GOP platform debate begins

Now the real GOP platform debate can begin. Yesterday (July 8), a week ahead of the Republican National Convention, the Republican National Committee released a draft platform. This is Donald Trump’s platform, and no mistake. Indeed it could not be anyone else’s platform, not with Lara Trump as co-chair of the Republican National Committee. This platform will disappoint those who want a stronger “social message.” But as any discerning pastor can tell you, the kind of social change evangelical Christians want, cannot come from government. It must come from the people, reawakening to a relationship with Jesus Christ, abandoning sinful practices, and rebuilding institutions they have allowed to become corrupt over a century and a half.

GOP platform in detail

The GOP platform is a sixteen-page document setting forth twenty basic principles. The Gateway Pundit hosts it here. Its language will, no doubt, strike readers as hyperbolic – after the classic and inimitable Donald Trump style.

Donald Trump has blamed illegal immigration most heavily for America’s economic and other ills, and the GOP platform reflects that. His first two principles lead with immigration and how to solve its problems:

Seal the border, and stop the migrant invasion.

Trump will get no argument from most voters in Texas, including especially South Texas and the Northern Rio Grande Valley. The federal government has sued Texas at least twice for trying to seal the Texas-Mexican border on its own. A President Trump could, by executive order, dismiss all legal action and formally “call forth” the Texas Military Department “to repel an invasion.” The TMD (as the Texas Army and Air National Guards and State Guard) already has the infrastructure in place.

Trump would need all the help he could get. He must seal the U.S.-Canadian border, too, because some infiltration has occurred there. Sadly, he can’t count on cooperation from every State along that border. Washington, Minnesota, Michigan, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine want illegal immigrants. CNAV will discuss the reasons for that later.

Mass deportation?

Carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.

By which Trump means: deport every last illegal immigrant. Technically, however, he could deport only part of their number and still achieve “the largest deportation operation in American history.” In blunt fact, no one knows how many illegal immigrants have come in. But lots of voters in “sanctuary cities” could tell him where they are.

End inflation, and make America affordable again.

A tall order. Furthermore he must come to grips with his own hyper-spending when the COVID crisis broke. That started the inflation, and Biden’s even worse spending sped it along. But Biden is still responsible for the near-hyperinflation American voters are seeing, and everyone knows it. They also know its effects. Industries that depended on significant disposable cash are closing down at a rate of once a week. Thanks for nothing, you doddering old fool!

Make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far!

Which means: end the Liquefied Natural Gas port moratorium, and tell the “Leave It In The Ground!” contingent, Tough luck! America has the resources, but those bent on deindustrializing the United States now hold sway. That must stop.

Stop outsourcing, and turn the United States into a manufacturing superpower.

That includes reopening coal mines in the Appalachian Mountain System, which might breathe life into some towns that have seen their populations decline precipitously – and perhaps not because the coal veins are exhausted! Again: “Leave It In The Ground!” It also includes rebuilding a manufacturing base that has lost out to imports. Libertarians might squawk, but the export side of the free-trade experiment never started. Let them explain that before they complain.

On taxes – and Constitutional rights

Large tax cuts for workers, and no tax on tips!

This would cut tips out of the line item on Form 1040 presently reading:

Wages, salaries, tips, and other employee compensation (attach Forms W-2).

This would also enhance people’s privacy. In fact, Trump has in other contexts called for replacing the income tax with tariffs. Which is exactly how the United States government once financed itself. And how it can do so again, with perfect justice. The one thing that keeps pirates’ heads down in the world’s oceans, is the United States Navy. So why shouldn’t importers pay a tariff, which pays the force that guarantees safe conduct? As for the rest, that calls for limiting government. The Supreme Court struck that blow in the Loper Bright case the Friday before last.

Defend our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, and our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to keep and bear arms.

That’s easy, Mr. President. Abolish the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Also abolish the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and stop all cozy conversations between the FBI, CIA, etc., and social media Trust and Safety Teams. While you’re at it, call off the dogs Biden sicced on peaceful churchgoers.

Prevent World War Three, restore peace in Europe and in the Middle East, and build a great Iron Dome missile defense shield over our entire country – all made in America.

That might require renegotiations of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaties. But if we couple that with a settlement of the Ukraine War, Vladimir Putin of Russia might accept that. This is where “The Art of the Deal” comes in handy.

End the weaponization of government against the American people.

See the Freedom of Speech and Religion promise the GOP platform already makes. Abridgment of these freedoms is what that weaponization is all about.

More GOP platform promises on immigration and quality of life

Stop the migrant crime epidemic, demolish the foreign drug cartels, crush gang violence, and lock up violent offenders.

Rebuild our cities, including Washington, D.C., making them safe, clean, and beautiful again.

These two go together, for one cannot do the second without first doing the first. The first two promises would go along way to satisfying this. As to lockup, one can look to El Salvador for a possible solution.

Strengthen and modernize our military, making it, without question, the strongest and most powerful in the world.

Yes, and start with the Navy, which has seen some humiliations of late. If the country is going to charge tariffs on imports, the Navy has to earn it. To do that, it badly needs attention. But that aside, America must stop “[looking for] monsters to destroy” abroad – aside from pirates. John Quincy Adams had it right: let America mind her own business. (And her business is her border.)

Keep the U.S. Dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

That will prove difficult, with the BRICS alliance growing. But some suggest the threat to displace the dollar is an empty one. One way to make sure it’s empty is to limit government – drastically – and thus reduce spending equally drastically.

Fight for and protect Social Security and Medicare with no cuts, including no changes to the retirement age.

The only way to make sure of that is to grow the economy – and make childbearing and child-rearing affordable again. (And safe again, too; see below.) Social Security and Medicare are in crisis, in part because its designers set the retirement age higher than they expected most Americans to reach, but also because two successive child-bearing-age generations have refused to replace themselves. The workers who otherwise would be paying Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance premiums (“Social Security taxes”) were never born. Thanks, Sarah Weddington!

How to make a less-intrusive government

Cancel the electric vehicle mandate and cut costly and burdensome regulations.

The Great American Electric Vehicle Road Test ended in failure. True enough, if you don’t fail, you’re not innovating, as Elon Musk has said in another context. But in blunt fact, electric vehicles are not ready to displace conventional vehicles on the American road. Nor can the electric grid handle so much charging at once. Already those who took part in the Great American Electric Vehicle Road Test are opting out of Round Two as fast as they can.

As to regulations, the Supreme Court finally got rid of the last Big Prop for the Administrative State: Chevron deference.

Cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.

Keep men out of women’s sports.

These two promises also go together, because the second problem proceeds from the first. Federal funding for education should end, anyway. In fact the GOP platform does promise to abolish the Department of Education. The States that legislate against these theories will become more attractive. But someone must argue that, over and over, before the United States Supreme Court. That is, unless and until Congress removes Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor from the bench on impeachment for, and conviction of, contributing to the delinquencies and psychological and physical wounding of children in the manner the GOP platform decries.

Deport pro-HAMAS radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again.

American colleges and universities have lots of ideological problems, of which antisemitism and apologies for atrocity are merely symptoms. Solving them requires building new institutions and decamping from the old. The new John Harvards and Elihu Yales can do this – if we let them.

Election integrity

Secure our elections, including same day voting, voter identification, paper ballots, and proof of citizenship.

Elon Musk has already pledged his support for all these concepts. He has denounced mail-in absentee balloting and drop boxes,

and even called for voting on paper.

Note that he called for in-person voting only. The French do it – with voting by pre-registered proxy. More to the point: when a man with a reputation for technological solutions tells you that a technological solution creates more problems than it solves – and that the only real solution is very low-tech – people should listen.

Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), Speaker of the House, also shared yesterday that “Resident” Biden threatens to veto the Secure American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act (H.R. 8281) if it ever reaches his desk.

That means only one thing: Democrats need illegal immigrants to win elections. They use them as two kinds of “mule,” first to request absentee ballots by mail, and then to hand them over, signed, to Party operatives. Those operatives then fill them in (but not, apparently, down-ticket! That’s how the Democrats lost House seats in 2020.) Then other “mules” carry them to drop boxes – which might be under camera surveillance but are never human-guarded.

Unite our country by bringing it to new and record levels of success.

That success would be economic – and economic prosperity is neither necessary nor sufficient for unity of the citizenry. It can help – but covetousness erases any unity that prosperity might bring. That is why we need the Ten Commandments – more than ever.

The GOP platform has a dissenting voice

Jenna Ellis, at American Family Radio, sounded a dissenting note.

Her problem is that, for the first time in 40 years, the GOP platform says nothing about abortion, and takes a softer tone on the spectacle of Same Sex Roommates Sharing Bed who call themselves “married.” That’s because Donald Trump doesn’t care to emphasize an issue that still divides the country down the middle.

Erick-Woods Erickson, normally no friend of Trump, made four points this morning. Here they are, with some additional insights:

1. Donald Trump will still lose fewer voters by soft-pedaling abortion and adult alternative lifestyles than by emphasizing them. Note carefully: adult. He takes a different attitude when certain activists come after the nation’s children.
2. His signal achievement, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, remains.
3. By now the pro-life movement has split between those willing to take the battle to State legislatures, and those still wanting a federal ban. Trump settled the matter – though he shouldn’t “punt” on the Comstock Act.
4. Platforms are for window dressing anyway, as all Party history has shown.

If not in the platform, then where?

In any event, abortion is a symptom of the culture, and democratic elections do not change culture; they reflect it. So we need men like John Harvard, Elihu Yale, Jonathan Edwards, and the other Great Awakeners. This change must percolate through many institutions that the “Culture of Death” has compromised.

These manifestly include the nation’s primary and secondary schools, and schools of law – and medicine. The Big Cheese Teaching Doctors have been lying to their patients, and the American public, for decades. They are also the gatekeepers, who sit on Specialty Boards and refuse or revoke certification for doctors who disagree. All this deception exists for profit, not patient welfare. That mind-set produced Kermit Gosnell, M.D. – whom those same gatekeepers abandoned.

The concurrences in Dobbs show that the Supreme Court’s Moderates are so close to – yet so far from – finding an inherent right to life. This reflects a corruption of the country’s law schools. (And Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson should be first to find against abortion, which has always been an instrument of genocide.)

Donald Trump will leave people free to advocate for the change that must come, to redeem America’s soul. The GOP platform reflects this. If Joe Biden wins again – no matter who actually becomes President – the by-word will be freedom, not of religion, but from it. So if you do not want Margaret Atwood as Secretary of Information in a Biden – or Harris – or Whitmer – or Newsom administration, vote Republican. Simple as.