Congress, Give Us Back Our Country

The first thing newly elected congressmen and senators do is to take an oath to defend the Constitution, but the results of their labors has resulted in the subversion of the Constitution. It’s just another law we can ignore, like Immigration enforcement. If the primary job is to pass laws, there seems to be little time to read and understand them and less of a chance to amend them. Many laws should be repealed. Most should be amended. Remember, we are broke.

Congress must understand, we want the spending stopped and the debt paid off. We as sick of seeing them piss away our tax dollars on trivia, monuments, welfare, foreign aid, earmarks, healthcare, education, liberty-killing laws, economy-killing regulations, atheists, anti-discrimination liberals and their bloated government employees, unions, pensions and bail-outs. We need to starve the beast or we will be bankrupt. We would love to end all transfer payments, social engineering, progressive indoctrination and “political science”.

If special interests can affect the laws in their favor with threats and campaign contributions, how do they avoid being charged with bribery ? This kind of mafia style extortion is right out of the union playbook. The evolution of using federal dollars to fund everything has brought us to a point where we no longer have the tax money to fund earmarks and that’s probably a good thing. The stranglehold the unions, healthcare, education, banks, environmentalists and anti-discrimination industry has on Congress is a fiscal death trap.

The only thing I can think to do to unravel this mess is to restrict campaign contributions to registered voters who live in the district, city, county or state the candidate is running to represent, and ban campaign contributions from all other outsiders. I would specifically ban contributions from unions, government employees, wealthy ideologues, industries and businesses. You would claim that you are only beholden to your constituents. You would need to include real questionnaires on your websites, so you would know what the majority of your voters want. More importantly, you would be immune from outside attacks by special interests. Contributions of one dollar per voter would be more than enough to maintain candidate’s websites and provide yard signs and travel expenses, but we would have to forego those irritating negative attack ads. I don’t think we would miss them.

Homogeneous districts would be pleasant, happy places. Ideologically split districts could use simple majority rule as their excuse to side one way or another. It would, however, be “representative government”. I don’t expect the proposals coming out of San Francisco to make much sense. I could only pray that the Southern and Midwestern values would prevail. Populations could shift ideologically, but for national issues, the majority would rule.
Having removed special interests from the money trail, it would be possible to revisit the laws that supported the mess that started this revolution. Loopholes could be closed, special deals could be ended, subsidies could be reduced and earmarks could be banned. The entire political / special interest / industrial complex could be dismantled. Anti-discrimination laws could be defanged, so that no group is more equal than any other group and could not extort or sue anybody. Social engineering could be laid in the dust bin along with the “political science” of global warming. All unconstitutional rights usurped by the federal government would be returned to the states. At that point, you could claim that you have defended the Constitution. There would still be a relationship with industries, but they would not be writing the legislation.

The next challenge is to unravel the retirement and healthcare entanglement. We can admit that Social Security was a chain letter that began in 1933 and ended around 2033. And now, for those who haven’t earned anything yet, the 15.3% contribution will be deposited in their self-directed investment account, turning this unsustainable defined benefit plan into a sustainable defined contribution plan. To be fair, we should make sure the investment options are not run by a bunch of crooks. For the rest of us, Social Security would have to pay us out, all $35 Trillion dollars. We must also admit that retirement might return to it’s pre-1933 condition and that not working may not be an option. Healthcare should return to a patient-pays model as much as possible. Like education, healthcare has become to labor intensive and it doesn’t need to be. Some private insurance might be helpful for accidents and major medical procedures, but government must not be expected to step in. Certainly self-funded health savings accounts should be encouraged.

We would do well to remove the federal government from education. The states and school districts should be reformed to deal with improving education, but we first need to demand interactivity with school administrators to ensure that the current systems are dismantled and replaced with systems that succeed in educating rather than indoctrinating and costing way more than it’s worth.

Having removed government benefits, unfunded mandates and special interests from congressional representatives, all congress would need to do is clean up the laws and the Judiciary and appropriate money for federal highway and land maintenance, defense and a few other departments. Congress should revisit all the laws on the books and correct the errors. We would expect congress to interact with constituents to explain and sell their ideas very honestly and easily via the representative’s website. We would want a cost / benefit analysis for everything. We would vote down cap & trade, government involvement in healthcare and every other thinly explained proposal Congress might contemplate. We would hope you would become experts at crafting laws that maximize honest free enterprise and minimize crime and fraud. Most of our current laws do just the opposite.

The Judicial System should view the newly enacted, clearly written laws as preempting case law and behave accordingly. I would make the Judicial System interpret the law rather than establish the law. I would reform the prison system to ensure that inmates earn their own keep and work 50 hours a week like the rest of us.

I would view unstable and undeveloped countries with skepticism. I would not want our tax money going to these countries in any form, because it tends to backfire on us. The money we give the U.N. ends up with Hamas. I would only trust private and church-based relief organizations to help these people clean up their water and sanitation, but they must solve their own problems without expecting U.S. tax dollars to arrive. I would end U.S. support of the World Bank and the United Nations unless their activities could be limited to something worthwhile.

To reduce military expenditures, we must examine why we maintain each of our 700 military bases worldwide and close those we can and make these countries take responsibility for their own defense. We must continue to develop the infrastructure to track and stop terrorists and international criminals.

Freedom would reign. Our federal taxes would be lower than anywhere in the world. And it would be the job of all other countries to reform their systems and follow our lead. State and local taxes could vary, but competition between states and cities would be refreshing. Our economy would be on a rock-solid footing. Manufacturing would return to the U.S. as fully automated facilities. We would not have to abandon the starving and homeless, but I imagine the private sector would provide most assistance anyway.