Paul Weyrich

Paul Weyrich – R.I.P.

paul weyrich

Paul Weyrich

Paul Weyrich, conservative leader has passed away.

Paul M. Weyrich, 66, who helped found the Heritage Foundation and at one time was one of Washington’s most visible conservatives, died this morning. At his death, he was president and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.

Heritage announced this morning: “Paul M. Weyrich, chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation and first president of The Heritage Foundation, died this morning around 1 a.m. He was 66 years old. Weyrich was a good friend to many of us at Heritage, a true leader and a man of unbending principle. He won Heritage’s prestigious Clare Boothe Luce Award in 2005. Weyrich will be deeply missed. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family, including son Steve, who currently works at Heritage.”

From Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform:

Ideas alone do not have consequences. Ideas, even — or especially — powerful ideas are like seeds. If they land in fertile soil and are cultivated they can grow. On rock or sand or ignored or tended by incompetents they die.

The idea of individual liberty and a limited constitutional government has been around a long time. Liberty doesn’t need new ideas to advance, but institutions to give muscle and skeletal structure to a political movement for liberty. That is how Paul Weyrich changed the world for the better.

Paul Weyrich created institutions and networks that incubated new and old powerful policies and strategies to advance liberty. The Heritage Foundation. ALEC. The Free Congress Foundation. The Kingston meeting. Many of the structures of the “religious right.” He understood that only freedom could successfully promote traditional values. He brought leaders of various freedom impulses together. Most of the successes of the Conservative movement since the 1970s flowed from structures, organizations, and coalitions he started, created or nurtured.

May Paul rest in peace.

Flap is a little sadder this morning…….


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