THE BATTLE PLAN: THE FIRST 100 DAYS
EVERY FIGHT REQUIRES A battle plan. Stopping the progressive crusade to systematically dismantle the principles of liberty and the Constitution will not be easy. Ronald Reagan wisely told us that freedom is never more than a generation away from extinction—and that means failure is not an option.
Only by understanding the ideology of progressives and their true agenda, only by understanding that they view the acquisition of power as a self-justifying goal regardless of the means used to acquire it, can defenders of American values hope to prevail.
We have offered the agenda, the order of battle, to halt the left’s march to fundamentally transform—and ultimately extinguish—the shining city on a hill, the beacon of freedom that is America.
The First 100 Days of the Trump Presidency
EXECUTIVE ORDERS
On day one, Trump will sign at least 20 executive orders to undo the illegal subversion of the Constitution and its balance of powers undertaken by former president Barack Obama. Among them are the following:
- TPP, RIP—Voters rejected the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the mainstream consensus on trade and immigration. President Trump will listen to the voice of the people and negotiate new deals.
- Restore Guantanamo—Democrats are uncomfortable fighting the war on terror. They are in denial about our radical Islamic enemies and want to treat terrorists as ordinary criminals, affording them the rights of American citizens. They want to read them their Miranda rights and provide them with opportunities to convert and recruit other prisoners. The detention facility at Guantanamo is one of the most carefully monitored incarceration facilities of its kind in the world, and it should be maintained as an essential tool in America’s war on terror.
- Relocate America’s Embassy in Israel—Israel is the frontline state in the war against Islamic terrorism. The capital of Israel always has been and always will be Jerusalem. It is time to stand up for our one staunch ally in the Middle East and recognize that there can be no peace as long as Palestinians support terror and deny Israel’s right to exist.
- Keystone XL and Drilling on Federal Lands—President Trump will promote US energy independence to thwart the left’s agenda to make America dependent on global partners whose heartfelt hope is to undermine America.
- Nixing Amnesty—President Trump should fire the current left-wing Justice Department officials, instruct the new attorney general to end the corruption, and resume enforcement of US immigration laws, including immediate deportation of the estimated two to three million illegals with criminal records.
- Defund Sanctuary Cities and Prosecute Officials Who Support Them—Some 340 jurisdictions have absolved themselves from cooperating with federal authorities on the enforcement of US immigration law. President Trump, in return, should declare those jurisdictions no longer eligible to receive at least some streams of federal funding. The Justice Department should look into prosecuting city officials who defend their pledge to ignore federal immigration laws and to refuse to cooperate with the Department of Homeland Security.
JUDICIAL APPOINTMENTS
- Supreme Court—President Trump must act on his pledge to nominate a conservative justice willing to follow in the footsteps of the late, great Justice Antonin Scalia. The key litmus test for Senate confirmation should be the recognition that the Constitution’s clear meaning must not be distorted to conform to a leftist agenda.
- Other Judicial Appointments—Because Democrats lowered the threshold for ordinary judicial confirmations to just 51 votes in the Senate, Republicans must cast off Democratic stonewalling and exhibit the will to quickly fill all vacancies in the federal judiciary with justices who favor Constitutional literalism over progressives’ “socially desirable” outcomes. This will finally begin to redress the imbalance in judges brought on by eight long years of Obama appointees.
RULES AND REGULATIONS
- Countermand the Affordable Care Act—The expansion of the imperial presidency under President Obama means much of what passes for law in this country are actually federal regulations. President Trump has promised to order the federal bureaucracy to move quickly to cancel them. Nowhere is this more urgent than in the case of the Affordable Care Act. While he’s awaiting congressional legislation to replace Obamacare, Trump should order the US Department of Health and Human Services to begin dismantling it. One alternative is to make it easier for states to establish their own alternative health care systems. It’s also time to stop the federal effort to recruit new enrollees into a health care regime that, based on narrowing provider bases and spiraling premiums, is already imploding.
- Attack IRS Malfeasance—The IRS has continued to add insult to injury with its persecution of conservative nonprofit organizations long after Obama apparatchik Lois Lerner left government service. To restore a culture of law and order in the federal government, the Trump administration should launch a wholesale investigation into those responsible at every level of the IRS bureaucracy, with penalties up to and including criminal prosecution for those who played ball with the Obama administration’s push to wield the agency as a political weapon against its rivals.
- Challenge EPA Overreach—President-elect Trump has promised to “cancel” the Paris climate-change deal that threatens to ensnare US autonomy in a web of international accords that blatantly favor India and the Chinese. Also look for him to declare the EPA’s “Clean Power Plan”—a scheme to weaken the energy sector by limiting the carbon emissions of US power plants—to be null and void. That plan is already frozen by an order of the US Supreme Court, pending a judicial review.
- New Deal for Black America and the Inner Cities—Trump must act quickly on his promise of a “New Deal for Black America”—to make inner cities “safe,” to increase educational opportunities for their children, and to provide jobs. Republicans at the state levels must begin to challenge progressives in their political powerbase in the inner cities. Democrats’ monopoly control of America’s inner cities is actually their Achilles’ heel. The best way to break that monopoly is to use Department of Education funding to pay for scholarships and vouchers to help parents select the public or private school of their choice. Eliminating the public-sector unions’ monopoly on education will expose the left’s pretense of social justice for the cruel sham it is. Trump may be able to accomplish some items on his own, but he has called for a “School Choice and Education Opportunity Act” to restructure the Department of Education to facilitate, rather than impede, the implementation of school choice.
- Obamacare’s Replacement—House Speaker Paul Ryan has let it be known that two pieces of legislation are almost ready to be introduced. In January, President Obama vetoed legislation that would have repealed the Affordable Care Act. It also would have defunded Planned Parenthood. Now, with a member of their own party in the White House, congressional Republicans must figure out a way to preserve the popular aspects of health care reform—coverage for preexisting conditions, for example—while extricating the federal government’s sticky fingers from the one-sixth of the US economy that health care represents. Much of this work can be done through the “reconciliation” maneuver that was originally used to pass the bill, meaning just 51 votes in the Senate can put the bill on the president’s desk.
- Tax Reform—Reducing the share of the monies the federal government confiscates from its citizens is politically toxic for Democrats. So the absurdly high US corporate tax rate of 35 percent, the highest in the world among developed nations, has gone unaddressed year after year. With Republicans in charge across the board, that must quickly change. House and Senate leaders must cut US corporate taxes to repatriate the estimated $2.5 trillion in profits that American-based companies have simply parked overseas, where the capital is lost to the US economy. On the campaign trail, Trump also promised to lower the top marginal rate for individuals to 33 percent. The bottom line: Nothing would do more to stimulate our lagging economy than overhauling a tax code that is both burdensome and unwieldy.
- Infrastructure Spending—The last time Congress passed an infrastructure spending bill, most of the money went to pet congressional projects and progressive nostrums such as clean energy. Now Trump wants genuine infrastructure spending to rebuild America’s communication and transportation networks. It’s part of his plan to “Make America Great Again,” but he’ll need the support of Congress to make it happen.
To stop the progressive juggernaut dead in its tracks, Republicans must challenge the base of power progressives depend on by offering genuine opportunities to the disadvantaged urban communities that Democrats have ruled, exploited, and paid lip service to for decades. Restoring law and order, offering school choice, ending the open-borders policy, and rebuilding America’s infrastructure will do wonders for an inner-city community that knows liberals have been long on promises and short on delivery.
What matters from this point forward is not what we say but what we do. We must rise up and confront those who no longer believe in America as the exceptional bastion of freedom that it is. Along with Reagan, we must fight to defend liberty in order to bequeath it to the next generation.
Let it not be said we shrank from the great calling of our times: to faithfully defend the “last best hope” of freedom that is the United States.