WHAT WINGERS MEAN BY "JEFFERSONIAN"

Culture of Truth provided this clip of Laurence O'Donnell interviewing GOP Rep. Nathan Thurm (John Culberson?) and at one point Thurm asserts that he is "a Jeffersonian Republican." Thomas Jefferson greatly feared a strong Federal government and his 1800 essay "A Simple and Inexpensive Government" explains why:

Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government. Public servants, at such a distance, and from under the eye of their constituents, must, from the circumstance of distance, be unable to administer and overlook all the details necessary for the good government of the citizens; and the same circumstance, by rendering detection impossible to their constituents, will invite the public agents to corruption, plunder, and waste.

The true theory of our Constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the states are independent as to everything within themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign nations. Let the general government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage the better the more they are left free to manage for themselves, and our general government may be reduced to a very simple organization, and a very unexpensive one--a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants.