How to Fix Schools, Power, Housing, and the $10B Veterans Promise in 10 Years (Full Blueprint)

How to Fix Schools, Power, Housing, and the $10B Veterans Promise in 10 Years (Full Blueprint)

In Iraq I walked little girls to school past men who wanted them dead for learning to read. Then I came home and watched American kids get diplomas for sitting in a chair.

Class is in session. This is Part 3 of 3, and like the other two, it stands on its own. Part 1 fenced the Article V convention, put Congress in a barracks, and laid out every amendment the plan needs. Part 2 took the IRS out of your paycheck, gave you a retirement account with your name on it, gave every citizen a card at fourteen, and turned welfare into a trampoline with an exit sign. This part is the country you actually live in every day: the school your kids sit in, the air and the power plant, the house you cannot afford, the hospital bill nobody can read, the veterans this country broke and then billed, the prison, the flag, the truck our soldiers ride in, and a place for your family to go on a Saturday.

Two classrooms explain this whole Part.

The first one was in Iraq. In 2007 and 2008 I was a medic, and some of the most important work I did had nothing to do with bandages. We helped stand up a school, and I walked the girls to it. Those girls knew exactly what an education was worth, because somebody was willing to kill them to keep them from getting one.

The second classroom is mine, in Northeast Ohio, at a Career Tech district where most of my kids qualify for free lunch. A few years ago, a student sat in my Anatomy class who had “passed” the prerequisite. He could not tell me the difference between a cell and a molecule. He had a transcript that said he knew it. He did not know it. He passed the course and learned nothing, and the adults in the building called that success.

That student wanted to work in a NICU. Think about that the next time someone tells you grades are just a number.

Teachers did not fail that boy. The system did, and systems are built by people who never have to live inside them.

I have also watched this country find trillions for programs Article I never authorized, while failing, Congress after Congress, to stop clawing back the retirement pay of combat-wounded troops. If your compassion cannot find the wounded before it finds the soda aisle, it is not compassion. It is a vote farm.

— I. THE MASTERY EDUCATION ACT — Short title: Train Up, Don’t Seat-Time

This Act has a federal half and a state half, and I am going to be honest about which is which. The Tenth Amendment does not stop being true because I like my own idea. Washington’s job is to get out of the way. The classroom itself belongs to the states, and I wrote this as a model statute I want Ohio to pass first.

SECTION 1. FINDINGS

The Constitution mentions education zero times. The Department of Education opened its doors in 1980. Since the 1970s, America has roughly doubled inflation-adjusted spending per student — and the long-term national test scores for seventeen-year-olds in reading and math are essentially flat. Same scores. Twice the money. If a student handed me that lab result and called it progress, I would ask him to define “progress.”

Quinn’s Tenth Law says liberals never think what they are doing is wrong; they only think they have not done enough of it yet. Every time those flat scores come out, the answer is more money for the same building.

The 1963 Congressional Record list of Communist goals includes Goal 17, to get control of the schools and soften the curriculum, and Goal 41, to emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. I will let every parent who has been told they have no right to see their own child’s curriculum decide for themselves which of those is still “pending.”

Proverbs 22:6 says to train up a child in the way he should go. The Hebrew verb is chanak — to train, to dedicate, to shape. Not to stamp a passing grade on a forehead and wave goodbye.

The Army solved the competence problem long ago. Army training doctrine rates a unit’s proficiency as Trained, needs Practice, or Untrained — T, P, or U. A unit does not deploy at P. A child should not graduate at P and be told it was kindness.

What is next, a state that stops requiring students to show they can read, write, and do math before they graduate? … Oh, wait. Oregon suspended exactly that requirement in 2021 and has kept extending the suspension. I really need to stop making jokes. Somebody keeps turning them into policy.

SECTION 2. THE FEDERAL HALF: THE CATHEDRAL CLOSES

The Department of Education is repealed by Congress. The current administration has already started shrinking it, but only Congress can abolish what Congress created, so this finishes the job. Its statutes that commandeer state classrooms die with it. Student records transfer to the states, and privacy protections stay. The cathedral does not.

Federal student lending stops being an entitlement. The One Big Beautiful Bill already started drawing this line: a college program whose graduates earn less than a typical high-school graduate between twenty-five and thirty-four, in two out of three years, loses access to federal loans. That bar is lying on the floor. A program that cannot clear it should not have the taxpayer as its co-signer.

The GI Bill is earned. Everyone else signed a note. It is unfair to ask the plumber who skipped college, the kid who worked two jobs to graduate debt-free, and the soldier who enlisted to pay for school to cover a loan somebody else volunteered to take out — which sat in COVID forbearance for more than three years at zero interest. Biden’s Autopen tried to hand that bill to all of them anyway, and the Supreme Court said no in Biden v. Nebraska in 2023. If that is how we treat debt now, I have a mortgage. I would like the renters in my county to start paying it.

SECTION 3. THE STATE HALF: THE CALENDAR

Year-round school with four breaks, one each season. A comment from this very classroom gave me that idea, and it is better than mine was. Courses run in one-semester or one-trimester blocks, the state’s choice, published in advance.

You take the block. You demonstrate mastery. If you do not, you repeat that block — not the whole year, not a scarlet letter, not a punishment. You stay on the skill until you have the skill, then you move on.

That is how you train a medic. That is how you train a welder. That is how you ought to train a citizen.

SECTION 4. MASTERY GOALS, NOT COVERAGE

A Mastery Goal is a specific, observable, measurable demonstration that a student can perform a defined skill to a defined standard. Not exposure. Performance. Repeatable.

Teachers build their own Pathways to the Goal, and different pathways can reach the same goal. The goal does not move.

To advance, a student must pass BOTH the classroom grade and the block mastery test. The grade is the training record. The test is the live-fire range. You can ace the class and fail the range. You need both.

In my own room, “pass” looks like this. In a Physics block on circuits, the student builds the circuit, measures the current, predicts what changes when a resistor moves, and writes the sentence explaining why without copying a poster. In an Anatomy block on the heart, the student names the chambers, traces a single drop of blood through the whole loop, and finds the same structures on a model he has not been drilled on that morning. In a Diesel block, the torque spec is met on a bus that will carry children. There is no essay that substitutes for that.

Partial credit exists on the classroom grade. Partial credit does not exist on the mastery test. P is not T.

The state publishes the cut score before the school year starts and never moves it after the scores come in. If a state board tries to set “passing” at forty percent and call it equity, the whole system is a lie. And no state board may rename a failing score “emerging,” “approaching,” or “developing.” Words are not alchemy.

SECTION 5. LEVELS INSTEAD OF A DECODER RING

Every subject runs on levels. Your level is the number of sequential blocks you have mastered. Math Level 1 is one block of foundational math, mastered. Math Level 12 is twelve. Nobody has to call a guidance counselor to find out what an A meant at that school that year.

A diploma becomes a record of levels. There is no fake “everyone graduates” minimum, but there are plenty of honest minimums to ENTER things. Want Physics? Math Level 6, because physics without algebra is interpretive dance. Want an electrician’s apprenticeship? The trade publishes that it wants Math Level 8 and Physical Science Level 4. Transparent. Fair. Readable by a fourteen-year-old.

Students branch. Math Level 14 opens Physics 1, Chemistry 1, and Statistics 1. Biology Level 5 opens Anatomy, Ecology, or Microbiology. A student who reaches high school without the base levels goes into intensive remediation and a job-skills pathway, with an honest conversation, not a punishment. Non-skilled labor training is a legitimate path. It has more dignity than a fraudulent diploma.

Online-only high school is not part of this model. We ran that experiment in 2020 and 2021. I have the data sitting in my gradebook. No.

SECTION 6. AN HONEST DISTRIBUTION

A bell curve describes the spread of grades inside a block. Mastery describes the threshold to move on. They are not enemies. A published honest distribution — roughly ten percent A, twenty percent B, forty percent C, twenty percent D, ten percent F — kills the participation trophy. The A means something again because not everyone gets one. The D is not a verdict. It is a map: here is where you are, and here is the next block.

SECTION 7. DIVISIONS — AND STUDENTS MOVE

Division I is college-prep rigor. Division II is the capable middle. Division III puts Career Tech at the center of the building, not in a portable out back. Division IV is intensive intervention: small classes, foundations, patience.

Students move between divisions. The division is where you are right now, not who you are forever. Alabama and a Division III program are not the same football program, and nobody honest pretends they are — but a D-III player who puts in the work gets noticed.

SECTION 8. BIG BROTHER, BIG SISTER

Study hall dies. High-school students in good standing mentor younger students, structured and supervised. The best mentor is not always the straight-A student. Sometimes it is the kid who knows exactly what being behind feels like. Teaching is the deepest form of learning, and attendance changes the day a seven-year-old’s face lights up because YOU walked in.

SECTION 9. DISCIPLINE THAT TEACHES

A high-school student is a young adult. When he earns an in-school consequence, the consequence is real: community service, an orange vest, beautification detail, a sack lunch, work. If he commits the same offense a year later on the same street, the vest is not optional and the officer is not a school resource officer anymore. The school’s job is to make the connection between choice and consequence undeniable while the stakes are still survivable.

The resource officer is not the enemy. For a lot of my kids, he is the only stable adult man they see all week.

SECTION 10. CAREER TECH RUNS THE BUILDING

Diesel students maintain the bus fleet. Auto students maintain the vans. Construction students repair the building and bid community projects. Health-tech students staff a supervised first layer of prevention. Culinary and baking students ARE the lunch program.

Frozen, reheated school lunches are an embarrassment. I have eaten better in a combat-zone dining facility. Feed them fresh food, cooked by their classmates, because they matter.

Career Tech students who maintain the fleet are covered like apprentices for injury, not like visitors. If the work is real, the protection is real. And the school becomes a functioning economic entity, not a building where a lie gets stamped on a transcript.

SECTION 11. WHAT COLLEGES AND EMPLOYERS SEE

A transcript is a level list: Math 14, Writing 11, Biology 8, Culinary 6. Colleges and employers publish the levels they want. A Math 14 from a rural district and a Math 14 from the wealthiest suburb mean the same thing, because the mastery test is the same. A senior who wants nursing can see in March, not August, that the college wants Writing 10, Biology 6, Chemistry 4, and Math 8 — and exactly which block she still needs.

You can always raise a level after you leave, on your own time and your own dime. The record never closes. Only the lie does.

A student who carried a seventeen percent average for three quarters and asks for “credit recovery” during the school day gets the same answer under this Act every time: the next block, taught again, tested again. I have already watched the other answer produce a future NICU nurse who could not name an organ.

SECTION 12. NO REBUILT CATHEDRAL

A state may not take federal money and rebuild a Department of Education with extra steps. The point was always the classroom, never the org chart.

SECTION 13. THE HONEST TRANSCRIPT RULES

Four rules that do more for a transcript’s honesty than any curriculum ever written.

NO U’S. To advance a level, a student must show mastery on the published task list with ZERO tasks rated Untrained. Not one. A U means a load-bearing skill is missing, and advancing that student anyway is the same mistake we have been making for thirty years with a friendlier label.

• END CREDIT RECOVERY AS WE KNOW IT. Credit recovery used to mean summer school. Now it often means a computer module during a study hall that erases a year of failure in a few weeks. I have had a student carry a seventeen percent average for three straight quarters and tell me, with total confidence, that she would pass anyway because “that is what happens every year.” She wanted to be a NICU nurse. She was genuinely stunned when the college rejection letters came. Her character did not do that to her. We trained her to expect it. Under this Act, a failed block is retaken as a block, with a real teacher.
• KILL THE GIFT D, AND FLIP THE BURDEN. I have lived the way a “gift D” gets made. A teacher enters an honest F. Then the meetings start. Did you modify the assignments? Document every parent contact? Every tutoring offer? File the intervention plan? Even when the teacher has done all of it, there is always one more form. And the teacher next door who gives everybody a C gets nothing but smiles. So teachers learn that a 60 makes the whole circus disappear. They are not weak for taking that deal. They are rational. The system punishes honesty and rewards compliance.
• I have worked for principals who backed an honest grade every time, and they are worth their weight in gold. This is a system problem, not a people problem. So flip it: the DISTRICT must document why an unmastered student should advance, and the teacher’s honest grade stands unless the district can prove the grade wrong. Watch how fast the incentives change.
• TRUANCY IS A WORD AGAIN. Last year, two out of every three of my students met the definition of chronically absent — missing ten percent or more of the school year. Most were promoted anyway. The only person in the chain held accountable was the teacher, expected to catch a kid up on thirty missed days. Bring back truancy enforcement with teeth, and make parents legally accountable for a child who simply does not come. The most valuable lesson school teaches is not the Krebs cycle. It is that expectations exist, you are required to meet them, and the consequences belong to you.

SECTION 14. SIXTEEN-WEEK BLOCKS, NOT THIRTY-SIX-WEEK SENTENCES

Math is not a year-long subject. It is a SEQUENTIAL subject, which is a different thing. Under the old calendar, a kid who realizes in November that he is lost has two choices: drag himself to June for a D, or fail the whole year. Either way he loses nine months waiting for the calendar to hand him a restart.

In a sixteen-week block, the decision point comes in sixteen weeks, and the teacher knows exactly which tasks came back P or U. The retake is a targeted repair, not a verdict on a child’s worth. Parents lose their minds when a kid is held back a year. A semester is a much more honest conversation, because it IS more honest: sixteen weeks to fix a sixteen-week problem. Combine that with four seasonal breaks, and a student who stalls in the fall can be caught, repaired, and back on schedule by spring. The gap between finding a problem and fixing it shrinks from two years to one quarter.

SECTION 15. TESTS THAT HOLD THE LINE

In 2024 the SAT went digital, and the College Board shortened reading passages to a paragraph or two with a single question each — about the length of a social-media post — and dropped the long passages from America’s founding documents. The Declaration of Independence, apparently, is too long for a college-bound seventeen-year-old. It is about 1,300 words. I have assigned longer lab reports.

Meanwhile the Classic Learning Test asks students to read Plato, Frederick Douglass, Euclid, and Einstein in the original. States should accept rigorous alternatives like the CLT for scholarships and graduation, and should tie their own recognition of any test to whether its scale stays stable from year to year. A just weight and a false balance are not the same thing. Proverbs 11:1 said that long before the College Board had a marketing department.

SECTION 16. NO LOWERED BARS BY CATEGORY

Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the classroom too often teach students the same lesson credit recovery teaches: the rules are different for you based on who you are, not what you do. They call it equity. I call it condescension with a marketing budget. Roland Fryer, the Harvard economist who has done some of the most rigorous work on race and schooling in the country, puts it simply: find talent wherever it hides, and then demand excellence from it. The Supreme Court reached the same destination in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard in 2023, holding that race-based admissions preferences violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment — the amendment written to protect people who had been told the rules did not apply to them equally. The standard is the standard. The support is where the compassion goes.

SECTION 17. COMMUNISM 101 — REQUIRED, PASS/FAIL, GRADED BY SOCIALISM

This is my favorite law in the whole series.

Every high school student takes a one-semester course called COMMUNISM — a model state graduation requirement, like everything else in this classroom Act. Not “Comparative Economic Systems.” Not “Perspectives on Collectivism.” Communism. Taught the way I teach sepsis: bluntly, clinically, with primary sources and photographs.

The content: the Holodomor, the engineered famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933 while grain was shipped out. The Great Leap Forward, when tens of millions of Chinese starved while farmers were ordered to melt their pots in backyard furnaces. The Killing Fields, where the Khmer Rouge murdered people for wearing glasses, because glasses meant you could read. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag. The Berlin Wall — and I want every student to notice which way the guns were pointed. Venezuela, within their own lifetimes: sitting on the largest proven oil reserves on earth and unable to keep medicine in its hospitals. And one satellite photograph of the Korean peninsula at night. Same people, same language, same history. One half lit. One half dark. That single picture teaches more than a semester of lectures.

Then they read all forty-five goals from the January 10, 1963 Congressional Record, and they evaluate them themselves. Goal 17, to get control of the schools. Goal 41, to raise children away from the influence of their parents. I do not tell them what to conclude. That is what a science class does: present the data and let the student run the analysis.

And the grading is the lesson. The course is pass/fail and never touches the GPA, so nobody’s future is at stake. But inside the course, every score is pooled and redistributed. The class average becomes everyone’s grade. Extra credit is confiscated at the moment it is earned and distributed to the collective. And a small percentage of every redistribution is kept by the teacher as an “administrative fee,” because that is how it works in real life too.

I already know what happens, because I have watched the raw version in my own gradebook. One year my first period had two students who missed more than forty days each. The class average was 58 percent. In the same room, I had a young woman earning 103 percent, who emailed me at eleven on a Sunday night because she was not satisfied with almost understanding the parasympathetic nervous system. Under the redistribution rule, she gets a 58. So do the two who never showed up. The gap closes. Everyone fails.

And this should keep people up at night: she was ALREADY redistributing. Voluntarily. She shared her notes and stayed after class to help her classmates, better than I could, because sometimes a peer unlocks what a teacher cannot. The moment you mandate it, you do not get more of that. You get less, because generosity turned into extraction.

By week three, somebody asks why they should even try. By week five, the class average drops, and the coasters end up with worse grades than when the achievers were carrying them. By week six, a student, never me, proposes a tracking sheet of who is not contributing. The students invent the informant system on their own, because the incentives demand it.

Then, in the final unit, I hand them the mirror. What you just experienced with points, the Ukrainians experienced with grain. You lost motivation. They lost their lives. Same mechanism. Different stakes.

I would bet everything I own that this one course produces more committed defenders of free people and free markets than every think tank in Washington combined, because they will not have read about it. They will have lived it.

— II. THE FIRST RUNG — Short title: Wages, Licenses, and the Right to a First Job

I teach Career Tech. My students do not want a speech about the dignity of work. They want their first job. And every “living wage” politician keeps sawing the bottom rung off the ladder and then holding a press conference in front of the ladder.

THE WAGE FLOOR

Here is a revolutionary concept. A wage is a voluntary agreement. An employer offers a wage, a worker accepts it, and if nobody accepts, the employer raises the offer or goes out of business. Exploitation would be a gun to his head. This is a handshake. We call it a market.

When you force the price of an hour of labor above what an unskilled sixteen-year-old can produce in that hour, the employer does not magically pay more. He hires fewer sixteen-year-olds, buys a kiosk, or asks the veteran employee to cover two stations. The kid who never gets hired never builds a résumé, never learns to show up on time, and never gets the second job that actually pays. That is how a “living wage” turns into a lifetime of unemployment and dependency — and a dependent voter is a reliable voter. I do not think that part is an accident.

Federal law already has a youth training wage: an employer may pay a worker under twenty a lower rate for the first ninety days. Extend it to a full year and let it apply to documented trainees of any age. A state may set whatever wage floor its voters will tolerate. The federal floor should not price my students out of the shop they are training in.

And the “starter job” is not a dead end. McDonald’s and Walmart both pay above the federal minimum, and a crew member who keeps showing up can become a manager, and a Walmart store manager can earn six figures without a single dollar of student debt — more than plenty of people with master’s degrees.

My own modest proposal, since everybody in Washington seems to have one: every student who attends class should be paid a living wage, regardless of age, by the school. It is only fair. They are working. It is just common sense. … No? Then maybe stop pretending that a sixteen-year-old’s first summer job is supposed to support a family of four.

OCCUPATIONAL LICENSING

A state may not require a license for a job that does not involve a body, a boiler, or a bridge unless it can show a real harm that a bond cannot cover. Hair braiding is not neurosurgery. Licensing boards may not demand a four-year degree for a trade that does not use one. And a journeyman who can pass the practical exam gets reciprocity in every state. A welder’s bead does not change when it crosses the Ohio River.

— III. STEAL THE ENVIRONMENT: THE CLEAN REPLACEMENT AND ALBEDO ACT — Short title: Build the New Plant Before You Padlock the Old Gate, and Cover the Parking Lot While You Are At It

I have four kids. Every one of them is going to inherit this planet whether Congress passes a resolution about it or not. And every fall, a few of my physics students walk in already scared, because somebody told them the world ends in twelve years unless their parents sell the family car. Then they turn on the news and watch the people who told them that climb the stairs of a private jet headed to a climate summit. Kids are not stupid. They notice.

The left has spent twenty years telling America that Republicans do not care about clean air, clean water, or the climate, and we let them have the issue. That was a mistake. This section takes it back, with physics instead of press releases.

SECTION 1. FINDINGS: SCALE, MOLECULES, AND PRIVATE JETS

Scale matters. A firefly and the sun are both light sources, and if I told you a firefly was going to give you a sunburn, you would correctly assume I had lost my mind. The worst warming event in the fossil record, the Great Dying 252 million years ago, took hundreds of thousands of years of continuous volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia, carbon dioxide levels several times higher than today, methane pouring off the sea floor, and a temperature rise on the order of ten degrees Celsius — and then it wiped out the overwhelming majority of life on earth. We are at roughly 1.2 degrees. That deserves intelligent policy. It does not deserve panic from people who fly private to deliver the panic.

And if you were born before 1980, the official climate deadlines have killed you so many times that somebody owes you a cake.

The Department of Energy’s Climate Working Group released a critical review in July 2025 arguing that many models have run hot and that overly aggressive mitigation policies could do more harm than good. A 2025 satellite-gravity study found that the Antarctic ice sheet actually gained mass from 2021 to 2023. I am not telling you to stop caring. I am telling you science is supposed to argue with itself, and anyone who tells you it is “settled” has stopped doing science.

I also follow molecules, not press releases. When a state padlocks a refinery and imports gasoline on a tanker that burns bunker fuel the whole way across the ocean, the carbon does not die. It changes passports. Under international reporting rules, fuel burned by ships and planes on international trips is kept out of every nation’s official total. The pollution still happens. The spreadsheet stays clean. If my students did that on a lab report, I would call it cooking the data.

What is next, a state that bans the sale of new gas cars and then, the very same week, asks its residents not to charge their electric cars because the grid cannot handle it? … Wait. California did exactly that in August 2022. I could not make that up. My imagination is not that good.

And Quinn’s Fifth Law: when liberalism conflicts with reality, reality must give way. Hundreds of private jets flew into a single climate summit in Egypt in 2022 so their passengers could discuss your heating bill. Every one of those meetings could have been a video call. Four hundred cardiologists on a private jet to tell you to exercise more. That is not environmentalism. That is aristocracy with a recycling logo.

SECTION 2. THE REPLACEMENT RULE

Nobody padlocks a refinery, a gas plant, a coal unit, or a nuclear unit until the replacement megawatts or barrels are built and connected. A shutdown permit without a replacement certificate is void. When a 1970s gas unit is dying, a company files a replacement certificate for a modern turbine with lower emissions per megawatt and closed-loop cooling, and the old gate closes the week the new unit syncs to the grid — not the week somebody drops a press release.

SECTION 3. BUILD THE CLEAN REFINERY HERE

We should refine American oil in America, in modern plants that pollute less per barrel than anything in the countries we currently ship it to. Every barrel refined here instead of overseas cuts a tanker trip, keeps the jobs home, and keeps fuel for our military and our Strategic Petroleum Reserve on our own soil instead of on the far end of a shipping lane an enemy can close. A new refinery or plant that is cleaner than what it replaces gets a tax holiday on the new investment for a published term, a permitting shot clock measured in months instead of decades, and relief from process rules that exist only to stall a project rather than measure a molecule.

SECTION 4. THE ALBEDO PROVISIONS

Albedo is how much sunlight a surface reflects instead of absorbing. Fresh snow reflects around 85 percent. Black asphalt reflects somewhere between 5 and 10 percent and turns the rest into heat. The United States has hundreds of millions of parking spaces, estimates run up to a couple of billion, most of them black asphalt, baking all day and producing nothing useful. That is the Stefan-Boltzmann law, and it is in my textbook.

o SOLAR CANOPIES OVER PARKING LOTS: accelerated depreciation for any business that covers its lot with solar canopies. The panels shade the asphalt, keep the cars cool, cut the air conditioning load on nearby buildings, and generate electricity. One structure, three wins.

o PARKING GARAGES INSTEAD OF SURFACE LOTS: a deduction for big-box stores and developers that replace acres of blacktop with a parking structure. One garage replaces several lots, shrinks the heat-soaking footprint, and cuts stormwater runoff. Put canopies on the roof and you have solved three problems with one building.

o METAL AND REFLECTIVE ROOFS: a tax credit for homeowners and businesses who choose a light-colored metal roof or other reflective roofing when they reroof. A light metal roof can run dozens of degrees cooler than dark shingles on a summer afternoon, sheds its heat quickly after sunset, lasts two to three times longer, and can be recycled when it is finally done. Asphalt shingles are one of the biggest streams of construction waste in the country.

o URBAN FORESTS: shade, evaporative cooling, and actual photosynthesis. Cities that plant and maintain canopy trees get priority for any remaining infrastructure money.

SECTION 5. BURN THE METHANE

If your concern is greenhouse forcing, you should be obsessed with methane, not carbon dioxide. Over twenty years, methane traps somewhere around eighty times more heat than CO2, by the IPCC’s own numbers. And one of the best things you can do with methane is BURN it, because burning turns it into CO2 and water — a much weaker greenhouse gas. Natural gas burned for electricity produces roughly half the CO2 of coal for the same power and keeps methane from leaking out of landfills and wells unburned. The movement that spent a decade trying to ban natural gas has been fighting to leave the WORSE gas in the air. Quinn’s First Law has never had a cleaner demonstration. So: capture and flare-or-use requirements for landfill and wellhead methane, and an end to policies that force gas plants offline in favor of nothing.

SECTION 6. NUCLEAR AND YUCCA MOUNTAIN

France gets roughly two-thirds or more of its electricity from nuclear power and has some of the lowest per-capita emissions in the industrialized world. A nuclear plant emits zero carbon while running, runs twenty-four hours a day regardless of the weather, and per unit of energy produced has one of the lowest death rates of any power source ever used — lower than coal, oil, and gas by a mile, and in the same range as wind and solar. Congress designated Yucca Mountain as the national repository in 1987, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s own staff finished its safety review in 2015, and Congress stopped funding the licensing anyway, for politics. Fund the license decision and let the physics answer. Modern reactor designs get the same permitting shot clock as everything else in this Act.

SECTION 7. THE OCEAN AND THE FOOTSTEP

Tides are not weather. They run on a gravitational schedule set by the Moon and Sun, predictable to the minute for centuries in advance. Scotland runs commercial tidal turbines in the Pentland Firth. Alaska, Maine, and the Pacific Northwest have enormous tidal potential and none of the intermittency problems of wind and solar. Put tidal and wave projects on the same shot clock.

Floor tiles that generate electricity from footsteps already exist and have been tested in places like Heathrow Airport. One step is not much. A hundred million steps a day through our airports and transit hubs is not nothing. Pilot them in federal buildings.

And the plan T. Boone Pickens — a Texas oilman, not an activist — put in front of the country in 2008: wind on the Great Plains, natural gas for heavy trucks, and a phased build-out that did not require anybody’s suffering. The numbers worked. Washington ignored him because it was practical.

SECTION 8. OFFSHORE DRILLING AND RIGS TO REEFS

The ocean floor leaks oil on its own. Natural seeps release an estimated tens of millions of gallons of petroleum into North American waters every year with no press conference. Responsible offshore production captures oil that would otherwise make its way to the surface. And decommissioned platforms, left in place as artificial reefs, become some of the most productive fish habitats in the ocean; studies off California have found platform structures supporting more fish per square foot than many natural reefs. Make rigs-to-reefs the default for platforms that pass an environmental review, instead of paying to rip out a thriving habitat.

SECTION 9. FORESTS THAT DO NOT BURN

A megafire can dump more carbon into the air in a week than a fleet of SUVs does in years. So we put people to work clearing dead timber and brush out of our national forests, restore prescribed burns on a real schedule, and give the job preference to veterans, CSIP graduates, and rural workers. That is conservation, jobs, and fire prevention in the same paycheck.

SECTION 10. HONEST RECYCLING

We stop shipping our “recycling” overseas so it can be dumped in somebody else’s ocean. Metal and glass actually recycle over and over, so we pay for those streams to work. Paper goes to the farm as compost, tilled into the soil to improve it, instead of being shipped, bleached, and washed into the water. And plastic that cannot be recycled at home does not get a fake recycling label.

SECTION 11. BIG NEW LOADS PAY THEIR OWN WAY

A data center, a gigafactory, or a new city of servers posts a cash deposit for the generation and wires it needs. If the project cancels, Grandma does not pay for the substation on her electric bill. Ohio has already started down this road, with AEP Ohio’s data-center tariff making the biggest new users pay for most of the power they reserve. Make it the national standard.

SECTION 12. ADVERSARY CAPITAL STAYS OFF THE WIRE

In Grand Forks, a Chinese company bought farmland near an Air Force base, and the Air Force called the project a significant threat to national security. Near F.E. Warren in Cheyenne, a Chinese-linked crypto mine set up about a mile from a base that houses nuclear missiles, and the government had to order a divestment. So: no purchase of land, generation, or substations within a published radius of a strategic installation by any entity tied to a designated foreign adversary. County clerks get a lookup list, not a seminar.

SECTION 13. BUILD INFRASTRUCTURE LIKE OHIO, NOT LIKE CALIFORNIA

California has spent well over a decade and tens of billions of dollars on a high-speed rail line that still does not carry a single paying high-speed passenger, and its own business plans now price the first segment north of a hundred billion dollars. Meanwhile utility equipment keeps starting wildfires. Bury the lines first. Fix the leaking water mains. Publish the numbers.

Ohio, the state that treats orange barrels as a fifth season, is doing the planning on a real Cleveland-Columbus-Dayton-Cincinnati passenger corridor, and Columbus is one of the largest cities in America with no passenger train at all. Build rail where the people and the freight already are, in states that actually finish construction projects.

SECTION 14. HONEST REPORTING

If the barrel moved, the molecule counts. No offshoring the exhaust and keeping the poster.

Genesis 2:15 says God put man in the garden “to cultivate it and keep it.” Stewardship is not a left-wing idea. It is the oldest job description we have. We should start acting like it, with a solar canopy, a metal roof, a local refinery, a compost pile, and a forest that does not burn.

POP QUIZ. NO NOTES.

You are a third of the way through the last Part. Here is your midterm. Answers in the replies before you scroll.

o About how many words are in the Declaration of Independence?

o Which state banned new gas cars and then asked its people not to charge their electric cars, the same week?

o When the Army designed the up-armored Humvee, how many carabiners did it put on the ceiling for a medic to hang an IV bag?

Answers at the bottom. The third one is going to make you angry.

— IV. THE HOUSING AND TRADES ACT — Short title: Pour the Foundation

Ask any twenty-five-year-old when they expect to own a house. Watch them laugh. Then watch them stop laughing, because they were not joking.

Institutional investors did not cause the housing crisis by themselves. They just showed up to a store where the government had already locked the shelves. Decades of zoning, parking mandates, minimum lot sizes, and “environmental review” lawsuits made it illegal, slow, or stupidly expensive to pour a foundation, and then politicians acted shocked that there were not enough houses.

A young couple in Lansing loses a starter house to a fund that can afford to wait eighteen months for a permit. The couple cannot. The fund can still bid under this Act. It just does not get a government-made head start anymore.

Housing is state and local law, so this is a model statute for states, plus one federal condition: federal infrastructure money never goes to a town that bans the housing its own transit line was built to serve.

SECTION 1. THE SHOT CLOCK

Permits for single-family and missing-middle housing — duplexes, triplexes, townhomes — run on a shot clock. Miss the clock and the permit is deemed granted as submitted. The building code still applies in full. Safety stays. The stall dies. Those are different documents.

SECTION 2. BY RIGHT

Duplexes and townhomes are allowed by right on residential lots. Parking minimums end; the market decides how many spaces a building needs. Minimum lot sizes shrink to what the land and the septic system can actually handle. And a county that paid for a transit line may not then ban apartments near it. You do not get to buy a train and then outlaw the riders.

SECTION 3. HONEST FEES

Impact fees and hookup fees are capped at the actual cost of the new infrastructure that house requires, published. A starter home should not be priced like a stadium. Environmental review may not be weaponized by a neighbor to kill a code-compliant house on a lot already zoned for it.

SECTION 4. SHORT ABATEMENTS

Tax abatements for new units are short. Enough to clear the first years. Not a generational gift, and not a permanent holiday for a well-connected developer. Then the parcel pays taxes like its neighbor.

SECTION 5. THE TRADES PIPELINE

Division III in the Mastery Education Act is the pipeline. Local kids build and repair local buildings. You want more houses, you need more electricians, plumbers, carpenters, and HVAC techs, and every one of them is sitting in a Career Tech classroom right now waiting for somebody to let them get to work.

SECTION 6. THE NUMBERS BEHIND THE HEARTBREAK

The median age of a first-time homebuyer in America hit forty in 2025, a record. First-time buyers made up only about one in five purchases. My grandparents’ generation bought in their twenties on one factory paycheck. The house they bought is, in a lot of American towns, now literally illegal to build.

Minimum lot sizes are the quiet killer. If every house must sit on a 5,000-square-foot lot, or a full acre in some suburbs, you have set a price floor on the land before a single board goes up. A 900-square-foot starter home on a mandated acre costs almost as much to site as a 3,000-square-foot house on the same acre, so builders, being rational, build the big one. And the history is uglier than most people know. Researchers have documented that minimum-lot and single-family-only zoning spread fastest in the suburbs that expected the most Black families to arrive during the Great Migration. A lot of the neighborhoods with equity yard signs are still defending rules that were written to keep people out.

SECTION 7. STOP SUBSIDIZING DEMAND

Every few years, a politician proposes a $25,000 check for first-time buyers. It sounds kind. It builds zero houses. When you hand every buyer more money and leave the supply where it is, sellers raise the price by about the size of the check, and the subsidy lands in the seller’s pocket. The only cure for a shortage is more houses. So:

o Minimum lot sizes shrink to what the land, the sewer, and the fire code actually require.

o Duties on Canadian softwood lumber get suspended for residential construction, because lumber is the skeleton of every American house.

o Community banks get relief from compliance rules written for Wall Street megabanks, so the small lender who actually knows the young couple in town can write the small mortgage again.

— V. THE AMERICAN HEALTH FREEDOM ACT — Short title: Posted Prices, Not Cathedrals

A law called “Affordable” that stops being affordable the moment its temporary emergency money runs out was never affordable. The emergency money was the product.

Let us get the history right, because I keep hearing it wrong. The enhanced Obamacare subsidies were written as temporary COVID relief in the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and extended in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Not one Republican in either chamber voted for either bill. Democrats chose the expiration date themselves. Then they shut the government down over their own expiration date, and when that failed, they spent the next month explaining how expensive Obamacare is without the extra money. It is like your boss giving you a $1,000 Christmas bonus, and then you storm into his office in January accusing him of cutting your pay by $1,000. Nobody cut your pay. Your bonus ended. You cannot argue that a program is affordable while also arguing nobody can afford it.

And I have a question for the part of the online left that turned Luigi Mangione, charged with murdering a health insurance executive on a Manhattan sidewalk, into a folk hero for “fighting the insurance industry.” Murder is wrong, and no grievance excuses it. But why are you now demanding that taxpayers send permanent subsidies to those same insurance companies? A health savings account puts the money in the patient’s hands. A subsidy puts it in the insurer’s.

Every paramedic has had the patient who waved off the ambulance because the ride would cost more than his rent. Some of them walked away fine. Some of them did not. Either way, he made a medical decision based on a bill nobody would show him in advance.

How did we get here? In 1930, Americans paid their doctors directly, and health care cost a small sliver of the economy. During World War II, wage controls stopped employers from competing on pay, so they competed on health benefits instead, and the IRS made those benefits tax-free. One administrative decision chained American health care to your EMPLOYER instead of to YOU. Lose the job, lose the coverage. Then Medicare and Medicaid arrived in 1965 with open-ended reimbursement, and providers learned that the government would pay whatever was billed. Today the country spends on the order of five trillion dollars a year on health care, close to a fifth of everything we produce, and still trails other wealthy nations on basic outcomes like life expectancy.

Medicare for All is not the answer. One well-known estimate put a version of it at more than thirty-two trillion dollars over ten years. That is not compassion. That is a clerk in an office deciding which grandmother’s hip is “not medically necessary” this quarter, and a waiting list to find out.

So, three pillars that already exist and already work:

• PILLAR ONE: DIRECT PRIMARY CARE. You pay your primary care doctor a flat monthly membership, often $50 to $100 per adult. You get unlimited visits, same-day or next-day appointments, and thirty minutes with a doctor who knows your name, instead of eight minutes at the medical drive-through. No insurance billing department, no prior authorization calls, labs at close to wholesale prices. Employers who have adopted direct primary care report large drops in ER visits and total medical spending. Make DPC memberships HSA-eligible and deductible, and get every federal rule out of its way.
• PILLAR TWO: REAL CATASTROPHIC COVERAGE. Insurance for the events that actually bankrupt families — hospitalizations, surgeries, cancer, trauma — instead of a bloated plan that runs every sore throat through a claims department. Paired with DPC, it costs a family far less per month than a traditional plan’s premium alone. For lower-income families, income-scaled vouchers cover both the membership and the catastrophic premium, run by the states after the revenue flip.
• PILLAR THREE: $1,000 AT BIRTH. Every American child gets a $1,000 deposit in a health savings account the day they are born. Invested in a broad index fund at a conservative seven percent, that single deposit grows to around $81,000 by age sixty-five without another dime added. It is portable, permanent, and theirs — not their employer’s, not the government’s. HSAs are triple tax-advantaged: in tax-free, grows tax-free, out tax-free for medical care. Raise the contribution limits and open them to everyone.

And the guardrails:

o Every hospital and provider that takes public money posts its cash prices — procedures, drugs, everything — in plain English, before the procedure, where a patient can actually find them.

o A bill that exceeds the posted cash price by more than ten percent without a documented complication is presumed a surprise bill: full refund of the difference plus a penalty.

o Real antitrust enforcement when hospital systems, insurers, and private-equity roll-ups swallow a local market. When one owner controls a region, prices climb and quality does not. That is a cartel. Treat it like one.

o A safe harbor in malpractice law for doctors who follow published evidence-based guidelines, so “defensive medicine” stops quietly padding every bill in America.

o VA medical centers publish their staffing floors monthly. If “community care” is quietly replacing VA staff instead of adding to them, the director’s name goes on the sheet.

If posted prices “will never work,” then you are admitting the health care market is a costume. Fine. Stop calling it a market.

— VI. THE WOUNDED: THE MAJOR RICHARD STAR ACT AND THE NEVER ACT — Short title: Stop Robbing the People You Broke

This is the section I would write if I could only write one.

Major Richard Star was an Army combat engineer from Ohio who served in Desert Storm, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He came home with stage-four lung cancer from the burn pits. He was medically retired just short of twenty years, and then the government told him that because he was retired for his wounds instead of his years, he could not receive both the retirement he earned and the disability compensation for what the war did to his body. Every dollar of one was subtracted from the other.

He spent his last months traveling on oxygen, barely able to stand, asking Congress to fix it. He died in February 2021 at fifty-one. His wife Tonya had quit her career to care for him, and she picked up the fight after he was gone. She died still fighting it. David Star is still at the microphone. Congress did not earn that kind of devotion. Congress caused that kind of exhaustion.

About fifty-two thousand combat-wounded, medically retired veterans are in that same trap today, losing roughly $1,200 to $1,900 every single month.

SECTION 1. THE NUMBERS

CBO scored the Major Richard Star Act at about $9.75 billion over ten years. My own population model — which subtracts the veterans who die, the ones who age out at fifty-nine and a half, and the ones who reach twenty years — puts the entire remaining lifetime cost of the bill around fourteen billion dollars, and about $737 million this year. When a much broader concurrent-receipt draft drew a far larger score, that big number got waved around as if it belonged to this small, surgical bill. It does not. If a student handed me an answer off by that much and used it as a reason to skip the assignment, I would hand it right back.

SNAP spends about $8.2 billion a month. The Star Act costs less per YEAR than SNAP spends in four days.

And this next part should make every reader angry. The eligible pool is at its peak right now and shrinks every year. Every year of delay, hundreds of these veterans die and more than a thousand age out. The bill gets “cheaper” because the men and women it was written for disappear. The clock is not an accident. The clock is the strategy.

SECTION 2. THE AFFORDABILITY HOAX

On October 8, 2025, when the Senate was asked simply to schedule a vote on the Star Act,

@SenatorWicker

objected. He called it “an entitlement that does amount to a double benefit, and that we cannot afford.” Senator Wicker had cosponsored the bill in the past.

The very next day, October 9, he voted for a Senate defense bill of roughly $924.7 billion.

Military retirement pay is earned by years of service. VA disability compensation is paid for what the service did to your body. Two different benefits for two different things. Calling that “double dipping” is like telling a construction worker who fell off a roof that he has to choose between his pension and his workers’ comp. Senator Wicker spent his own career as an Air Force JAG officer. He knows the difference between two separate entitlements. He objected anyway.

Nine hundred twenty-four billion dollars one day. Not a dime for the wounded the day before. He made a choice and called it a fiscal argument.

SECTION 3. THE CLEAN STAR RULE

Combat-related Chapter 61 retirees keep both their earned retirement and their VA disability. No dollar-for-dollar clawback. No fifty-percent floor that pretends a blast injury is a paperwork problem. No years-of-service floor that punishes the soldier who got broken at year fourteen instead of year twenty.

SECTION 4. THE NEVER ACT — NO EARNED VETERANS’ ENTITLEMENTS REDUCED

I wrote the NEVER Act because I read the “veterans bill” that came out this summer, the one that carried the Star Act in its first section and then paid for it fifty pages later by cutting ratings for tinnitus and sleep apnea. Robbing future veterans to pay current ones is not a veterans bill. It is a shell game with a flag on it.

Title I rebuilds concurrent receipt so CBO cannot ambush it with a scare number attached to a different population. It defines a qualified combat-injured retiree with no minimum rating and no years-of-service floor. It bans tiering combat-injured retirees against each other, computing pay on service never performed, a “lesser of” cap, and any reduction by degree of disability. It pays whichever amount is greater after tax, so nobody “wins” on paper and takes home less. It requires ninety days’ notice before any change and guarantees nobody ends up worse off than today. It automatically converts the tens of thousands of veterans already receiving Combat-Related Special Compensation — do not make a man dying of burn-pit cancer re-litigate the burn pit. And it pays the most severely injured first.

Title X bans paying for one veteran’s increase by cutting another veteran’s rating, fee, copay, or pension. It forbids writing tinnitus down to zero because a hearing device exists, and forbids writing sleep apnea down because a CPAP works. A treatment that manages a symptom does not erase the injury. It puts a floor under the current rating schedule for everyone already rated. Any bill that violates this faces a point of order in both chambers, and waiving it takes sixty votes in the Senate. The next chairman who tries to fund a veterans bill by robbing future veterans takes a recorded vote with his name on it.

Title XII names the non-veteran offsets, if Congress insists on an offset: unobligated money from dead weapons programs, wasteful non-mission administration, improper-payment recovery (with a ban on clawing it out of a veteran’s own account), and surplus property sales that exclude VA hospitals and veteran housing. It sets a direct-care staffing floor so community care adds to the VA instead of replacing it.

And every veterans bill carries a plain-English cover sheet on page one: Benefit added — who, how many, ten-year cost. Benefit reduced — who, how many, ten-year savings, and if none, the word NONE in 24-point type. Offsets outside veteran benefits. Emergency designation, yes or no. Rating-schedule change, yes or no — and if yes, the bill is out of order unless sixty senators say otherwise. If that one sheet had existed in June, tinnitus and sleep apnea would never have been buried fifty pages deep.

SECTION 5. THE BACK DOORS A FIVE-PAGE BILL LEAVES OPEN

The clean Star text is short, which is a virtue. It also leaves holes, and I would rather name them myself than have them discovered by a widow.

• A Chapter 61 medical retirement plus a VA rating for the condition that ended the career is presumed combat-related unless the service board proves otherwise, in writing, with a record the veteran can appeal. Burn-pit cancer, blast brain injuries, and hearing loss from weapons fire do not wait on a stingy board’s mood.
• DFAS and the VA get 180 days after enactment to start the corrected pay. Miss it, and the Comptroller publishes the name of the responsible office every thirty days. Endless processing limbo is not a processing style. It is a denial with nicer stationery.
• The clean bill stops the bleeding. It does not repay the years already taken. Paying that debt is a second, separate bill, under 4,400 words, scored honestly, and not paid for by cutting anyone’s tinnitus rating. I said that when the bill was five pages long, and I am saying it again so nobody claims I hid it.
• SURVIVOR BENEFITS. When retirement and disability pay move at the same time, some families’ Survivor Benefit Plan math changes. Put that interaction in the implementing rules in writing. Do not let a widow discover it on a statement.

SECTION 6. WHAT YOU CAN DO BEFORE LUNCH

The Star Act has been one of the most cosponsored bills in Congress for years — hundreds of House members and a large bipartisan majority of the Senate. The discharge petition that would force a House floor vote, H.Res. 1247, needs 218 signatures. Every cosponsor who has not signed it is a person who wants credit for supporting a bill they refuse to let anyone vote on.

Call the Capitol switchboard — (202) 225-3121 for the House, (202) 224-3121 for the Senate — and ask for your Representative and both Senators. Say something like this:

“I am calling to urge support for the Major Richard Star Act, H.R. 2102. It would let combat-wounded veterans who were medically retired receive the full benefits they earned. These veterans should not keep being penalized because a combat injury cut their careers short. If my Representative cosponsored H.R. 2102, it is time to act on that cosponsorship and sign H.Res. 1247, the discharge petition to bring it to the floor. Too much saying and not enough doing. Can I count on their signature? Thank you for your time.”

Call your own members first — they have the most reason to listen. Then call the cosponsors who have not signed. Volume matters. Fifty-two thousand wounded veterans, their families, and everyone who ever thanked one of them for their service could fill those phone lines in an afternoon.

— VII. THE PRISON STANDARD — Short title: No Convict Lives Better Than a Private

I spent almost twenty-three years in uniform. At Camp James A. Garfield here in Ohio, I slept in a World War II munitions building fitted with bunk beds. I have stood in a GP Large tent with forty other soldiers in August. I have slept in a one-man tent small enough that sitting up every morning reminded me of my life choices. In the field, the shower was a five-gallon can hanging off a truck bumper, and Army field-hygiene planning counts on as little as one shower a week, with “bird baths” from a washcloth in between. The water came from a jerry can or a canvas bag treated with enough chlorine to taste like a public pool. Dinner was an MRE in the rain, sitting on my ruck.

Nobody called that cruel. We called it Tuesday.

So the rule is parity: the housing, hygiene, food, and medical care provided to CONVICTED felons shall not EXCEED what the United States provides to the soldiers it sends to defend the country. Not lower. The same. The soldier earned every bit of it. The felon chose his situation, and he received every protection our legal system offers — a lawyer, a jury, a judge — before a verdict of guilty.

o HOUSING: military-standard open bays or surplus TEMPER tents, cots, wall lockers with enforced standards, and facility maintenance done by inmates for sentence-reduction credit. Better quarters are EARNED through compliance, work, and demonstrated rehabilitation.

o HYGIENE AND FOOD: clean drinking water and sanitation always; showers on the field-hygiene schedule; three nutritionally complete meals planned by Army dietitians and nutrition specialists, prepared with military efficiency; hot-line meals as an earned privilege. Medical diets, yes. Preference diets, no.

o MEDICINE: Army Reserve and National Guard medical units need real training hours and real patients. Prisons need real medical care. Rotate combat medics, aid stations, surgical teams, and combat-stress teams through correctional facilities as part of their annual training. Two problems solve each other.

o 0600 PT: graduated by ability. Structure, routine, and physical training are how the Army turns civilians into soldiers, and they are some of the best tools we have against recidivism.

o CAREER TECH IS MANDATORY: welding, diesel, electrical, plumbing, HVAC, culinary, construction — chosen by what the state’s economy actually needs, with the same credentials a Career Tech high school awards. A man who walks out with a CDL and a job offer is far less likely to walk back in. That costs less than paying for his return trip.

o TELEVISION, IF ANY, is a privilege and runs like Armed Forces Network: news, education, and life-skills messages about budgeting, job applications, and legal rights.

Two honest limits. First, the Eighth Amendment requires adequate medical care for prisoners — Estelle v. Gamble, 1976 — and field medicine delivered by trained military medical units clears that floor. Second, this applies to CONVICTED felons only. Not people awaiting trial. And not immigration detainees, who are held in civil custody, have not been convicted of anything, and get safe housing, clean water, real food, medical care, and information in their own language about their rights and their hearing.

I showered from a five-gallon can tied to a truck. I am still trying to identify the victim here.

— VIII. THE FLAG DEFENSE AMENDMENT —

Combat medics make a decision nobody talks about at the dinner table.

You are at the casualty collection point. It is loud and wrong. One man has a survivable wound — if you start right now and do not stop. Two more are dying, each a little less badly, each a little faster to treat. Stay with the first and the other two die. Move on and he does.

The math is the math. You move on. He dies. Two live. You did it right, by the book, and you still replay it in every quiet room for the rest of your life.

So when I tell you the flag is not a piece of cloth, understand where that is coming from. The flag goes on the coffin of the man I could not stay with.

On the night of September 13, 1814, the Royal Navy threw bombs and rockets at Fort McHenry for about twenty-five hours. Francis Scott Key watched from a ship out in the harbor. Through the whole night, the only proof the fort had not fallen was the glare of the weapons trying to destroy it. When the firing stopped, he did not know whether silence meant victory or surrender. At dawn, he looked for one thing. It was still there. “Oh say can you see” was not poetry. It was a real question, asked by a man who had spent the whole night afraid of the answer.

The Supreme Court held in Texas v. Johnson (1989) and United States v. Eichman (1990) that burning the flag is protected symbolic speech. And I agree with the principle behind that ruling: the government should not be in the business of jailing people for what they say, even when what they say disgusts me. Men I served with died defending exactly that freedom — including the freedom of the person holding the lighter.

But every service member took an oath to support and defend the Constitution, and that oath does not come with an expiration date. Ask any veteran. So here is the amendment:

A person who has taken the military oath, or who has served honorably in law enforcement or the fire service, may use non-lethal physical force to stop an American flag from being burned in a public place — to grab it, wrestle it away, and put out the fire — and shall bear no civil or criminal liability for doing so. The protection ends at three lines: no weapons, no deadly force, and no serious bodily injury. A scuffle over a flag is protected. A beating is not, and anything past those three lines is judged under the ordinary law, exactly as it is today.

My reasoning, and I will not apologize for it: Men have died for that flag. Men held it up at Fort McHenry and carried it through places whose names still wake veterans up at night. If a soldier was willing to die for it, a protester who wants to set it on fire should be willing to lose a wrestling match over it. You have every right to try to burn it. I have every right, as a man who swore an oath, to try to stop you. The government is not censoring anybody. I am not the government any more than you are. Two citizens, two constitutional claims, one flag, and may the better man win.

The flag burner still keeps his speech. He can stand on that corner and say anything he wants about America, at the top of his lungs, all afternoon. What he does not get is a guarantee that nobody who took the oath will reach for the flag.

The honest legal note: this is the government shielding one side of a speech confrontation, which Texas v. Johnson and R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992) forbid by ordinary statute. So it rides the amendment train, in the optional slot, or it does not ride. If thirty-eight states want it, they can have it. I think they would.

— IX. THE E-5 DESIGN AUTHORITY ACT —

The people who design our combat vehicles have never lived in one. Not for a week, never mind a year-long deployment where the truck is your kitchen, your bedroom, your office, and sometimes the only thing between you and a folded flag. The designers go home at five. There is a coffee shop in their lobby.

My favorite example is one I lived. The standard casualty litter does not fit well inside an up-armored HMMWV. The middle of the litter lands on the air-conditioning unit and the ammo storage. So the medic starts an IV on a patient rocking on every turn while the gunner stands over both of them, and if the guns run dry, somebody has to move the patient to reach the ammo. There is no cubby for tourniquets, no hook for a CamelBak, and not even one carabiner on the ceiling to hang an IV bag so gravity can do the work. One carabiner. I found it was often easier to treat a casualty on the HOOD, outside, blocking the driver’s windshield. That tells you everything about the design.

The external fuel cans sit where, if they are hit, the fuel runs downhill toward the crew’s feet. No tactic fixes that. Gravity wins, and I teach gravity to sixteen-year-olds. There was no cup holder, no MRE heater mount, no trash can, and no radio integration, so a soldier’s personal speaker would play right over a radio call. My 2006 Honda muted the music when the phone rang. We went to the moon in 1969, and the lunar module had a place to put things.

The JLTV was supposed to fix it, and it did get two cup holders. Progress. But troops still report suspension faults that drop the truck into a crawling limp mode — in a kill zone, that turns a combat vehicle into a slow, expensive target. The engineering principle is not exotic: fail to OPERATIONAL, not fail to crawl.

So, the Act. Before any major ground vehicle or individual-equipment contract is signed, a board of twelve E-5s from different specialties — a combat medic with two tours, a cavalry scout who spent a year in a city, an infantryman who knows exactly how fast a door has to open, a wheeled-vehicle mechanic who will have to fix it — gets locked in a room with the prototype and the authority to REJECT it. Not advise. Reject, with a written finding that goes into the contract file and requires a documented engineering fix before the program can move forward.

When soldiers have to invent a fix in the field, that is not creativity. That is an engineering failure with duct tape on it. We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per vehicle. The cup holder is not a budget problem. It is a listening problem.

— X. THE NEO-MALL —

I miss the mall. Not the half-empty fluorescent shell it became — what it WAS. A place a twelve-year-old could have his first taste of independence, a teenager could hang out without getting into trouble, and Grandma could walk her four laps in the air conditioning while Grandpa pretended to shop for shoes.

Amazon did not kill the mall. A failure of imagination did. Amazon changed what buying things looks like. It cannot give anyone a reason to GO somewhere.

And this belongs in a plan for fixing America because the rest of this series takes apart government programs that swallowed the jobs churches, neighbors, and communities used to do. You cannot tear down the program and leave nothing in its place. Human beings need third places — somewhere that is not home and not work. We tore ours down and then commissioned studies about loneliness.

So: zoning that allows mixed use, and the same accelerated-depreciation treatment for converting a dead mall that we give to factories. And here is what I would build:

o A dinner-and-a-movie theater with no kitchen at all. Food trucks rotate through the building, and each showing — breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner — comes with a meal served at your seat from whichever truck is there that day. The theater never changes. The meal is different every time.

o A real arcade, an indoor skate park, a multi-level RC-truck track, an esports arena, laser tag, go-karts viewable from the balcony, and escape rooms connected by secret passages, because a building that surprises you is a building you tell your friends about.

o The Man-Sitting Lounge: recliners, a big screen with whatever game is on, a bag check, and a barber in the corner, for every husband currently holding seventeen bags that are not his.

o A kids’ wing with a science museum, a LEGO build room, a splash pad, and an after-school program with homework help.

o A senior wing with a licensed adult day program, so working families can drop off Grandpa on the way to work the way they drop off the kids — plus a warm-water therapy pool, an urgent-care clinic, and a 1950s diner. As a medic I learned that isolation kills older people slowly and measurably. Connect the senior wing to the kids’ wing, and grandparents read in the library corner and mentor in the LEGO room. The seniors get purpose. The kids get wisdom.

o A Career Tech partnership, so local vocational students run real services in the building: early-childhood students in the kids’ wing, auto students on the go-kart fleet, culinary students in the food hall.

Call it a community with a parking garage. And put a solar canopy on the garage.

— XI. A FEW SMALL BILLS THAT SHOULD NOT NEED WRITING —

• WOMEN AND GIRLS IN SPORTS. Female sports categories in schools and colleges that take public money are for females. Biology is not a costume. I teach it. On January 14, 2025, the House passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act 218 to 206. Two Democrats, Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, joined every Republican. In the Senate, the bill failed to advance 51 to 45, well short of the sixty votes it needed, with every Democrat voting no. This bill will never be a cathedral. It is a locker room with a definition on the door.
• FOREIGN MONEY NEAR THE CLASSROOM. Curriculum, programs, or “cultural centers” paid for by a foreign government get labeled like a registered lobbyist. If it cannot wear a badge, it cannot write a lesson plan.
• FOREIGN SPENDING IN ITS OWN BILL. Money sent overseas that is not defense, a Senate-ratified treaty, or disaster aid under a named statute travels in its own 4,400-word bill with its own recorded vote. If it cannot survive sunlight, it was never aid. It was a cocktail party with a better invoice.

— XII. THE FULL BOARD, ONE PAGE, NO EXCUSES —

Every piece of all three parts, on one page, so you can print it and hand it to a legislator who claims he does not have time to read. The Amendment Ledger at the end of Part 1 tells you which tool each one needs.

o THE CONVENTION: limited subjects only, instructed and recallable delegates, a walkout rule, an interstate compact, a felony for delegates who break their oath, and thirty-eight states to ratify, one amendment at a time. Meanwhile, a state attorney general files the Tenth Amendment lawsuit.

o THE CONSTITUTION: enumerated powers restored, a balanced budget that replaces the debt ceiling, locked department envelopes, a ten-year sunset on every law, no bill longer than the Constitution, the Seventeenth Amendment repealed, and the Supreme Court locked at nine.

o CONGRESS: Earned Stripes pay (E-7 House, O-3 Senate, capped by district income), TSP instead of a pension, concurrent-receipt offsets applied to members, barracks, DEFAC, uniforms, PT, staff duty, drug tests, a published ACFT, public school for their kids, TRICARE, VA, or the teacher plan, a stock ban, no pay until the books balance, the shutdown bar, three terms in any seat, Up and Out, a twenty-five-year cap, an Accountability Court, a real filibuster, a lottery challenger in every primary, STAR voting, and hard campaign-money limits.

o THE PERMANENT GOVERNMENT: civil-service Up and Out, 90-day emergency sunsets, and no new department without a clause.

o MONEY: no federal income tax on the citizen, a per-person invoice to the states after each census, FEMA stays federal, and you file once, with your state.

o RETIREMENT: everyone near retirement kept whole in ink, and a personal, inheritable, TSP-style account for everyone else.

o THE CARD AND THE ROLL: a free citizen card at fourteen, the card as the I-9 and the voter credential, a roll that maintains itself, and ten years per counterfeit.

o WHO IS IN THE HOUSE: a forward-only citizenship-clause amendment, a front door with a lock and a doorbell, and every state paying its own Medicaid match.

o MARRIAGE AND THE FRANCHISE: civil unions from the state and marriage from the altar, an end to every marriage penalty, credit for the parent at home, and a franchise earned by service, ownership, or household — with the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments left untouched.

o THE FAMILY: a free permit for child three and after when the household can carry the child, a paused franchise when it cannot, a late permit to restore it, and every child already born grandfathered.

o FOOD: a box, not a wallet, with a recipe card in every box and churches at the pickup sites.

o POVERTY: TAP as a trampoline with a six-percent interest cap, and CSIP as a trade, a rebuilt car, and an exit.

o SCHOOL: mastery blocks, levels instead of letter grades that lie, no U’s, no gift D’s, truancy enforcement, year-round calendars, tests that hold the line, Career Tech running the building, Communism 101 graded by socialism, and the Department of Education closed.

o THE FIRST RUNG: a real youth training wage, and licenses only where a body, a boiler, or a bridge is at stake.

o THE ENVIRONMENT: replacement before padlock, clean refineries at home, solar canopies, parking garages, metal roofs, urban forests, burn the methane, nuclear and Yucca, tidal power, rigs to reefs, forests that do not burn, honest recycling, big loads paying for their own wires, and adversary money off the base fence.

o HOUSES: shot clocks, duplexes by right, no parking mandates, smaller lots, honest fees, no demand subsidies, and the trades.

o HEALTH: direct primary care, real catastrophic coverage, $1,000 in an HSA at birth, posted prices, surprise-bill penalties, antitrust with teeth, and published VA staffing floors.

o THE WOUNDED: the clean Star Act, the NEVER Act’s ban on robbing one veteran to pay another, and H.Res. 1247 signed today.

o THE CELL, THE COLORS, AND THE TRUCK: prisons no nicer than a private’s barracks, a right for those who took the oath to wrestle a burning flag away from the man holding the lighter, and twelve E-5s with veto power over the vehicles they will ride in.

o A PLACE TO GO: the Neo-Mall.

If I forgot something, that is what the comment section is for. I know there are more. There always are.

— XIII. OBJECTIONS, ANSWERED —

“Communism 101 is indoctrination.”

It is the opposite. It hands students the primary sources, the body counts, and the forty-five goals, and lets them run the analysis. Indoctrination is hiding the Holodomor. And they will learn more from six weeks of having their own points taken than from any lecture I could give.

“Burning methane still makes CO2.”

Yes. Much less potent CO2, instead of methane that traps around eighty times more heat over twenty years. Trading a bad gas for a far weaker one is called chemistry.

“Prison parity is cruel and unusual.”

The Eighth Amendment bans cruel and unusual punishment. We ask nineteen-year-olds to live this way every day as a matter of routine. It is, by definition, not unusual. And the medical floor from Estelle v. Gamble stays in place.

“The flag amendment licenses violence against protesters.”

It licenses a non-lethal scuffle over a burning flag between a protester exercising his right and a veteran exercising his oath. No weapons, no deadly force, no serious injury. If you are willing to set fire to the flag men died under, you should be willing to get wrestled for it. Nobody is stopping you from saying a single word.

“Mastery is just teaching to the test.”

Seat-time is teaching to the calendar. I would rather teach to a skill I can watch a student perform.

“An honest grade distribution is cruel.”

A fake A is crueler. It lasts right up until a boss, a patient, or a steel beam finds out.

“Year-round school kills summer jobs.”

Four seasonal breaks exist on purpose. A job can live on a seasonal break. A child who forgets a year of math every July cannot.

“Closing the Department of Education abandons poor kids.”

Poor kids are sitting in my classroom right now. The department has had more than forty years and a mountain of money. Show me the improvement in the scores. Then we can talk about keeping the cathedral.

“A lower youth wage exploits teenagers.”

Zero dollars an hour is the lowest wage there is, and that is what a job that does not exist pays. Ask any of my students which they would rather have.

“Nuclear is too slow.”

Process is slow. Physics is not. A replacement file with a shot clock is how you stop using slowness as the policy.

“Housing shot clocks lower safety.”

The building code stays in full force. Only the stall dies.

“The Star Act is double dipping.”

No. It is two earned checks for two different things: one for the years, one for the body. Calling it an entitlement is how a man on oxygen ends up getting a lecture from a man with a pension.

“The NEVER Act is too rigid.”

It is rigid at the exact spot where a so-called veterans bill went hunting in tinnitus and sleep apnea to pay for itself.

“Posted hospital prices will never work.”

Then you have admitted the market is a costume. Stop calling it a market.

— XIV. THE CALENDAR —

• Year 0. The Star Act and the NEVER Act’s cover-sheet rule go to the floor, by discharge petition if leadership will not schedule them. The Department of Education repeal bill is filed in Congress while Ohio files the state mastery statute. Different clocks. Do not wait for the cathedral to volunteer.
• Year 1. The first year-round calendar. The first Communism 101 cohort. The first solar-canopy and metal-roof credits claimed. The first prison Career Tech graduates. The first block mastery tests. The first school lunch actually cooked by the culinary program. The first replacement certificate on an aging power plant. The first shot-clock permits.
• Year 2. The first E-5 board rejects a prototype — and the next version has a carabiner on the ceiling. The first students move between divisions. The first honest transcript a college can read without a decoder ring. The first data-center deposit. The first posted-price penalties.
• Year 3. If the Star Act is still a cosponsor photo instead of a law, Part 1’s scorecard has already told you what to do with that member at his board.
• Year 4. Publish placement rates from Career Tech Division III and from CSIP. Close what cannot place. Fund what can.

— CLOSING THE THIRD HOUR —

That is the whole board. Three parts. The fence and the barracks. The kitchen table and the exit sign. The classroom, the plant, the house, the hospital bill, and the wounded.

Steal it. Improve it. Argue with the parts that pinch. When the good comments pile up, I will run a revision, the same way I revise a lab after a class finds the flaw in it. Good comments already put Congress in a DEFAC and put four seasonal breaks on the school calendar.

If you only print one section of Part 3, print the Star Act section and make the phone call before lunch. Everything else in this series can wait a week. The veterans in that pool cannot. Some of them will not be alive to see the next revision.

POP QUIZ ANSWERS

About 1,300 words. Shorter than plenty of lab reports I have graded, and apparently too long for the new SAT.

California, August 2022.

Zero. One carabiner would have cost less than a dollar. Post your score, and if you got the third one right, thank a medic.

Mike Borowski is a medically retired Army combat medic with 23 years of service, including a combat deployment to Iraq, and a high school Anatomy and Physics teacher at a high-need Career Technical district in Northeast Ohio — where he also wrote and published the textbooks for both courses. He runs “Bski’s Classroom,” a platform dedicated to cutting through political noise with data, history, and the kind of blunt honesty that comes from someone who has seen both war and the American classroom up close.

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