Activists unveil Mount Vernon manifesto

From POLITICO:

Conservative leaders gathering in Virginia Wednesday will sign on to a broad statement of principle aimed at giving a coherent framework to the grass-roots energy roiling the right.

"The federal government today ignores the limits of the Constitution, which is increasingly dismissed as obsolete and irrelevant," reads a portion of the statement provided to POLITICO by its organizers. "Some insist that America must change, cast off the old and put on the new. But where would this lead — forward or backward, up or down? Isn't this idea of change an empty promise or even a dangerous deception?

"The change we urgently need, a change consistent with the American ideal, is not movement away from but toward our founding principles," says the statement, which seeks to define those principles as "constitutional conservatism."

The statement marks an effort by a group of leading conservatives to put their stamp on a movement that in the past year has been overtaken by a populist uprising against the Obama administration and growing federal spending, if little else.

Activists unveil Mount Vernon manifesto - Ben Smith - POLITICO.com