(LifeSiteNews) — If conservatives still celebrate “Ted Stevens Day,” they unfortunately have a lot of soul-searching and education to go through. I would rather that the public allow him to rest in peace and stop trying to hide the damage this man did to Alaska. But with an airport and a day named in his honor, I claim that it is fair game to attack not the man, but his true legacy.
OK, I will be accused of having a dog in this fight: I ran against him twice, first in 1990 as a Republican in the primary and then knocking him out of the Senate in 2008 as a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, allowing another big-spending, pro-abortion liberal to take his place.
In 1990, with the superb Fairbanksan Mike States as campaign manager, we raised $66,000 and took 30% of the vote against Uncle Ted. His purse spent over $700k. The split was 81,000 v. 34,000. In 2008, my share of the vote was much smaller but was 3-4 times the difference between Stevens and Mark Begich.
But did I really have a dog in this fight? I ran against Uncle Ted because it was apparent that he was anything but a conservative. He was attempting, with the sexual predator Sen. Bob Packwood of Oregon, to codify Roe v. Wade, decades before the ultra-Marxist Democrats wanted to do exactly the same thing. Stevens was so ignorant about what Roe actually said that he kept insisting (along with the mainstream media and the general public), that it did not legalize abortion-on-demand all nine months of pregnancy.
That argument is not even offered any more and is thoroughly and completely won by the pro-lifers.
Now let’s go to what Uncle Ted did to, not for, Alaska.
As a neophyte Harvard law school grad, he tried to get a job in the D.C. Interior Department but settled for a law firm that handled national resource issues in the Beltway. He was sent (likely by the Deep State) to Fairbanks, and within six months, was named federal district attorney. It ruffled feathers in Alaska as longer-serving lawyers were passed over.
And lo and behold, Ted did get that Interior job in D.C., going back to the Beltway, which was to become his true home for the rest of his life. There, he admitted that he illegally wrote part of the Alaska Statehood Act – an act that reserved control of the state and its resources to the federal government – cementing Alaska’s colonial status and entry into the union as a permanent 2nd class state, where we still need an act of Congress to build a 17-mile gravel road between two villages or to develop vital resources that lie even on the mere 25 percent of the land that was granted to us. Even liberal Sen. Mike Gravel lamented the ANILCA legislation under Jimmy Carter, an act that further ended any hope of Alaska ever being permitted to control its own economic destiny.
So, why do we have a Ted Stevens Day? Because with his seniority and influence, Stevens steered massive amounts of federal dollars to keep our economy afloat, creating the dependency and control that is the very hallmark of socialism.
Socialism is the system that Alaska was conceived into in the early 20th century, increased through the Alaska Railroad and Matanuska Valley Projects, furthered through the influence of the Rockefeller Public Administration Service, which gave us our state constitution, and locked down by Uncle Ted’s federal spending service.
I will say this: when his usefulness was dried up, he was blindsided by the Deep State with a fake corruption charge, thus exonerating him and overturning the one conviction he did not deserve.
Alaska is a small state. I was glad to have his grandchildren as students in my classroom and on my hockey team. As they read this, remember that your grandfather was, and still is, public property. I would prefer that the memory you certainly possess of him as a grandfather remain at peace. But I love this state too and have for 47 years now, and I want to see it freed from the nefarious claws of the federal leviathan, a socialist monster that cares not for any individual, even those who served it dutifully for decades.