Agenda for a Republican President
Remember when liberals dreaded the inauguration of Reagan? Attacks on entitlements, tax cuts for the rich, a new arms race? Ah, the good old days! When the Republican party actually believed in policy. Terrible policy in a lot of cases, but policy nonetheless.
When I came to Washington in 1970, there was already a network of “government in exile” think tanks where expats from the JFK and LBJ administrations and bright up-and-comers (like me, I guess) could ride out the Nixon years: Brookings, Nader outfits like Public Citizen and the Center for Auto Safety, my employer (the Council on Economic Priorities), etc. And this let them keep working and thinking so they could hit the ground running when Carter brought many of them back in. There was no equivalent Republican sector: their appointees viewed government as a good tick mark on their resume, but their career was on Wall St. or Madison Ave. or in industry.
That was starting to change by 1980, when my time on the Hill was ending. A variety of Richard Mellon Scaife-funded outfits cranked out a blizzard of policy from the right. The Committee on the Present Danger. The Heritage Foundation. American Enterprise Institute. And now, the right probably has more people making a career of “destroying the administrative state” than the left has trying to improve it. And they’ve been busy, developing a nightmare for us.
We know a second Trump administration will mainly be about destroying NATO and payback. We also know there will be no Jim Mattis’s in the room; we’ll start with the Kash Patel’s and John Eastman’s. Indeed, it is possible the nominee won’t be Trump. But does anyone think a President Abbott or President DeSantis is going to return to the politics of Paul Ryan?
Some of it is pretty obvious: a national abortion ban. National voter ID. National over-ride of local gun safety laws. (Does anyone remember when the GOP complained about “federal over-reach’ and thought the states should have the authority?) Basically the Wisconsin legislature on a national scale.
Build the darned wall. Drill baby drill. Immigration crackdown. Privatize social security and VA; turn Medicare into a voucher. Gut national parks.
How about this idea? Taking all safety net programs (housing, food stamps, Medicaid, etc.) and turning it into a block grant. At much reduced funding.
A national electoral framework for voter suppression and rigged vote counting.
Then, the show trials. So some US attorneys resisted Bill Barr’s orders to launch political prosecutions. Think they’ll make that mistake again? Biden. Harris. Wray. Fauci. Garland. AOC. Ilhan Omar. Adam Schiff. Nancy Pelosi. Liz Cheney. Heck, why stop there? Pete Buttigieg.
We saw for four years Trump’s desire to corrupt federal agencies and turn them into instruments of his revenge or domination. It took them almost four years to come up with Schedule F, the new federal schedule that for all practical purposes abolishes the civil service system and makes way for Trump to appoint loyalists up and down the civil service. It will be available from Day 1. “Where will they find all those people?” you ask. Remember Cassidy Hutchinson? There were hundreds of her, in the White House, on the Hill, in agencies and January 6 didn’t bother most of them. They’ll be back. They’re getting ready.
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