Republican 2024 platform: suggestion

Recently someone asked, on a social medium that shall remain nameless, how Republicans would most likely govern in 2024. The questioner also asked whether “we” should worry, or “take it in stride.” The operative question goes beyond “who’s ‘we’?” It concerns how Republicans should govern, “if they gain control of some or all of the levers of power/government by 2024.” To answer that question, CNAV offers a suggestion ahead of the platform debate at the Republican National Convention in 2024.

But first: who’s “we”?

Naturally people will read that question and ask, “Who’s ‘we’?” This goes to how people used to regard elections in America, as recently as the Election of 1964. To be sure, the Democratic Party usually ran savage campaigns. Who can forget this TV advertisement, titled “Peace, Little Girl,” but which we know as “The Daisy Ad”?

Now here we had a President calling his challenger a warmonger. But history shows that Lyndon Baines Johnson was just as much a warmonger, if not worse, than Senator Barry M. Goldwater (R-Ariz.) ever dreamt of being. Nevertheless, the ad had its effect.

Yet after the election, people shrugged their shoulders and went on. (Johnson didn’t even have nearly the coattails he thought he had. In that same election, John A. Volpe, Republican Governor of Massachusetts, won re-election.)

But, beginning in 1967, everything changed. Radically, if one will pardon the pun. Beginning at Harvard University, students walked out of classes, took over buildings, and screamed,

ON! STRIKE! SHUT IT DOWN! ON! STRIKE! SHUT IT DOWN!

And those same students got onto the faculties of our colleges and universities, with notable exceptions. These “tenured radicals” govern our universities today. Even Yale University, which didn’t blow up then, now has become a full-blown Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiment.

Here you have your “we.” The left will not take things in stride, as they expected the political right to do.

How likely will the Republican Party regain total control?

Lay aside for a moment whether the Republican Party has ever had total control. Two factors suggest Republicans never had this control. These factors are the:

1. Rules of the United States Senate,
2. Lack of a clear (sixty-plus) majority in the Senate, and
3. Presence of Republicans In Name Only (RINOs).

Which is why Steven Turley, Ph.D., has started his “RINO Hunt” campaign.

So “total Republican control” will require more than clear majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives. It will require all Republican Conference members to be on the same page – a patriotic page. And ideally it would require sixty votes in the United States Senate, and a decisive majority in the House of Representatives. And in addition to electing the President and Vice-President, it will require electing a majority of State governors, and control of State legislatures. (Plus a Supreme Court majority.)

If it controlled two-thirds of both chambers, then the Republican Party could propose amendments to the Constitution – but only if it had the support of legislatures in three-fourths of the States.

CNAV does not repeat not recommend inducing two-thirds of those legislatures to apply to Congress for an Article Five Convention. Such a convention is a recipe for disaster – because no institution can survive a second exposure to the process that created it. That applies doubly to Constitutions.

Besides, very few Constitutional amendments should be necessary. The objective is to obey the Constitution as written, not amend it further.

The Republican platform: legislative

So what laws should a Republican Party submit to Congress? Longer-lasting tax relief, for one. Ditch the income tax and replace it with a consumption tax on new goods. Americans for Tax Reform gives us the details. Such a reform would do away with preferential treatment of “public charities” – and free them from any consideration of what is, and what is not, a legitimate charity. That same Lyndon Baines Johnson famously amended the tax code to forbid churches to campaign against him in Texas when he was a Senator. The code had no place for such viewpoint discrimination then and even less place now.

Turn next to appropriations. Do away with quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial executive agencies. Congress is the place to write law, and the courts are the place to interpret it. That includes who has broken the law – and who has not.

Most of the rules in the Code of Federal Regulations have to do with issues in which either individual responsibility or consideration for one’s neighbor ought to apply. With regard to the latter, let’s give people standing to sue when their neighbors affect them adversely with their activities. That should apply just as well to air, water, and soil pollution as to the most common noise pollution complaint: the neighbor who turns the sound up too high on his entertainment system.

And executive

The proper functions of government are three and only three, according to the late Ayn Rand. They are:

1. Police, to protect people from those who take wealth or threaten the person by force or fraud,
2. Armed services, to protect against invasion, and
3. The judiciary, the right place to sort out disputes and determine guilt or innocence.

The executive should not usurp any part of the judicial power. Neither should the legislature, for the same reason that the Constitution forbids bills of attainder and ex post facto laws.

Nor should executive or legislature usurp fundamental rights of the people. The Constitution recognizes many of them, and government must respect them – totally. They include

• Freedom of religion, speech, the press, assembly, movement, and association.
• Right to keep and bear arms.
• Right to choose whether to “quarter” a soldier in one’s house in peacetime.
• Security of the person, home, papers and effects against unreasonable search and seizure.
• Prohibition against “double jeopardy” and compulsion of self-incrimination.
• Right to one’s life, liberty and property, subject to due process of law.
• Payment for any property, or use of property, the government “takes.”
• Right to face one’s accuser, have counsel, and have a jury try his case.

Sound money

Darrell L. Castle, in 2016, called for ending the Federal Reserve. He makes an excellent case. The Federal Reserve creates money where none existed, and has no anchor for setting the value of money. This has given rise to the “Modern Monetary Theory” of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Which states: just print it, baby! Don’t worry about it! There’s plenty more where that came from! She wouldn’t even have to worry about cutting down trees to provide the paper – because she has in mind a system that gives everybody a government debit card or some such thing. Even before that, the Fed gave us “quantitative easing” during the Obama administration. Let’s call that what it is: theft!

In fact, fiat money (literally, Let There Be Money!) and fractional reserve banking have destroyed value. One can observe the effects in history. The stores we call dollar stores today, we called:

1. Dime stores when your editor was young,
2. Five-and-ten stores earlier when a certain Christmas carol came to be, and
3. Cent shops originally.

And that people even remember or can look up when they called them five-and-tens speaks volumes.

Yes, the Republican Party should propose to abolish the Federal Reserve. We can and should replace it with gold and silver that someone physically holds and will surrender on demand.

Possible Republican Constitutional amendments

Does the Constitution need amending? For the most part, no. The Republican Party position ought to be: to obey the Constitution as written. To that end, quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial executive agencies are unconstitutional. Anything that vests in the federal government a police power to cover traditional kinds of crime is unconstitutional. For that matter, creating an institution to emit bills of debt, and incidentally to create a nice, fat, juicy target for criminals to attack, thereby necessitating an American secret police – excuse me – Federal Bureau of Investigation, is unconstitutional.

CNAV has been over this before, describing ways the Left would have to amend the Constitution to justify their own program.

Having said that, CNAV would in fact advise amending the Constitution in these ways, if possible.

First, strike Article I, Section 8, Clause 9 from the Constitution.

The Congress shall have the power … to establish post offices and post roads.

That, at least, ought to be strictly a State power. The “post office” is obsolete today, in this age of electronic mail. Highways once were private, and can become private again. This might even go to the contention that the government “subsidizes fossil fuels” by building roads instead of laying rail.

Second, strike Amendment XVI – the Income Tax Amendment. Go back to apportioning direct taxes among the States.

Third, strike Amendment XVII – popular election of Senators. Restore the role of a Senator as an ambassador from his State government, not merely an at-large representative of its people.

What do “they” have to worry about?

Those who ask whether persons other than Republicans need to worry, should ask themselves what they are worried about. Much of what they worry about, they plan to do if they ever took full control. So that’s one kind of thing about which they need not worry. Republicans will not write bills of attainder or ex post facto laws, as Democrats are trying to do now. Nor have we plans for mass arrests.

But! Anyone who had a hand in stealing the Election of 2020 should worry. Anyone who got rich off the public weal, while pretending to have the interests of the people at heart, should worry. Likewise, Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., has reason to worry. This isn’t about a bill of attainder. This is about the Democrats giving him a gig from President to President, and granting him immunity from prosecution and civil lawsuit. All that special treatment will now end.

Aside from that: if all they worry about is the abolition of and setback to their program, then that worry is illegitimate – because their entire program is illegitimate. We have seen its bad effects – and several people, now languishing in prison without charge, or after forced confessions, will testify to even worse effects.

This, then, is the platform on which Republicans should run.

Let’s hope they have the gonadal fortitude to do it.