To conclude this series exploring quotes that make up the foundational ethos of the mission, I want to highlight two, bringing the last two journal entries in this series into one.
Speaking of her time leading the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman said this:
“I never ran my train off the tracks and I never lost a passenger.”
What’s inspiring to me about this statement is that Harriet’s leadership included politics, civil rights, forward progress, the human experience as it should be, severe personal trauma, contemplative faith, leading teams—and physical endurance.
I started Liberatus in 2015 partly because it’s ambiguous what exactly we were fighting for in Congress. While we said we were fighting for freedom, in the words of former Congressman Raul Labrador, Capitol Hill “is a place that just sucks your soul.” But why?
“He’s a principled conservative.”
After working within the conservative movement, it’s not clear to me what this statement means.
But I think it means something like this: There’s a conservative view of things that is the truth, therefore, he stands on that truth no matter the costs, achieves top marks on legislative scorecards, and those who don’t hold to principles might be nice to people but they’ll never be champions.
Today, often the farthest we go with this advice is to say that we should “turn down the heat” when things get too ugly. But to govern the country well, we need constructive parameters for what it means to restrain partisanship, in the same way that Olympic athletes have constructive parameters for how to perform at their best, follow the rules of their sport, and uphold sportsmanship.
Let’s be honest: the primary goal, broadly speaking, of congressional offices is for the Member to get re-elected. Re-election demands the safety of what’s been done before, of what worked the first time. The job of representing shifts towards keeping the peace, and we lose a deeper understanding of what it means to govern well with the time we’ve already been given.
