By John F. Di Leo -
It is expected – unless the vote fraud is even worse than usual this time – that the Republicans will win back both the US House and the US Senate in November 2022.
This is not certain, and nobody should count their chickens before they’re hatched, though every poll points to it.
Even so, it’s not too soon to talk about what the next GOP Congress needs to do. And this time, some of the absolute musts are unusual.
First, a few ground rules:
1. Republican legislators have a tendency to say “if we don’t hold the executive branch, there’s no point wasting our time on things that won’t get signed.” Wrong. Even if there’s no chance of a signature from the White House, pass the bills. First, to get the Democrats on record for vetoing it, and second, to show what the GOP stands for, and will pass again when there’s someone in place to sign it. Besides, sometimes, some of them will pass with enough of a majority to override a veto. It’s worth a try.
2. There are tons of issues that Republicans shy away from. Cold fear of being called “racist, sexist, anti-gay,” and a hundred other insults has terrified Republicans to the point that they won’t say a word about the crippling welfare state, our emasculated military, the insolvency of Social Security, and perhaps a hundred other subjects. We simply cannot afford such fears anymore. For decades, Republican squeamishness has given the Democrats carte blanche to use those very issues to undermine not only the United States, but Western Civilization itself. Stand up or go home.
3. Finally, unity is imperative. Democrats manage to act united in Congress no matter what, while the Republican caucus always has dozens of self-proclaimed “mavericks” who show off their power by building coalitions to undermine conservative policy whenever the party is on the brink of victory. How do Democrats avoid this problem? By letting such mavericks know that they will be destroyed in the next primary if they dare to dissent. As a result, we can list the number of Democrats who think for themselves on one hand. Imagine what the Republican party could accomplish with that much unity on the side of good.
Now then. What must the GOP focus on in the next term?
Obviously matters of the budget – cutting spending, cutting taxes, and numerous investigations on such subjects as the Biden crime family, the shameful abandonment of Afghanistan, Democrat party support of riots in 2020, etc. Much of this goes without saying.
But there are also certain critical issues that appear to be underappreciated by the national Republican party. These are issues that must be addressed if the party is to have a prayer of winning anything in 2024 or ever again, issues that may determine whether this country ever again bears any resemblance to the United States left to us by our Founding Fathers.
Climate Change
The “manmade global warming” campaign is much more than just an obnoxious “sky is falling” hoax, designed to scare people into buying electric cars and Chinese windmills. That’s what it looks like, but it is more insidious than most can imagine. This global con, which has been utterly disproven time and time again, is being used as the justification for all kinds of unconstitutional, destructive regulations emanating from unexpected federal agencies, from chemical production to banking, from education to health policy. Congress urgently needs to act, stating for the record that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, and that no executive agency has any right or authority to promulgate rules controlling CO2 levels in any way. The very crooked concept of the “carbon footprint” must be demolished at the federal level, and to the extent that states can do so, they should as well.
Vote Fraud
There are dozens of different ways to commit election violations, and Democrats have made this subject their special arena of expertise for at least a century. Most election law is controlled at the state level, and rightly so. But to the extent possible, the federal government can crack down, through measures such as reducing the number of illegal aliens… making an election fraud conviction grounds for immediate revocation of visas, government grants, or government jobs… facilitating national databases to enable voter roll cleanups, etc.
Securing the Border
The country has been over this issue countless times in the past half century. We know what we need to do: build the wall, enforce the laws, and put an absolute end to talk of amnesties. The Democrats have long practiced a shameful policy of showing incredible favoritism for gate crashers at the expense of the honorable immigrants who follow the law. The GOP must make this case, vocally and clearly, and start purging and/or closing the many federal agencies on the wrong side of the issue.
The Regulatory State
We can break down the jobs of the House of Representatives into three general buckets: pass the laws, establish federal agencies for the executive branch to manage, and oversee those agencies through audits, reports, hearings, and corrective measures. Congress has traditionally been happy to pass laws and establish agencies; it’s in the oversight of those agencies where there has been a largely bipartisan lack of interest. As the regulatory state has grown, as seemingly every single agency promulgates an agenda infinitely broader and more destructive than Congress chartered it to do, this is the function that Congress must reassume with gusto. Their very job is to clip the wings of the leviathan, to bind its arms, muzzle its jaw, and chain its legs. As long as it fails to do so, unelected technocrats will continue to increase their chokehold on our country.
The Attack on Societal Norms
In just the past ten years, the Left’s efforts to attack the traditional family unit, by undermining marriage, by encouraging sexual deviancy, and particularly by mainstreaming mental illness such as gender dysmorphia, has reached a fever pitch in the popular culture, infested our schools and legal system, and wormed its way into federal hiring practices and grant allocation. Women’s sports, in particular, are now in jeopardy of utter destruction due to the ability of a few men who have been allowed to dress as women, steal competitive awards and demolish the college scholarship environment. Congress can and must quickly reverse the recent federal orders, particularly in the Department of Education, that have facilitated this cancer.
Restore the Military
Few things exemplify this attack on societal norms more than the pacification of the military that began in force under Clinton and accelerated under Obama. We have all seen the latest US Navy training video, instructing our servicemen to participate in the pronoun game. Personnel is policy, so such a course correction cannot happen overnight. But what Congress can do, it must do. Our national security is in jeopardy.
Social Security Integrity
The Democrats have spent some fifty years spreading the lie that Republicans want to attack our seniors’ Social Security program, all the while undermining it themselves by using it as an endless piggy bank, to fund social engineering projects and all manner of welfare state programs for everybody but the seniors who are counting on it for their retirement. It is long past time for Congress to protect Social Security by breaking away those other programs, to be dealt with by the general fund, and thereby enabling Social Security to be properly funded and protected from such cannibalizing.
A National Manufacturing Policy
This is a dangerous term; it is usually used to call for massive federal spending on programs and subsidies, many of which are illegal under our international trade treaties. But we can support American manufacturing the conservative way too, and so we should. An end to Davis-Bacon, restoration of American energy independence, a broad scrapping of the crippling federal regulations that have driven so much industry overseas, restoration of the temporary Trump-era tax cuts that Democrats practically salivated at the chance to sunset. Congress can make the United States a welcoming home for all kinds of heavy and light manufacturing again, and so they must. Not a penny in new government spending; just a clear embrace of the free market again. It’s the only way our of this economic crisis.
There is more, of course, so much more to be done. But these are the issues that a new Congress will likely think too big to tackle and too unlikely to gain even partial presidential support for. But that’s exactly why they must be on the agenda for 2023. Even if only some of these are fully successful, a Republican majority must be on the record as recognizing their importance and working on them, instead of just holding hearings and spending money, which are all a lot of Americans think Congressmen ever do.
Some of this is purely federal in nature; some of it has state-level and even county and village level aspects as well. If the Republican Party is to earn the majority status that appears to be on the verge of returning, it must demonstrate an understanding of its role in society, and its obligation to restore so much that has recently been undermined.
Copyright 2022 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer, and actor. A one-time county chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009.
A collection of John’s Illinois Review articles about vote fraud, The Tales of Little Pavel, and his 2021 political satires about current events, Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes One and Two, are available, in either paperback or eBook, only on Amazon.
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