The Republicans Are Blowing It – AGAIN

John R. “Buck” Surdu

Biden’s poll numbers continue to plummet. It still amazes me that as many as 38% of the population still supports him. Destroying energy independence, the embarrassing flight from Afghanistan, creating runaway inflation with reckless spending, proposing another spending bill to combat the spending-induced inflation he has already caused, crawling to rapacious dictators asking for oil while selling off portions of the strategic petroleum reserve to China, fascist masking and vaccine mandates that have left the health care system dangerously short of professionals, redefining terms (lying) to hide his failures, and illegal and unethical ties to foreign government (including China) are just some of his long list of failures. I recently listened to two pollsters describe the lack of support for Biden – reflected in his own party publicly abandoning him. They noted under normal circumstances this lack of support would translate into a bonanza for the Republicans. They pointed out, however, that in generic matchups Democrats and Republicans are in a dead heat. This means that when “likely voters” were asked if they would vote for a generic, unnamed Republican or Democrat, the numbers were statistically close to equal. Even if they are off by a percentage point or two, this is a startling result.

The pollsters were at a loss to explain this disconnect, but the answer is simple: the Republicans stand for nothing! While they gleefully bash Biden and eagerly predict a Red Wave in November, they have not proposed solid, hopeful, forward looking policy messages. Republicans are demonstrating what they do best: fight among themselves and lose gracefully but never, never govern effectively. As I suggested months ago, the Republicans need to propose a New Covenant with America that is actionable, believable, and hopeful. Their Covenant will accomplish a, b, and c. The products of our failed education system cannot handle nuance. The Republicans need to propose a small set of meaningful policies that are achievable and can be articulated in short sentences and small words.

People who share my lack of confidence in the Red Wave point to three important facts. First, the Democrats are fundraising millions to Republican’s thousands. Perhaps that is not surprising given the number of woke billionaires on the Left, but where are the conservative billionaires and their money? Second, Republicans have completely abandoned the Reagan dogma of “Thou shall not speak ill of another Republican. The recent primaries have shown vile and personal attacks between Republican primaries – that will certainly show up in Democrat campaign adds purchased with those millions of woke dollars. Kevin Walling observed, “In Pennsylvania, recent polling has Oz down double digits against his Democratic rival Fetterman, due in large part to inability to unite Republicans across the Commonwealth.” He also observed, “As former House Speaker Tip O’Neill famously quipped, ‘all politics are local,’ and the senate majority will not be decided in Washington nor what decisions happen in Washington, but will rather be by voters who look at their candidates as binary choices. And, with a fractured slate of less than stellar Republican candidates,” the probability of the Red Wave is waning. Third, the Democrats have been able to turn the repeal of Roe vs. Wade into a weapon against republicans in the same way they corrupted the good intentions of the Tea Party. Republicans need to get off their soap boxes with anti-choice rhetoric and stick to the facts: choice exists, and that choice will be made in the local legislatures far from the obscene and unconstitutional overreach of the Federal bureaucracy.

More importantly, and less in keeping with their time-honored tradition, Republicans need to get everyone in their party singing from the same sheet of music instead of fighting among themselves with competing visions – AND THEY ACTUALLY NEED TO DO THOSE THINGS IF THEY GET POWER. Imagine that! Working to live up to your campaign promises! The Republicans can be the party of parents, working Americans, and patriots if they get their collective heads out of their derrieres and so something for a change. The time to have done that was months ago, but the opportunity has not been lost.

Republicans are only slightly less heinous and self-serving than Democrats. Slightly. There is a saying that Republicans like big government, but Democrats like bigger government. Does anyone really think that a Republican congress is going to repeal Bankrupt Back Better or Inflation Exacerbation Act, shrink government, drastically curtail the bloat of regulatory agencies, purge the military of woke sycophants cosplaying as warrior leaders, fix the border, return to energy independence, get biological males out of women’s sports, wipe out the Department of Education, reduce private sector censorship and get control of the tech tyrants, drastically CUT the federal budget, convert the secret police (FBI) back into a law-enforcement agency, reign in the intelligence community, and end the fascist response to the pandemic madness? While many of my conservative friends think so, I don’t. I don’t have any hope we will see that happen. And that doesn’t even count the work needed to re-convince our allies that we are good friends and our opponents that we are powerful enemies. I consider most politicians to be without honor, and politicians never willingly give back power. (For this reason, one of my friends thinks that Trump and others like him will succeed: they are not career politicians.) Republicans usually slow the growth and overreach of government, but in my lifetime, I have never seen meaningful reduction of government.

Republicans have shown their only method of governance is losing gracefully, going along to get along, and infighting. While some will argue that the Republicans have purged their ranks of RINOs, I am not so sanguine. If they want to gain and retain control of the Federal government, they need to prepare to really govern for a change. While a third party has no hope of winning the presidency, a third party has an opportunity to create sizable inroads into Congress, since polls show that 30% of the population trusts neither Democrats nor Republicans to run the economy.

So, what is needed is a Covenant with America, created NOW and used by all candidates in 2022 and 2024. The cynics like me will see this as empty campaign promises because the Republicans are led by Quislings, like Mitch McConnell. (Vidkun Quisling was the Norway leader who collaborated with Nazi Germany after it occupied Norway in WWII, and Quisling Republicans are my name for those who collaborate on things like reckless spending and power collecting.)

We all know that politicians, with few exceptions, are good at promise making and bad at promise keeping. There are no strong conservatives willing to fight hard for these issues at the helm of the party. But it is a start. This is akin to the party platform that no one reads. It should be clear, actionable, and in layman’s terms.

Why the term “covenant,” when the previous attempt by Newt Gingrich was a “contract?” The dictionary definition of covenant is “a formal and serious agreement or promise.” Contrast this with “contract,” which is “a binding agreement between two or more persons or parties.” I use the term “covenant” in the vain hope that dishonorable politicians will work harder to fulfill their covenant with the American people than a bunch of lawyers looking for loopholes in a contract. I know: naïve.

What would this covenant look like? Here is what I’d like to see in the Covenant:

• Shrink the federal government. Actually shrink it. When Al Gore claimed to have shrunk the government, he merely transferred labor from government employees to contractors — raising the cost of government. Shrinking the government means slashing and burning through regulatory agencies, massive reductions in Congressional and Presidential staffs (personal and professional), cutting the self-licking ice cream cone that is the Pentagon, and drastically reducing the size of cabinet departments. My going-in position is to cut the budgets of most regulatory agencies in half and let them decide what is important and what to jettison. Re-evaluate after a couple of years by measuring outcomes before and after the cuts. You know, use data, which is something the Federal government rarely does. Then cut it all in half again. Move power to the States where it belongs. If the Congress is going to ignore the advice and analyses of non-partisan groups like the Congressional Budget Office, disband those offices and save a few dollars.
• Focus on the 10^th Amendment. Get the Federal government out of our lives. Move power to the States and local communities where it belongs and where the people have greater influence and control.
• End Federal overreach associated with future pandemics. The correct role of the federal government during a crisis is making sure the resources are available to the States (PPE, hospital ships, streamlining vaccine development, etc.) not mandating (and vilifying) State responses. The role of the Federal government is not to restrict the access to therapeutics from Florida or mandating health choices that belong to doctors and their patients. The pandemic needed to be handled like FEMA is supposed to handle natural disasters; they are there to help states manage crises, not manage the crises for them. More importantly, instead of vilifying Red state responses, which turned out to be effective, the role of the Federal government is to collect best practices from across the country and share those.
• Do not apply federal money to bailing out cities that have defunded their police, encouraged lawlessness, or bankrupted themselves with stupid, Marxist, and woke policies. As an American, I have no trouble with FEMA using my taxes to help a community impacted by a natural disaster, but I resent my taxes helping Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and others recover from their own stupid decisions.
• Do not apply any federal resources to help sanctuary cities deal with a few thousand illegal immigrants. Instead of adding 87,000 agents to the world’s largest terrorist organization (the IRS), add 87,000 agents to the Border Patrol.
• Eliminate the Department of Education. (See my article: The Federal Government is the Weakest Link that describes other Federal departments that should be shuttered.). We need to get woke Federal Vogons (a bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious, and callous race from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) out of education. Since the creation of the Department of Education, we spend more money per student than any country in the world while our educational outcomes in the bottom of the middle third of the western world. Return control of schools and standards to local communities. See my articles on education here, here, and here.
• Return the FBI to the premier law enforcement agency in the world. The FBI behaves more like a Secret Police. That means purging the upper ranks of politics. While many advocate disbanding the organization entirely, I am not suggesting a Biden-like purge of everyone who supports the opposite party. I am talking about making the organization — at all levels — scrupulously apolitical.
• Ditto for the intelligence community.
• Ditto for the ranks of General and Flag officers in the military. I have written several articles on the woke rot within the military here, here, and here. We need to purge the military of woke sycophants cosplaying as warrior leaders — particularly at our military academies.
• Stop all the ridiculously self-defeating rhetoric about banning abortion everywhere for any reason no matter what. Republicans crowing like that is only playing into the hands of the Democrats. The story is that the Dobbs decision is pro-10^th Amendment and is pro-choice. That means freedom for each State to CHOOSE the level of abortion their citizens are willing to accept. Period. Otherwise, keep your mouth shut.
• Close off the border. Cut off the flow of illegal drugs, human trafficking, and illegal immigrants. Find illegal immigrants and deport them. If they want to come to the US, they need to go through legal channels. Period. Eliminate “anchor baby” status.
• Return to energy independence. Renew our arrangements with Canada. Build pipelines. Build lots of nuclear power plants. And, yes, explore alternative sources of energy where they make sense. Bring on-line dozens of new, small, safe nuclear power plants throughout the country.
• Eliminate the hyperbole over the climate “crisis.” We can all be better stewards of our environment, but that should include real data collection, real science, not “Fauci science,” analysis, and reasonable actions. The US already exceeds the Paris pledge, so we don’t need to destroy our economy. If you want to have meaningful impact, don’t destroy our petroleum industry; instead, punish rich hypocrites and their private jets.
• Pass legislation that protects women’s athletics from men pretending to be women.
• Curtail the ability of de facto monopolies (the tech tyrants) to censor free speech. See my article on regulating the Internet here.
• Repeal the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Build Bankruptcy Better plan, the Inflation Exacerbation Act, and most of the rampant spending that has occurred in the past 20 months. There is little about infrastructure in any of these obscene spending orgies.
• Invest in real infrastructure improvement. That means roads and bridges. That also means pushing broadband Internet connectivity out to rural areas, not just Blue cities. That also means reliable power grids and power production throughout the country.

And how would this covenant be used? I see the Covenant with America as akin to the party’s platform. All candidates should refer to the covenant in campaign speeches, campaign adds, talking points, appearances on Sunday “news” programs, etc. Each Republican must sign the covenant and publicly take ownership for working to achieve its tenets and take responsibility for failing to do so. The Republicans need to be on guard to not let Soros and the media pervert the covenant, turning it into something it isn’t, like they perverted the Tea Party. More importantly, it should guide the creation of legislation and voting patterns by all Republicans. Only by abiding by the covenant and working together (for a change) can the Republicans hope to ease America back from the brink of civil war and destruction.

A Covenant with America is a good start, but it will take a lot of work to build trust among taxpayers that Republican politicians will even TRY to live up to it.