PROLIFE, ran across this surfing today and thought you would enjoy it. It's a little long, but a very good read.
A New Contract With America
by Sam Brownback
Policy Review
March-April 1996, Number 76
"I love my nation but I fear my government." So read a bumper sticker I saw in Topeka, Kansas, during my first campaign for political office. I was running for Congress and I had to wonder: Was this not the same government that had mobilized the nation to win World War II, that had defeated communism, that had built the interstate highway system? What had gone so desperately wrong? A few months later, I understood perfectly the meaning of that message.
Americans deeply believe in the principles of America, but they don't see them reflected in their government. Americans believe in freedom, democracy, moral values, family, community, and free markets. Yet their government seizes their rights without their consent. Government has become their master, not their servant.
To address these concerns, I ran a campaign in 1994 based on three words: Reduce, Reform, and Return. Reduce the size and scope of the federal government. Reform the Congress. Return to the basic values that had built the country: work and family and the recognition of a higher moral authority.
While many were rightfully skeptical back then that what I said would ever happen, none says so now. We are finally seeing some progress toward reversing a trend thought unstoppable: the growth of government, the irresponsibility of Congress, and the loss of the moral character upon which the nation was founded. The current debate over the budget is about more than simply learning to live within our means. It is a turning point in the history of the federal government. The crucial issue is who should be in charge of major programs like welfare and Medicaid -- the bureaucrats and regulators and members of Congress in Washington, or the American people and their elected state and local representatives.
Our Founding Fathers designed the federal government to be limited. But in the name of compassion, the federal government now tries to do all things for all people. We have discovered, by spending trillions of dollars and taking rights and freedoms away from individuals, that government cannot solve all of our problems. Indeed, exceeding the authority for which the system was designed hurts people.
I certainly discovered this in the district I represent.
LeCompton, Kansas, has a population of 750. At the city hall one day, I met Jeff Goodrick, who showed me a ramp that has provided access to the handicapped for 20 years. Under the new Americans with Disabilities Act, the town was told to replace this ramp for an estimated cost of $15,000, even though the design of the old ramp had never denied anyone access to the tiny city hall. The new one was to be slightly longer, with a slightly more gradual slope. The people of LeCompton don't have the money to pay for this new ramp without sacrificing other services essential to their community. Their freedom had been diminished, and for what?
In Erie, Kansas, I walked up and down the main street while I was campaigning. I entered a small repair shop and visited with the owner, Rex Bohrer. He had the thick, callused hands of a man who has not lived a life of leisure. I asked him for his vote. Rex stared up at me from behind an air-conditioner he was repairing and said, "You runnin' for the U.S. Congress?" -- to which I answered a timid "yes." He said, "I want to talk to you." He led me to the front of his shop and showed me a government manual containing more than 50 pages of fine print telling him how he must repair refrigerators under new regulations regarding the chemical freon. He asked, "What the heck am I supposed to do with this? I don't understand this manual, and you tell me that if I violate any provision it could cost me $10,000. What am I supposed to do?"
I didn't know. I certainly do not want to pollute the environment with dangerous chemicals. But here was an honest citizen trying to earn an honest wage who was being directed by an impossibly complex manual and who face fines of up to $10,000 if he violates any of its provisions. Rex's only recourse is to quit the business that he needs for survival. What is he to do?
In Girard, Kansas, I was speaking to the seniors of Girard High School about the Social Security trust fund. A number of these students had already paid some Social Security taxes. I asked how many of them expected to receive anything from Social Security when they reached the age of 65. Out of nearly 100 students, only four raised their hands. Then I asked how many of them believed in extraterrestrials. About 15 hands went up. This mirrors the responses of young people everywhere. Nationwide, fewer Americans under 25 believe that they will receive anything from Social Security when they retire than believe in UFOs.
In Troy, a farming community in northeast Kansas, I held a town meeting about the need to balance the budget and cut the government back for the sake of future generations. Blaine Holder held up his hand and said, "Well, I can tell you how to do away with the entire U.S. Department of Agriculture and the farm programs, but we as farmers have to have some sort of promise that the government won't use food as a political weapon. We need a contract with the State Department that if they ever use food as a diplomatic weapon, they will reimburse us for the reduction in price that we receive because of our government's actions. If the government would enter into a contract of this nature with the American farmer, I think many of them would be willing to do without all of the government interference and price supports." Of course, Blaine thought the possibility of such a contract was hopeless.
In nearly every town hall I visit, I hear complaints about our tax system. The complicated and frequently politically driven statutes that now make up our tax code compromise our economic growth and provoke class envy. No one can understand the 10,000 pages of tax laws; even the tax lawyers complain about its complexity. When America's taxpayers call the IRS for information, they get five different answers from five different agents. Whatever happened to a tax code designed only for raising federal revenue? How did we end up with a system that micromanages our lives and our economy?
Everywhere I go, I hear stories that reveal an overreaching regime distorted by the false notion that centralized authority will lead this nation on the right path. In fact, the American people believe they can handle most of their problems better than the federal government can. They are right.
How has a nation conceived in liberty and opposition to tyranny arrived at a point today where citizens are more fearful of their own government threatening their rights than they are of any other government?
We got off track by forgetting our core principles. But the good news is there is a way out. It's called the Constitution. However much we may have strayed from the precepts of that document, Americans continue to revere it and the principles it enshrines. Ratified by our founding generation and amended by succeeding generations, the Constitution stands equally for self-government and limited government. It is the instrument with which we empowered the federal government in the first place. But it is also the instrument with which we limited that government. If we would only return to those principles of limited government, then our nation, our economy, our liberties, and our social fiber will grow stronger than we have seen for a generation.
The bureaucratic model of growth and prosperity for a nation has been shown wanting all over the world, from communism in the former U.S.S.R., to socialism throughout Europe, to the welfare state in America. Those running for office in 1996 will find that one of the keys to success and leadership will be a vision of hope, of a brighter future with a smaller government -- one that is at last turning toward its constitutional principles and away from the idea that a centralized, bureaucratic government will solve all of our problems.
We must create an environment in which Americans look first to themselves and to each other for help, not to their congressmen. We must return to a society where people rely on their communities and do not regard their government as a substitute for civil society.
Faith-based institutions can address the needs of the poor more compassionately than federal bureaucrats can. Right now America could profit tremendously from a Fourth Awakening of the moral and spiritual fiber of this country. The government cannot lead that and it certainly should not thwart it. Government should take the Hippocratic Oath to "do no harm" to the values, the faith, and the moral and spiritual roots of the people of this deeply spiritual land.
We must restore the master-servant relationship between the people and the government. The people, of course, are the master, and government the servant, but even the best servant can't do everything. We must remind ourselves, as Ronald Reagan once said, that a government big enough to do everything for everybody is big enough to take everything from everyone.
The Constitution gives the federal government a limited number of important enumerated powers -- for example, to borrow money, to regulate commerce with foreign nations and among the states, to establish post offices and post roads, to declare war, to coin money, to lay and collect taxes for all these purposes. Powers not granted and enumerated are retained by the states and the people. Much of the federal government literally has no constitutional basis. And that is where we find ourselves today.
The underlying principles limiting the federal government are embodied in our founding documents -- the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Civil War Amendments. These documents paint a picture of government, and the role of government in human affairs, that is subtle and profound. As the product of many compromises, the Constitution is not perfect; in fact, one of its compromises took a civil war to resolve. The process of refinement began with the Bill of Rights, which concludes -- in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments -- with a succinct statement of the Constitution's blueprint for a government of enumerated powers and delegated to the government by the people. Finally, the Civil War Amendments ended the immoral institution of slavery, then corrected the imbalance between federal and state power by adding a federal check on the states' power, thus adding greater force to the Declaration of Independence's original promise of liberty and equality for all.
In the Declaration of Independence, we find the American vision of freedom and responsibility in its purest form. The Declaration's essence is captured in the few short phrases that begin with the most important phrase of all, "We hold these truths to be self-evident." In that simple line, Thomas Jefferson placed us squarely in the natural-law or higher-law tradition, which holds that there are "self-evident truths" of right or wrong. And what is that higher law? It begins with a premise of moral equality -- "all men are created equal" -- then defines our equality by reference to our "inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
There, in a nutshell, is the moral vision -- a world in which moral people are free to pursue their own happiness, constrained only by the equal rights of others to do the same. It is not the responsibility of government to secure our happiness for us. That is our responsibility -- and our right. The role of government, rather, is to secure our rights, as the Declaration goes on to say. That is its basic function. But to be just or legitimate, government's powers must be derived "from the consent of the governed."
We have evolved this century from a constitutional government to a government that behaves without regard to constitutional principle. That moral vision in which people have the right and responsibility to pursue their own happiness has been lost. The federal government no longer derives its powers from the people -- it just takes them. This is why citizens distrust their government so much today. It is time that we re-limit our federal government so it can perform its proper functions well, and leave to the people and the states those functions which the federal government was never intended to perform.
If we can begin to restore a constitutional government, I foresee an America where freedom and responsibility grow for individuals, families, and communities. Freedom and responsibility cannot be separated. Our freedoms never belonged to the federal government, but to the individual. We must make our government return them.
I foresee an America that is the most family-friendly nation on earth. The family, not the government, should be the backbone of society. Government should cease trying to supplant it. When we are careless, legislative initiatives can harm families. By pledging to spare families from additional legislative and regulatory tinkering, we will do more to protect the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness than any federal legislative quick-fix.
I also foresee an America where far fewer decisions are made by Washington, and more are made by individuals, markets, or localities. Imagine the federal government, operating within its limited role, serving as a model of efficiency and effectiveness. A federal government focused on its constitutional missions -- rather than creating new ones -- could become a model for other governments.
So, how do we return to a constitutional government? To start, we can give the American people a clear choice in the next election. I propose that all Republican candidates running for president, the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. House of Representatives start working together to develop a specific plan to return to a limited federal government as intended by our Founding Fathers. We must develop an agenda to recover the rights of individuals from their government.
A New Contract With America
Call it a new Contract With America -- one that passes laws, not merely proposes them. Our party's greatest asset is our message, not our messengers. We should stake the future of our party -- and the country -- on a certain set of ideas, a governing moral code, rather than on any particular politician. Our goal should be to implement reforms consistent with those timeless principles embodied in the Constitution.
Our pledge to the American people should be clear: "If you elect a Republican president and maintain Republican majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, we will do the following . . . ." Here are some broad outlines for such a contract:
I. Reduce Government Spending
We will reduce the size of the federal government by a tangible measurement over a period of four years. My preference would be a reduction of federal spending from 22 percent of our GDP to 15 percent or less (which may take longer than four years). Imagine taking these resources from the hands of government and putting them back into the pockets of families and entrepreneurs.
II. Transform the Tax System
We will remove all social engineering from the U.S. tax code to create a new tax system designed strictly for the purpose of raising revenue efficiently. The power to lay and collect taxes was meant to fund the enumerated powers, not to become a political device in and of itself. Today, we discourage certain behaviors and reward others based purely on the whims of those who control the tax leviathan.
III. Reorganize the Executive Branch
We will redesign the executive branch to be consistent with its constitutional authority instead of one still operating on 20th-century, centralized government experiments. We will replace the 14 cabinet-level agencies, which impose more than half a trillion dollars worth of regulations upon the U.S. economy each year, with perhaps nine, and restrict their regulatory powers under constitutional principles. The Constitution does not authorize at the federal level, for example, many of the activities within the departments of Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Education, and Energy.
IV. Create a Constitutional Caucus
We will form a constitutional caucus or commission to evaluate all federal programs for an authorizing principle under the Constitution. A constitutional cleansing of the federal government is long overdue. Furthermore, Congress should require that all legislative proposals cite their precise constitutional authority before they can be enacted. In the case of existing illegitimate programs, Congress should identify and debate which ones should be returned to the states or phased out entirely.
V. Seek Change with Compassion
As we phase out unconstitutional programs, we will implement change with compassion, so that people currently dependent upon federal programs will have time to prepare for the transition and enjoy the empowerment they receive from their new freedoms.
VI. Pay Off the National Debt
We will implement a plan not only to balance the budget, but to run surpluses and pay off our $5-trillion national debt over 30 years, so that our children can decide their own future.
VII. Remove Barriers to Good Citizenship
We will erase from the books all laws, regulations, and other barriers that prevent local voluntary and civic institutions from helping their neighbors. Faith-based and civic institutions that are leading the fight for a civil society should not be stymied and penalized by mountains of federal laws and regulations that merely supplant local acts of kindness with the cold attitude of "government knows best." Why do we have a poverty class at all, when we spend an average of $36,000 in federal, state, and local welfare funds on every family below the poverty level? Because as much as 70 cents of each government anti-poverty dollar doesn't even reach the poor -- it is engulfed by administrative overhead and "professional" personnel. We will form a task force to conduct an exhaustive investigation of rules and laws that are interfering with those faith-based and civic institutions that are working to revive their communities and families. Then we will implement its recommendations. Local church and community groups can do far more to bring their people back to self-sufficiency than a central planner could ever hope to achieve.
There are conservatives who believe that, with the proper leadership, the federal government can engineer the comeback of the family and civil society. But we should not yield to such temptations. If we are trying to end social engineering from the left, how can we justify it from the right? Our highest goals should not rely on new legislative initiatives as much as on the proper legislative restraint.
With this platform and this contract with the American people, we will continue to be the party of ideas and of commitment to constitutional principles, to prosperity, to a revived citizenry, and to a government on the side of those who want the culture in America to reflect their basic values. This is more important now than ever before, because government thwarts those values by attempting to replace them. Today, on behalf of the "public good," government crowds out the individual's "pursuit of happiness" -- including private investment and private charity -- by replacing them with government substitutes.
We face today a set of deep-seated problems --overweening government, massive public debt, and crippling dependence on federal programs. But we face as well a historic opportunity to base our solutions upon our very roots as a nation, and upon our principles as a people -- freedom and responsibility.
Let us seize the opportunity before us by recovering those principles. If we restore government to its proper role under our Constitution, we will look back in years to come and say that the moment was right, and we were a match for that moment. And our children and grandchildren will thank us. |
