PrintJuly 23, 2010
Why the Revolution Will Prevail and Why It Will Last
If Republicans gain the chance, for the first time in history, to pass laws without Democrat support -- because of a potential filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, a working majority in the House, and the presidency -- what will prevent RINOs from gumming up the works? How can a brief two- or four-year period make permanent revolutionary reforms? Don't we need, instead, to amend the Constitution -- repeal the 16th Amendment and the 17th Amendment, for example?
These are all serious and fair questions, but these questions present no real obstacles. Consider RINOs. Will they stop a revolution? No. RINOs are not ideologues (at all). Rather, they fancy themselves "pragmatists." What RINOs really want is popularity, power, and prestige. However, popularity in the eyes of the leftist establishment is increasingly meaningless. Newspapers, news magazines, and network news are withering on the vine. Hollywood's left-wing lecturing films draw no audiences. Besides, as McCain found out during 2008, the fawning leftist media does not like or trust RINOs at all.
If Republicans led by conservatives run Congress and the White House, then RINOs can have a bit of power and a smidgen of prestige, but only if they are willing to support conservatives in the critical area of parliamentary procedure. That is all conservatives need. Let Susan Collins, for example, vote against a bill which provides revolutionary devolution of power over education away from Washington and education bureaucrats and directly to parents and to students. She can support Republicans in invoking cloture on the bill, saying, "I am not sure that I can support this bill, but I at least think that the Senate should vote on it." She supports cloture but votes against our bill on the floor -- and we win. We can also let RINOs get some of their small pet projects passed, which could happen only if the conservative majority in the caucus wished it so. RINOs have been hypocrites to us: They will just as quickly be hypocrites to an impotent but angry left.
The reforms passed in the period of true power must not be half-measures, and they must not require future fine-tuning. Instead, the reforms must be utterly transformative. As one example, granting parents a voucher to allow them to educate their child through public, private, charter, or home schooling and, critically, removing all subject matter jurisdiction from all federal courts on the constitutionality of this act, would gut the public education empire -- and it would be immensely popular with both students and parents. Private industry would compete aggressively for these vouchers, creating a permanent vested interest by millions of Americans in keeping this reform in place.
Wouldn't Democrats just repeal this reform when they had power? No, because the only times that Democrats have had the power to repeal or to pass laws were in those tiny windows of unchecked power -- FDR, LBJ, post-Watergate Carter, and Obama until Scott Brown. It requires very little muscle to stop new federal laws. Control of either House of Congress is enough; control of the White House and only 34% of either house is enough; control of 41% of the Senate is enough. It is incredibly difficult to pass a federal law, which includes repeal of an earlier federal law, against even a weak minority.
Shouldn't we amend the Constitution instead? Repeal the Income Tax Amendment. Provide that state legislatures once again choose senators. Change the Constitution so that our liberty will never be in jeopardy again. These are good ideas, but amending the Constitution is politically impossible for truly revolutionary reforms. Amendment requires not simply a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress, but ratification by three-quarters of the state legislatures. A foe of the proposed amendment who controls 13 of the 99 state legislative chambers can block confirmation of a proposed amendment.
But there is another problem with just amending our way to freedom. Even then, any new constitutional amendment simply becomes putty in the hands of jurists like future Justice Elena Kagan. The 14th Amendment provides for equal protection of the laws, which the Supreme Court has interpreted as unequal protection of the laws. The Constitution, as it is, already protects our liberty. The left, though, just ignores the Constitution.
We can pass a dozen or so revolutionary reforms, though, in a hundred days, if we have the three elements of a filibuster-proof Senate, a working House majority, and a president -- and a clear, uncompromising agenda. Because the left feasts on the rotting tissue of the secular nanny-state, one purpose of these reforms must be to starve these carrion birds. Allowing vouchers for education, for example, would improve education, but it would also drain the life out of the political giant of leftist establishment education. That reform -- and others would operate in much the same way -- would not only make America work better, but it would inflict a mortal wound upon the existing power structure that the left has built over the last eighty years.
What must be done is this: (1) Conservatives must agree on the precise language of the dozen or so reforms which will be passed, and that language must not change; (2) these must be appealing to most Americans, as the Contract With America was in 1994; (3) the reforms must each create genuine, revolutionary change which will continue until -- in the unlikely event -- the left ever has gargantuan political power again; (4) we must put aside, for now, our justified anger at RINOs or any other group of prettified, phony pomposities whose help may be needed, as revolutions are won by shrewdly using potential, even dubious, allies; and (5) we must grab the coming, brief, historic chance.
Bruce Walker is the author of two books: Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie and The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.
