Scott Bradley aims to give Utah voters a real choice in the November U.S. Senate race. The longtime Republican-turned-Constitution Party candidate faces an uphill battle in the race, but is running on a pure constitutionalist platform.
This year, that’s not an uncommon pledge. Everybody this year is a constitutionalist, Bradley told The New American, and that’s because they know that it will win elections. But Bradley comes with longstanding constitutional bona fides; he has made a second career out of studying and promoting the U.S. Constitution and has a long history as a constitutionalist scholar and activist in Utah.
The natural question for Bradley is: “With Tea Party activist Mike Lee winning the Republican Party primary for the U.S. Senate seat, why is he running?” Bradley has a ready response, noting that he had sat down with Mike Lee during the primary season for an hour and a half, just one on one. It was then that Bradley says he found fatal flaws with Lee’s professed constitutional credentials. Lee backs a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which sounds benign (who could be opposed to a balanced budget?), but could easily lead to an out-of-control constitutional convention. Moreover, the balanced budget amendment may actually not balance the budget, or worse, lead to permanent tax increases. All of these balanced budget amendments have an escape clause, Bradley told The New American, which could encourage greater deficit spending in order to bundle brokered votes for needed deficit spending. You are going to guarantee either additional deficit spending, Bradley reasons, or you’ll guarantee we never see another tax decrease.
Bradley and Lee also disagree on the issue of term limits and multilateral trade regimes such as NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. Lee supports them; Bradley opposes them because the fundamental problem is that the people are voting ignorantly. We already had term limits under the Articles of Confederation, and the Founding Fathers deliberately left them out, Bradley explains. Why would you ever want to term limit a guy like James Madison, for example, out? On NAFTA and WTO, Bradley says of Lee, He has no problems with these things…. They will destroy U.S. national sovereignty.
Running on a third-party platform is a first for Bradley, who notes that I spent 43 years in the Republican Party and during that time I was extremely active in the Republican Party effort. His rsum includes formerly serving as a county central committee member, a precinct chairman, county delegate, state delegate, and state central committee member of the Republican Party of Utah. Even during the 2010 election cycle, he notes that most of the eight GOP candidates in the U.S. Senate primary this year purchased what Bradley jokingly calls his 526-page pamphlet, To Preserve the Nation.
But Bradley resolved to offer a genuine alternative to the same old two-party duopoly. George Bush nearly doubled the national debt from 5.7 trillion to 10.7 trillion, with six of eight years of a Republican Congress, he told The New American. Moreover, Bush’s prescription-drug benefit was the biggest gulp of socialized medicine since and until ObamaCare. Bradley eventually had a heart-to-heart talk with myself and found that time and time again, they went along with the same socialist drivel that was going on when they got there.
Bradley knows his race is not likely to end in electoral victory. But his campaign stops, which he calls Freedom Forums, are creating a more informed electorate that will be less likely to accept the same old socialist drivel next time around. I look at it as something that is an offering to everyone, not just my children, but to the nation as a whole…. This is not about me and an office, this is about the reestablishment of the nation.
