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October 14, 2022
There’s not “a dime’s worth of difference” between the Democratic and Republican parties. That’s how George Wallace put it in 1966.
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Over decades, the lack of difference has been a constant. Of late, the Democrat party moved leftward and became the Democratic Socialism Party. It is the home of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Edward Markey, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Ro Khanna, and “Governor” Stacey Abrams.
The Republican Party, too, moved leftward but kept its moniker. Large government, excessive spending, adventurism, centralized control of the fifty states, and the national security state find favor with Republicans, because RINOs abound. Although Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger will not be in the 118th Congress, RINOs will be returned to the House in November. Many RINO senators are not presently up for re-election.
The Commitment to America (Kevin McCarthy, 2022), a set of good intentions, will have no beneficial impact on the size, scope, and cost of the United States government. Its antecedent, the Contract With America (Newt Gingrich, 1994), a set of specific goals, had no beneficial impact. Politicians want name recognition and face remembrance, not effective governance.
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To pull off a Lazarus of the dead republic, Republicans must file, no later than January 15, 2023, bills intended to remedy bad laws. With Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, those bills would be enacted. Joseph Biden would veto them. No matter. Enacted but vetoed bills would be planks of the platform on which the Trump-DeSantis ticket will sweep to victory on November 5, 2024.
II
Governmental excesses and economic distortions arose from the heaps of socialism, globs of progressivism, and dollops of communism brought into American life by President Roosevelt (FDR) and his successors. Although there is an abundance of bad laws, and all bad laws need to be remedied, four rectifications are pressing:
1. Repeal all laws that permit governments to declare emergencies. A government is wont to mislabel a difficulty as an “emergency.” A declaration of an emergency nullifies constitutional guardrails. Judges go along with Executive Branch totalitarians. A declared emergency lingers for years after the excuses given for the declaration evaporate. The worst example of lingering is the national emergency and bank holiday, declared on March 6, 1933 (during FDR’s reign). Under it, banks in the United States were closed. They reopened on March 13, 1933. The national emergency and bank holiday was terminated on September 14, 1978 (during Gerald Ford’s reign), forty-five years later.
2. Get rid of laws that support adventurism. The Authorization for Use of Military Force has been seen by the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations as a blank check for deployment of American military forces all over the world, for varied purposes. Repeal the AUMF.
If a particular place, such as Taiwan, is worth a military commitment, then a treaty to that effect should be entered into. The treaty should have the fixed term of 25 years. Compare the NATO treaty, which is opened-ended. President George H.W. Bush did the United States a disservice by not abrogating the NATO treaty in 1992, after the Soviet Union collapsed.
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3. Address civic dangers caused by the national security state. The genie is out of the bottle, but two improvements are possible. (a) Dismantle the Transportation Safety Administration. First, the constitutional right of travel should not be impaired by screening. Second, no team wins by playing defense only. In the event of a hijacking of an American civilian aircraft, then a civilian aircraft or two of a state sponsor of terrorism should be shot out of the sky. (b) Waive the sovereign immunity of the United States, in relation to contentions that surveillance or information collection by the national security state was unlawful. The minimum recovery of $50,000 should be set statutorily for a plaintiff who proves his case, because damages attributable to national security state shenanigans are not easily quantifiable.
4. Enact and approve laws that prohibit foreign investments in significant American enterprises. Recently, the spotlight was on Chinese purchases of American farmland, but the threat of foreign strangleholds is extensive. Many types of investments should be prohibited to foreigners.
Title 50, War and National Defense, should be amended by adding chapter 59, “Significant American Enterprises.” Therein, foreigners (whether natural persons, corporations, or governments) and those who stand in for them should be prohibited from investments in American aircraft manufacturing, aluminum milling, atomic energy, chemical manufacturing, communications, defense, education, financial services, firearms manufacturing, health care, information technology, medicine manufacturing, mining, motor-vehicle manufacturing, oil and gas, real property, radio and television broadcasting, rolling-stock manufacturing, seacraft manufacturing, shipping (road, rail, water, air), steel milling, stock exchanges, utility generation, and utility distribution.
III
There were doubts, in the era of the Framers, that the United States would survive as a federal constitutional government of delegated powers. As it turned out, the United States did not. Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, Abraham Lincoln, Thaddeus Stevens, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Barack Obama labored, and Pseudo-President Biden labors, to wreck the United States.
They succeeded. The United States government is omnipotent. Rights are privileges. States lack sovereignty. In any given year, the United States Constitution is whatever five of nine Supreme Court justices opine that it is. Every branch of the United States has excessive authority and is dysfunctional.
Perhaps the federal constitutional government of delegated powers can be resurrected. Probably not, but it’s worth a college try.
The author, who lives in Idaho, a free state, is on the lam from the CIA and the DIA, but not the FIA. He does not have exceptional driving skills. (FIA = Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, the governing body of motor sports such as F1 racing.) Among his writings:
“A Packet of Purported Legal Humor” (an oxymoron). http://ssrn.com/abstract=2068455.
“Gilbert and Sullivan for Lawyers” (G&S, sort of). http://ssrn.com/abstract=2311932.
“Preclusion of Sociological Policing” (Terry suppression hearings). http://ssrn.com/abstract=2253244.
“‘The New Colossus’ and Immigration: 2017” (statue of Liberty Enlightening the World). http://ssrn.com/abstract=2765088.
Image: Lars Di Scenza via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped).
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