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November 12, 2009
Exclusive: Getting Back to the Basic Principles of America’s Founding
Two weeks ago in these pages, I urged conservatives to recognize that theirs is an ideology with fixed principles. It is not, as the neo-Burkeans would have it, the unprincipled social affectation of resistance to change, but a systematic intellectual scheme for analyzing issues of public policy and implementing programs consistent with a philosophy of freedom. That liberating concept must be borne in mind as conservatives begin their march to political primacy. It means that having taken the time to define a philosophy, they must take the time to articulate an activist program to implement it.
The primary legitimate purpose of government is the protection of individual freedom and conservatism, as a philosophy of freedom grounded in the ideas articulated as the basis of the founding of the nation, has, as its rationale, the preservation and enhancement of that great ideal. That is not just a general intellectual concept. It is a sacred, activist purpose.
After the era of leftist predominance, there is much to undo. But conservatives should start with a program that affirms their basic principles. They should begin with an analysis of the extent to which government has become an instrument of coercion and an impediment to freedom and develop legislation that will put American government back in the business of protecting freedom rather than abridging it. That analysis will yield a range of laws and government programs which have the effect of limiting freedom and stifling individual initiative. Conservatives can enact legislation they can take to the people as a means of enhancing liberty and gain national support for a new era of individual freedom.
Freedom to Work. Conservatives should start the march to freedom by passing a national right to work law that applies, especially, to workers at all levels of government. In doing so, they will affirm the principle that no person should be limited in the work he does by the artificial imposition of involuntary membership in an organization of which he may not approve and whose message he does not support. Such legislation will recognize the unfairness of subjecting workers to the involuntary confiscation of their wages to underwrite a purely private organization pursuing purely private ends. It will unshackle millions of workers yearning for the freedom simply to do their jobs without, also, having to make a political statement. A national right to work law would enable workers to exercise their free choice and freedom must be conservatives’ mission.
Conservative representatives should wade through the National Labor Relations Act for limitations on the right of workers to opt out of union membership and limit protections for union organizing at all levels of government and commerce. Polls indicate that a majority of unionized workers are members of unions only because they have no choice. Federal law protects union organizers and limits the extent to which their importuning thuggery can be resisted. It provides rights to unions that are superior to the power of private companies and even governmental agencies to resist. Those sections should be repealed so that freedom of work and the right to do so unmolested by union pressure will be protected.
Freedom of Speech. Government cannot be allowed to limit speech but it effectively does so by rationing the very speech the Founders believed was entitled to the highest degree of protection: political speech. Most Americans do not own newspapers, magazines or broadcast stations. The influence of their speech is limited by the extent of their resources. The web has, to a very small degree, provided an outlet for the technologically savvy. But most Americans exercise their right to freedom of political expression by making donations to candidates for public office. Conservatives should do away with limitations on political financial support. McCain-Feingold and the regulations contained in that and other federal laws and rules that limit political speech at certain times and under certain circumstances should be repealed. They abridge freedom of speech. They are constitutionally infirm. They have not accomplished their purpose. They have increased the cost of campaigns rather than decreased them. They have promoted self-funding and resulted in wholesale evasion by the explosion of 527 political action groups that have no limitations. Freeing American speech is a moral imperative and must form a fundamental part of the conservative project.
Individual Prerogative. If freedom is the agenda, conservative office holders must cancel any statute that limits individual freedom in the choice of health care. That includes anti-free market initiatives as well as coercive taxation. It includes legislation that forces individuals to purchase health insurance because such enactments violate the fundamental right of citizens to make their own choices. It includes any program that limits, through regulation, health care choices by making procedures and testing unavailable. It also means that any regulation that makes invidiously discriminatory rules limiting care based on immutable characteristics, such as age, should be prohibited to government.
Economic Liberty. Ours is supposed to be a free society that protects freedom of enterprise and prohibits government from forcing citizens or companies to provide goods or services without payment. Doing so constitutes the unconstitutional taking of private property without compensation and forced labor on the part of those who must, by government mandate, provide service for free. A conservative agenda must include legislation that repeals federal law requiring the extension of health care services to anyone who shows up, regardless of the emergency or his ability to pay for service received. It should dismantle any public program that competes with the private sector and any tax on people or companies used to fund coverage for those who do not want or cannot afford it. Wealth transfer is not a legitimate function of government. It is the immoral theft of private resources.
Freedom through Truth. Freedom cannot be secured without a grounding in truth. Conservatives should, therefore, revamp congressional committees on the environment and organize hearings to determine whether or not current environmental hysteria has any basis in science. The public debate on global warming, for example, is transacted by hysterics like Al Gore, who has made an industry (and a fortune) out of scaring the bejeezus out of school children. His more frenzied claims have been soundly rejected by scientists, even by many on his side of the debate. A court in England has even found that his willfully dishonest movie is no more than a political screed with little grounding in science. But his conclusions are still accepted by the United Nations and have become conventional wisdom not only in Europe but in broad patches of the United States. Those who question that conventional wisdom are dismissed as cranks or worse. “Global Warming Denier” has become the left’s new epithet designed, like false accusations of racism, to intimidate dissenters and shut down debate.
It is past time for Congress to have an honest debate on this and other environmental subjects. It should spend the time to determine whether or not there is any legitimate basis for believing, first, that global warming is even occurring; second, that it is anything other than a natural phenomenon and, third, whether man has anything to do with it. Having definitively answered those questions, Congress should determine whether or not warming, if there is any, is a bad thing or a good one. Then and only then should Congress address it, assuming it finds there is anything mankind can actually do to change the outcome. If the Environmental Protection Agency resists, funding can be cut off without presidential consent by a majority vote on any new budget.
Enterprise and Environmental Protection. Conservatives should revisit the National Environmental Protection Act and repeal any legislative grant of private rights of action or awards of attorney’s fees for lawsuits filed by private citizens to enforce its provisions. They should revise the Endangered Species Act to put human enterprise on an equal footing with habitat protection. They should tighten up definitions of what constitutes a “threatened” or “endangered” species with an eye toward protecting species that truly are threatened with extinction. They should more narrowly define “geographical habitat” so claims that species are threatened because their numbers in a small discrete area are declining cannot be sustained when it is clear that their overall population numbers indicate they are not.
Fair Taxation. No one gets any more protection by our military forces than anyone else but many pay much more for it than others. When a citizen buys goods and services, fairness demands that he pay what everyone else pays. There is no reason, then, that anyone should pay a higher percentage of tax than anyone else based solely on income. The last time conservatives had control of all branches of government, they could easily have repealed the graduated income tax and implemented a value added tax, a national sales tax or a flat tax, but they didn’t. Whether it was a failure of principle or of political will, it was a disgrace. Polls show overwhelming support for a flat tax or national VAT and the abandonment of the income tax. If conservatives could not even do that with sound majorities in the House and Senate and a conservative in the White House, they are either unconnected to the basic philosophy that should define them or insufficiently principled to care. Either way, they must be about tax reform as a first priority. Conservatives must demand it as a condition for political support.
Freedom through Devolution. The original Constitutional paradigm contemplated robust state authority and prerogative. The idea was that the government that was closest to the people would have a clearer idea of the needs and wishes of each discrete state population. It was obvious to the Founders that the people could more readily influence state and local government to ensure the rights and powers of the people and address their more parochial problems. In the early ‘90s, Republicans, even on-again off-again Republicans like Arlen Specter, vigorously argued for “devolution;” for leaving to the various states the responsibility of addressing most domestic problems based on their unique perspectives and the distinctive needs of their various populations. Conservatives should re-energize that process.
Nothing is more local and of more local concern than land within state borders. State government is better able than remote federal agencies to determine how to manage public land in the best interests of its citizens. Fully 30 percent of the land in the western states is owned by the federal government and managed by the Bureau of Land Management, a situation that does not adhere in the eastern states. That is land that is unavailable to the citizens of those states and is managed by one-size fits all bureaucratic rulemaking from Washington. It is not national park land. It is land originally reserved and contemplated for settlement and exploitation but is now managed as a vast, ad hoc environmental experiment to the exclusion of local input, concern and gain. While the states have to bear the expense of the infrastructure that supports that land, it does not get the benefit of property tax or commercial activity that would otherwise be available to support state government.
The land and its management should be turned over to the various states so it can be managed properly, consistent with local interests. It should be managed, we must point out, in the same manner as the land east of the Mississippi, which suffers no discernable diminution of environmental quality and is managed solely for the benefit of the citizens of those individual eastern states. The resulting federal budget savings would be enormous and the reduction of federal influence would begin to restore the balance between state and federal power that has suffered such distortion since the 1930s.
State Autonomy. Unfunded national mandates are breaking state budgets across the nation. The federal government should not be in the unsavory business of extorting cooperation from the states by working its unconstitutional will by threatening to withhold federal funding available to cooperative states from those that want to maintain their sovereignty and constitutional prerogatives. If a state is otherwise entitled to highway funds, for example, they must not be tied to a surrender of state power to federal authority. Conservatives should pass legislation that prohibits extortive federal bribery that impinges on state prerogative and warps the original state/federal relationship.
Reduced Spending. Conservative candidates must commit themselves to the reduction of non-defense federal spending by 20 percent and to the reduction of federal employment by a similar amount. At the end of the Cold War, we got a peace dividend by the closure of military bases and the reduction of the military services. That reduction in spending helped prompt an economic expansion in the private sector that created enormous private wealth at all levels of the socio-economic ladder. The same would hold true by the reduction of non-military federal personnel. The longer term benefit to future generations would be a vast reduction in retirement obligations for federal employees.
Constitutionalism. I have argued that conservatives must define their philosophy less holistically and confine it to matters of political ideology. The coercive power of government must not be mobilized to enforce social norms if we are to suggest that ours is a philosophy of freedom. But there are places that are ripe for clarification.
Conservatives should bend themselves to the task of clarifying the First Amendment by proposing an amendment to the Constitution that recognizes that the Founders did not endorse a “wall of separation” between government and religion. Indeed, the adoption of the First Amendment by Congress was immediately followed by a resolution by that same Congress for a celebration of its great accomplishment by days of prayer and fasting. The suggestion that the Founders intended the First Amendment to prohibit nativity scenes on public property and prayers at public events is legally unsound and historically unsupportable. Only judges could get this so wrong.
Conservatives can, with massive public support, propose a Constitutional amendment that provides that notwithstanding any other provision, nothing in the Constitution shall be interpreted as prohibiting the recitation of prayer or the maintenance of religious displays at government sponsored events or on government owned facilities or property. In doing so, they would put an end to 60 years of silly litigation by such as the ACLU at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, consuming precious judicial resources on debates over how many lawyers can dance on the head of a pin.
This is just a smattering of proposals than can form the beginning of the development of a freedom agenda for conservative elected officials. Conservatives need to commit themselves to fixing what has been broken by 75 years of liberalism. Federal power must be brought to heel. Freedom must be our mission, individual dignity our goal.
Family Security Matters Contributing Editor John W. Howard is a lawyer, specializing in corporate and business litigation who also founded a non-profit, public interest law firm specializing in First, Second and Tenth Amendment issues.
Reader Comments: Submit Your Comment (2)
This article has been cross-posted and linked on www.unitedconservatives.blogspot.com and www.dcprotestwarrior.blogspot.com
Thank you for writing it.
I wholeheartily agree with the entire article, but first America must get rid of the Marxists in the congress & White House first.
After that and after we vote into office people who will implement all that was said in this article, we must try the liberals who enabled obama to be put in the White House and try obama also for treason.
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