upon election? 

Lawler: I suppose I could come up with a large bunch. One would be abolition of the income tax. 

MassNews: If you were to abolish the income tax, how would you raise revenues?

Lawler: I wouldn’t. As far as I am concerned the way to balance the equation is not to raise revenues in any other way, but to cut spending. Legitimate functions of government can be paid for through other sources of revenue.

MassNews: What else would you want to do away with, or severely restrict?

Lawler: I would want to close down the Department of Education. I would want to close down the National Endowment for Humanities and for the Arts. I would want a lot less foreign aid generally. I would want to restrict the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.

MassNews: Could you explain that one a little bit more? 

Lawler: The Constitution gives Congress the power to restrict the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, that is to say that certain cases would not be in the court’s judicial review. Given the fact that I don’t trust the Supreme Court at this point, I would try to take a number of issues out of their hands. Issues like end-of-life and beginning-of-life issues, probably religious freedom issues, and free speech issues. I think it would be important for Congress to assert its proper authority. 

MassNews: Do you support term limits?

Lawler: No.

MassNews: Could you explain why?

Lawler: I think that it’s undemocratic. I think people should be able to vote for anybody they want to vote for and restricting the number of choices open to the public is wrong. I would, however, guarantee that if I were elected I would serve one term. I don’t want to become a career politician. If I am forced by winning to become a politician, I will do it for as brief a term as I can. 

MassNews: What are your thoughts on gun control?

Lawler: Gun control seems to me one of those issues where liberals are showing their absolute disregard for the Constitution. The language of the Second Amendment is much more sweeping than the language of the First Amendment. The First Amendment says ‘congress shall pass no law.’ The Second Amendment says, ‘shall not be infringed.’ That means there should not be efforts by the government at any level to control or restrict the right to own and carry arms. 

Let me even go a little bit further. I think that this is one of those issues where government frightens people. When the people who want to own firearms see the government walking roughshod over the Constitution, it frightens them. It frightens them because firearms are a means of self-defense and the government is taking away their means of self-defense. Gun control is an instance where the government becomes not only inefficient and meddlesome, but actually threatening. 

MassNews: Where do you stand on the current ideas being bandied about over how to address healthcare?

Lawler: The healthcare problem is frankly a bit beyond me. I don’t understand how we can go about controlling healthcare costs but I do think that you should not try to do it by government. I think that more often than not government intervention makes things worse. I think that thus far that has been the case with the healthcare industry. It’s not a constitutional function of the government and it’s not something that government does well. I say get government out of the business. 

MassNews: What do you think the role of schools should be? Would you favor, for instance, getting rid of public schools or vouchers?

Lawler: My ideas about education reflect my ideas about the way society should work generally. I think that the authority and the power should be held at the local level. In the case of education, the people who should hold the authority and the power to choose are the parents or the students themselves – if they’re older students. The last people you want involved in the process are the people in Washington. I would support just about any measure that would give more choice to individual students and parents, and I would restrict the ability of the government to come into the schools and tell us what we have to do.

MassNews: Social Security is something that will probably, over the next six years, have to be discussed in the Senate. Where do you stand on that? 

Lawler: The Social Security system is in huge trouble right now. I’m 48 years old. I don’t expect to get a cent because I don’t see where that money would come from. For that reason, I would much prefer to phase out the system and allow people to have their own private savings. But the government still does have a commitment to millions of people and I think that commitment has to be honored.

MassNews: Do you think that there are too many people who are dependent on government to have the type of sweeping changes it sounds like you would support? 

Lawler: You know, that’s a really interesting question. We’re approaching the point where more people take from the government than give to the government. 

MassNews: Or at least more people get something, even if they do still pay in. 

Lawler: Right, and there’s corporate welfare. All the way up. You raise a really interesting point. There may be a point at which enough people are – so to speak – bought off that you don’t have any consideration of serious change. If that day is approaching, it’s all the more reason to try to derail that juggernaut right now before we ever get there. 

MassNews: What is your strategy for getting grassroots conservatives involved with your campaign? 

Lawler: The strategy is sort of dictated by the circumstance. In order to get on the ballot we need to collect 10,000 signatures, and in order to avoid a challenge we really should have 12,000. In order to get 12,000 certified signatures, experience indicates you need about 25,000 raw signatures. That’s an awful lot to collect in a matter of weeks. So by February when those papers are available, we already need to have set up a little army of activists.

Ordinarily getting signatures like that would be an onerous job; but in my case it’s not because as I said before we’re trying to build a coalition, a movement and the movement is going to need activists. So once those people are finished gathering signatures, we’re going to put them to work stuffing envelopes and ringing doorbells. That’s the general idea. This is obviously going to be an under-funded campaign. I think that it could be effective in this sense that, rather than coming at people sort of top-down with TV commercials and slick presentations, we’re going to be coming up through the grassroots. 

MassNews: What do you think about the gender gap question? Can a pro-life conservative win over enough women to get elected?

Lawler: This is an issue that I’ve been following mighty carefully for a decade now, and there’s no question in my mind that on balance the pro-life position gains more votes than it loses – particularly among women, who are more pro-life than men.

MassNews: Are you getting any sort of reaction from Libertarians?

Lawler: I can’t say that I have knowingly. I mean some of the people who signed on may be Libertarians but they didn’t tell me so. I think there’s a natural coalition between Libertarians and social conservatives. I think Ronald Reagan shared the basis for a winning conservative coalition that unites social conservatives, economic conservatives and the group that we now know as the Reagan Democrats. There hasn’t really been any effort to round up that same group in Massachusetts. If we make a concerted effort to do so, people might be surprised how much we can achieve. 

MassNews: Will you be able to get into the debates?

Lawler: I will fight like the dickens to get into the debates. I feel quite certain that Senator Kennedy won’t want to debate me. I’m almost equally certain if there is a Republican contender, he won’t be enthusiastic about having me on the podium. But there’s just no principled reason to exclude me and I’ve been told that if I am excluded, I might have a viable [court] case. 

MassNews: Do you think that you have a chance to win? Or are you more in it to make these points?

Lawler: I’m in it to raise points, but the only way to raise the points is to run an effective campaign and the only way to run an effective campaign is to try to win.

MassNews: With your involvement with Catholic journalism, do you expect to get any support from the Catholic Church? 

Lawler: Sure, there are three million Catholics in Massachusetts and I hope a lot of them will vote for me. I don’t think that there will be any sort of official support from the bishops, and I don’t think there should be. 

MassNews: As far as Catholicism and Senator Kennedy, if Cardinal Law comes out and raises questions about Justice Marshall and anti-Catholicism, do you think that he should raise questions about Senator Kennedy and abortion?

Lawler: Let me put it this way. I don’t think it would be appropriate in a political campaign for the Cardinal, or any other church leader, to issue some sort of statement which could be interpreted as an endorsement of one candidate, or a rejection of another. We have some history with that in Cardinal Medeiros and Barney Frank, and it backfired. At the same time, it is important for anyone whether he’s Catholic or not to understand that Senator Kennedy’s public stance on issues like abortion is clearly and directly contrary to the teachings of the church. 

MassNews: Some would argue that Senator Kennedy should be excommunicated because of the positions he’s taken publicly on some issues. Would you agree?

Lawler: The Vatican’s declaration on procured abortion says that someone who’s involved in abortion or who supports an abortion is automatically excommunicated – no announcement is required. So if support for abortion, that is if paying for an abortion incurs the penalty of excommunication, then it would stand to reason that public support for abortions would qualify for the same penalty. But I’m not the one who makes that announcement.

The Lawler Campaign can be reached by phone at 1-877-Dump Ted, or online.

Next month Libertarian candidate Carla Howell speaks with Massachusetts News
 

RETURN TO FRONT PAGE