Thursday, July 29, 2010

The Revolutionary Republcian Platform
  The Republic piece by Bruce Walker

We must have revolutionary change if we are to preserve America as a land of liberty.  Republicans may have that power to make revolutionary change after the 2012 elections, because, for the first time in history, the configuration of congressional elections in 2012 and 2014 will give the Republican Party the elements needed to pass a revolutionary agenda over the united opposition of Democrats:  a filibuster-proof Senate, a working majority in the House, and a conservative in the White House.

Americans want this change:  sixty percent of Americans, year after year call, themselves “conservative.” The champions of these conservatives – Sarah Palin, Tom Coburn, Mitch Daniel, Michelle Bachmann and others - are all Republicans.  What dismays conservatives about the Republican Party can be summed up in one word:  RINOs.  Should we trust RINOs, whose life’s ambition is to be invited to every chic party in Washington?  No:  we should use RINOs, just like Washington used the French to win our independence. 

The first step is to gain control of the Republican Party, not by driving out RINOs, but by making them feel the heat of conservative pressure, especially in those conservatives states which ought to be electing conservative Republicans, like Arizona and Utah, while punishing Scott Brown, the most conservative senator we can imagine Massachusetts electing, is childish.  The next step is to make sure that the next Republican National Convention has an irresistible conservative majority.

At that convention, conservatives should eschew the old, dry, wordy platform which no one reads.  Instead, conservatives should use the platform to promulgate revolutionary changes in America.  Our platform should be a short, readable, binding document – a platform that means something.  We should promise in this platform to pass very specific laws when we have the power.  We must insist that anyone who wishes to be considered part of the Republican Party support this platform.  We must then, like the Founding Fathers in 1776, publish this platform to all of America.  We must make it the heart of the election campaign.

The first section of the platform should explain revolutionary change is essential to save our land and that the American people will know before the election just what Republicans will do by announcing the verbatim text of all the bills we will pass.  This promise means that the revolutionary bills will not be sent to congressional committees, reconciled in conference committees, or otherwise sent through the smoke and mirrors of parliamentary labyrinths.  The whole of each house will vote, without amendment or change, on each of these bills.

The second section of the platform will be the verbatim text of each of these revolutionary bills, and each bill will be brief, simple, and clear.  Any bill longer than one page is probably too long, and there must be no five hundred page bills laced with pork and payoffs.  Would this part of the platform be popular?  Consider this:  Americans – all Americans – are appalled by the deal-making in Congress.  Americans place Congress dead last on the list of institutions that they trust.  Americans have never held Congress in lower repute.  The reason is the Byzantine and secretive process of making laws.

What should be in these revolutionary bills?  We cannot do everything at once.  We can, however, make strategic changes which will produce a permanent change in the direction of our nation from secular nanny-statism to liberty and Judeo-Christian moral traditions.  These bills should focus on the most unpopular parts of Leftism, like heavy and complicated tax codes, schools which teach secular humanism (and little else), and a legal system which feasts on destructive ligitation.

Labor unions rank near the bottom in institutions that Americans trust.  Most Americans see unions as corrupter of the political process and destroyers of jobs.  The simple language of our bill to liberate workers might read something like this:

“No person shall be required as a condition of employment to belong to any labor union or required to make any contributions to any labor union.  The National Labor Relations Board is abolished and all regulations promulgated by that board are repealed.”

Americans also see the morass of federal programs, offices, bureaus, commissions, and departments as a wasteful, disorganized, and almost incomprehensible mess.  The failure of Obama to react to the gulf oil spill, for example, is blamed by everyone on the Tower of Babel which is the executive branch of our nation.  Americans grasp that we must streamlines and trim the federal government, so our platform should address this problem directly and boldly:

“The President is granted complete authority to reorganize the executive branch of the federal government, including all independent regulatory agencies, which shall include abolishing, consolidating, or otherwise reforming any of these executive functions. “

These are bills that people could read and understand.  Such bills would be like the ballot questions which win by such massive landslides even in the heartlands of the Left. And these bills would change America.  We could remind voters also that the First Amendment has forty-three words and that great and good laws are simple and short. 

Platforms have become tired compromises on endless subjects.  No one reads or cares about platforms anymore.  It need not be so.  Republicans should use the vehicle of a platform at a convention with conservatives and RINOs to create a real plan for peaceful, revolutionary change – a binding contract promising definite things.  Those who use few words mean the words they use.  Brevity forces attention on the actual words used.  Such a revolutionary platform would recapture our nation and give it a new birth of freedom. 

Bruce Walker

Posted by Bruce Walker on 7/29/10

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