by John F. Di Leo
The year 2010 saw two significant records at every level of government in the United States: record-breaking numbers of socialist and otherwise destructive Democrat bills and programs, and in response, record-breaking victories for Republicans on Election Day.
2011 will be a year of challenges, as newly elected Republican majorities and governors try to find money for the shovels, excavators and front end loaders that will be required to dig their states and country out of the hole that their predecessors left for them.
With the crushing burden of the present budgetary disaster confronting these legislators and executives, it will be difficult for them to find energy and time to focus on the future, but it’s imperative. Here are just a few basic guidelines that every Republican office-holder must remember for the next two years and beyond, if we hope to build on the 2010 election victories, rather than having to look back on this time as no more than a momentary blip in an otherwise unbroken descent into Stalinism.
1) It’s never too early to stop the stealing.
If there’s anything we’ve learned about American elections over the past few years, it’s that Democratic political operatives have no conscience whatsoever.
- They situate polling places in nursing homes and rehabilitation centers so that their operatives can harvest stolen votes from the medicated, the comatose, and the senile.
- They send out absentee ballots to overseas military too late for their legitimate votes to be counted, while sending out absentee ballots to fictional names on ACORN-generated voting rolls early enough to stuff the ballot box with certain Democrat votes.
- They use a different tactic in every jurisdiction in the country, while conning a sheepish news media into believing that vote fraud is just a comical relic, limited in practice to Chicago’s cemeteries.
The miracle of 2010 was that public anger was sufficient to overcome even the dependable vote fraud machine of the national Democratic party. We will never know how many hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of votes are stolen across this nation every year, all we know is that it continues unabated as long as we fail to prosecute the practitioners, and as long as we fail to demand proper ID at the polls.
Every state legislature must pass a Real ID bill this year (every state that doesn’t already have one, that is) – requiring a proper state-issued ID to get a ballot, both at the polling place and for absentee or early voting – and must shame its governor into signing it. We need election reform now, before the 2012 campaigns begin.
No voting without a driver’s license or equivalent; no polling places situated where the handicapped can easily be robbed; no college students and snowbirds voting from multiple residences in the same election. And we must have severe punishment for the precinct captains, registrars, and building managers who allow such scams or perpetrate them themselves.
2) It’s never too late for 48 states to stand up for themselves.
For decades, all of our presidents have been selected by the forests of New Hampshire and the cornfields of Iowa (yes, I know, only their human residents vote, but every time I’ve ever been to either state, trees and cornstalks are all I can personally swear to having witnessed there). Nothing against these two states, but with Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater being the only two nominees of either party to respect the Constitution in the post-war period, the system obviously isn’t working… and we can’t afford another debacle in 2012.
No, it’s not too late. The other 48 states must stand up for themselves and demand a fair primary season for 2012. Despite the foolish deals cut last year, there’s still plenty of time to fix this mess. We need an agreement that no single date can ever host fewer than five primaries or caucuses, to eliminate the fatal flaw of the current system – that losing the least important state can destroy a presidential campaign.
There are plenty of plans out there – the time zone plan, the Ohio plan, the regional plan, and more – some are better than others, but all are better than a program in which the Democrat voters of New Hampshire can take Republican ballots in the primary, and the socialist college students of Madison, Minneapolis, Bloomington and St. Louis can flood Iowa caucuses, skewing the results inalterably in favor of anti-Constitutional candidates of both parties.
Best of all would be the simplest rule of all: that delegates only count if they come from states with closed primaries… or at least, that states that insist on holding open primaries must wait until all the closed-primary states have voted if they want their delegates to count.
If the next RNC chairman doesn’t commit to such an improvement, nothing else he or she does will matter a whit. The strongest party organization in the world couldn’t succeed in electing a Bob Dole or John McCain to the presidency. Nor should it.
3) It’s never too soon to stop the bleeding.
Every new employee in every county, state, and federal agency adds two costs to his government: both his salary today and his benefits, both today and future. These future benefits, particularly in healthcare and pensions, have been the principle instruments of doom for states like Illinois and California, and will continue to bury school districts and municipalities nationwide for as far as the eye can see.
Waiting for contract negotiations and other mass hiring deals takes too long, and puts too much power in the hands of the government employee unions. Every level of government needs to pass laws (these would obviously be different in every jurisdiction) both reducing the base salary of new hires and reducing the government’s long-term obligation for their benefits. Existing laws strictly limit changes to benefits already granted to existing employees; limiting the benefits of future hires isn’t a cure-all, but it’s a good starting point.
Compared with the burden of existing and past employees, the benefit packages of new hires in a time of hiring freezes may seem unimportant, but it will pay dividends. Whatever we do with public employees who have only one, or ten, or twenty remaining years to work for us, our commitments to new hires could bind us for thirty or forty. Oh yes, it matters.
4) Not by bread alone shalt thou live.
The conservative movement focuses hardest on the taxing and spending. When Congressional and state legislative committees focus on their task of overseeing state and federal agencies, they have always paid the most attention to their budgets – to approving, cutting, or battling the routine skyrocketing cost of every agency. And yes, that’s important. Government agencies have been wasting a lot of the people’s bread for a long, long time, and it needs to stop.
But even more important is paying attention to what those agencies do. Why is it that when Congress authorizes the Department of the Interior to issue permits for oil or gas drilling, such permits never seem to get issued? Why is it that when Congress authorizes a Department of Energy to work toward energy independence, that department instead brings suit against American manufacturers of showerheads and lightbulbs? Why do our federal and state agencies constantly fail to perform as they have been directed, as if they were independent tyrants, free to do as they choose, rather than required to obey their charters?
Our high taxes and foolish overspending are not the only things that driven manufacturing from our shores; the wasted and misdirected dollars of our leviathan are far from our greatest problem.
Our private sector is shrinking because of crippling federal regulations that drive companies out of business, and that foil the efforts of nascent entrepreneurs before they can even gain a foothold.
The most difficult task for the next Congress – its greatest challenge, but its most critical goal – will be to order a hostile bureaucracy to cease and desist in its (usually unintentional, but sometimes quite intentional) ongoing destruction of the American economy.
5) When the ship is sinking, bailing is easiest if you plug the leak first.
The political class whined about the difficulty of dealing with five million illegal aliens, and it grew to ten. They whined about the difficulty of dealing with ten, and it grew to twenty. We have over twenty million illegal aliens today, and we’re no closer to solving the problem than we were when it was first noticed.
Congress must pass laws and make appropriations that pay for themselves:
- Building the wall on the southern border,
- Mandating IRS and Immigration support for employers’ efforts to hire only legal employees,
- Indemnifying employers from harassment lawsuits for checking the citizenship status of both new hires and existing employees.
And until the federal government does its job, the states must follow Arizona’s lead.
There’s so much to do – government has grown so obese, so destructive, that the list of corrections is too long and daunting for anyone to bear.
But all we can count on is these next two years. Many think the Republicans are sure to gain in the 2012 elections, and “Then we’ll really accomplish something!”… but don’t be so sure. If we don’t deserve it, the public won’t give us another chance next time.
And even if those real live voters do want to give us another chance… if we don’t fix our election system (points 1 and 2 above), then there are sure to be just enough fictional votes cast for the Democrats to steal the election away. Four more years for Obama? Sure. And how about another eight for Biden, or Clinton, or Emanuel?
We’ve elected some good people – and in these hard times, we’ve given them complex goals with almost insurmountable odds. But if the Constitution’s only champions disregard these five issues in the short time they have in office, we may get no more chances.
Copyright 2011 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicago-based Customs broker and international trade compliance trainer. A former county chairman of the Milwaukee GOP, he has now been a recovering politician for thirteen years, seven months, and two weeks.
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