To Save America, Ten (or Eleven) Point Plans Aren’t Enough

From American Thinker.com (April 4, 2022):

In 1994, Newt Gingrich put out a ten-point plan called The Contract with America. It was a primary feature of that year’s mid-term Republican wave. Every part of that plan was implemented. And today it’s a dead letter. We have hard-Leftists controlling all three branches of the federal government, and active programs to destroy the America we grew up in everywhere.

Plans are worth bupkis. We need something different, not another plan.

Senator Rick Scott has an excellent eleven-point plan. Even if it is implemented, it will suffer the same fate as the Contract with America. Self-serving, power-mad Leftists will find their way to sabotage it bit by bit, taking us even farther down the road to perdition. The problem is very simple. We lack the two elements that are absolutely necessary to prevent the irresistible slide to destruction.

The first task is a statement of principles. The Republican Party, the only presently viable alternative to the Marxists, is simply Democrat-lite. That’s because we allow almost anyone to run with an “R” behind their name. “Republican” candidates are not required to declare any principles whatever. That’s how we get big-government soft liberals like John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Susan Collins. McCain torpedoed ObamaCare’s repeal. Romney voted to impeach Trump over bogus charges, and now Collins has declared that she will vote to confirm radical leftist Judge Jackson to the Supreme Court.

It’s no wonder that my wife has openly questioned the wisdom of voting for Republicans. “They don’t do anything anyway!” In short, they are Republi-Crats. Current RINOs would make FDR look like a right-wing lunatic. JFK would be a conservative Republican.

If we’re going to rescue America from its slide into darkness, it’s imperative that the Republican Party adopt a declaration of principles. The best place to search for those principles would be in the debates the Founders had over the Constitution. This would comport well with our recent emphasis on “originalism” for Supreme Court nominees. Those original debates contain a wealth of well-considered discussions of human nature and law.

The first principle is that the Constitution is designed to limit the power of the federal government. The Founders were painfully aware of the fact that those in power tend to seek more power. It is rare for any of them to be content with self-governing citizens. As Lord Acton noted, power corrupts. As it becomes absolute power, then the level of corruption becomes equally absolute. The only solution to this universal law is to prevent the aggregation of power.

The Founders created a list of enumerated powers in Article I, Section 8. These powers were meant to perform tasks that the central government was far better suited to than state governments. These are described as being for “the common Defense and general Welfare” of the United States. But, as some feared, the Supreme Court adopted “the general welfare” as an excuse to rubber-stamp anything Congress passed. The doctrine of enumerated powers has been buried.

We must exhume limitations on DC. Thus, the Republican National Committee must adopt a permanent principle that, if an action is not within the list of enumerated powers beginning after “general welfare,” it is not proper for the feds to do it. Period. And that means that a lot of DC must be scaled back or eliminated. [read more]