Governing in the “Key of We”: Jaguars in the Water, Clinics on the Ground, an Immigration Overhaul in the Air
President Trump needs some wins, and early. Big wins. Lasting wins. Wins you can point to for decades if not centuries to come. Keeping hundreds of Carrier/United Technologies jobs in the United States was just a small, though significant, start to the wins he needs to pile up. The Fourth Way means the congressional GOP helping President Trump obtain those achievements. The Fourth Way means embracing infrastructure—but infrastructure of a different sort than is commonly thought of when Democrats throw around the term, and delivered in a much different way. It means a tenth of the federal spending President Obama squandered in the 2009 “stimulus,” but a tenth yielding a hundred times the lasting benefits.
President Obama asked for and received $831 billion in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the stimulus). Asking Congress for a tenth of that amount for use in a new sort of infrastructure spending (described below) is reasonable. But this means President Trump will ask Congress for a lot of money to spend on infrastructure—big money in real terms, although small relative to the Obama stimulus. Congress should give it to him.
President Trump won on the promise of new infrastructure. And the right kind of new infrastructure projects alongside an immigration overhaul can create in one year a domestic legacy that will far outshine anything accomplished by President Obama in eight. It can be done. There is a playbook. You just have to study what’s been happening in Orange County, California—specifically in Santa Ana—since 1999 and in Phoenix, Arizona, during the same period.
About 350,000 people live in Santa Ana, California. Close to 80 percent of them are Hispanic. As of 2015, there were 52,582 residents enrolled in Santa Ana Unified School District K–12 schools, so the city has a very rapidly growing population. The median age is just under thirty, with 30 percent of the population under eighteen. One in five people live below the poverty line. The residents of Santa Ana live elbow to elbow—12,000 per square mile. It is the fifty-seventh-largest city in America. Its population is often said to include the largest number of Mexican citizens living outside of Mexico, though that is the sort of assertion that cannot be “fact-checked.” But we are certain that of the approximately 11 million unauthorized residents in the United States, more than half are Mexican. Tens of thousands live in Santa Ana. People with more than a casual fear of deportation are not easily counted or cared for, nor are their contributions and costs easily collected and turned into graphs, but it is safe to say that one of the physical centers of the immigration policy debate is Santa Ana.
Santa Ana is also home of a pool for the Segerstrom High School Jaguars, along with a YMCA pool next door, and Dr. Patricia Riba’s “Serving Kids Hope” clinic. These three structures—technically known as “infrastructure” exist because the nine-member Children & Families Commission of Orange County (of which I have been a member since its founding in 1999) paid for most of their costs. I see in these expenditures—in the commission’s organization and in its funding and spending, as well as in its results—the future of the GOP. This is a microcosm of the potential success that President Donald Trump can have when it comes to infrastructure. This is the kind of spending that juices the economy, creates immediate and sustained employment, assists the poor with health care and health more generally, and has the additional benefit of enormous political pop.
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Keep in mind as you assess these examples that this is a book about (1) how Republicans need to talk about the future, how and when they communicate, (2) the rules they need to adopt to ensure that the GOP seizes the chance to become a governing majority party for a generation or more, and (3) the specific policies it needs to embrace and support—the infrastructure and immigration policies discussed herein, a 350-ship Navy, originalists judges and court expansions, as well as tax reform and a regulatory state overhaul—while recognizing (4) the tension between the Article I GOP, led by Speaker Ryan and Leader McConnell; the Article II, GOP led by President Trump; and the Article III GOP, led by Chief Justice John Roberts. Together they can open a new and wonderful era in America. If they stay apart there will be another impeachment and resignation, or a Republican primary challenge to President Trump in the winter and spring of 2020, following a massacre at the polls in November 2018. I’m counting on decision makers in each of the three parts of the GOP to be open to outside thinking. I’m counting on TPRM actually wanting to win and having the openness to ideas not of their own making.
If the GOP descends into internal strife over agendas, or goes slow in carrying out a common vision, or is undermined by scandal brought about because of hyper-loyalists to any of the principal figures, it will all crash, and in the collision of agendas could come massive political carnage which, if paralleled by any political scandal, could consume President Trump in an impeachment proceeding. At a minimum, there would be either a return to the policies of the Dean Martin Republicans, who governed the House GOP caucus from the departure of Newt Gingrich to the arrival of Paul Ryan, or the embrace of the absurd ideological extremism of the Wall Street Journal Republicans with their love of Hayek and their disconnect from Main Street and the ordinary blue-collar worker. Either would doom the GOP. But there is a “Fourth Way.” Much like the Democrats invented a “Third Way” when their years in the political wilderness between 1980 and 1992 beat the liberal wing into submission. The Fourth Way will work—if it isn’t undone by scandal fueled by an extremely hostile mainstream media, the “MSM,” which is now widely understood to include not just the big networks and old papers but the new media that embodies the familiar left-leaning bias of the chattering class. Any empowerment of hyperpartisan loyalists beyond the close supervision of experienced hands who understand the risks of power could end in disaster, just as Richard Nixon’s sweeping victory of 1972 was followed by his resignation in August 1974. It doesn’t take long—just the blink of an eye—to fail. “He stood on pinnacles that dissolved into precipice,” Dr. Henry Kissinger said of Richard Nixon at the former president’s funeral. “He achieved greatly, and he suffered deeply.” This is not the eulogy that Donald Trump wants. He wants a tribute to an unexpected and massively successful presidency following the most surprising election in history—the first where both parties were dumbfounded by the result. A surprise win could be followed by an enormous disaster of a presidency. Or by a stunningly successful one, every bit as unpredicted as the Trump win.
• • •
This chapter lays out the types of “infrastructure” the new president should seek to win the political future of the country while fundamentally transforming how government spending should be done, and explains why marrying these infrastructure investments to an immigration overhaul makes so much sense. Investments in infrastructure are inherently “political.” The government is picking winners and losers when it invests federal dollars, which is why it is so dangerous and can quickly descend into “crony capitalism,” where only friends win and enemies always lose.
Ike’s interstate highway system was infrastructure, though, as were the first railroads and the Erie Canal. “Internal improvements” are made in every generation. If the right ones are made, the country benefits. As does the party superintending their construction. Make corrupt choices not based on the common good and scandal follows.
Democrats would never impeach one of their own. Republicans already have and would have removed my old boss Richard Nixon had he not resigned. Part VI of this book is a meditation on how this could all go very wrong. Parts III, IV, and V are about getting the policies right to prevent VI from ever occurring. This part is about words and visions surrounding the infrastructure and the immigration overhaul. Get this part right—learn to govern in the “key of we”—and the GOP will truly prosper, as will the country.
The vision must consist of more than speeches. We got beautiful speeches from President Obama—at least at the beginning—but they could not lift the dreadful weight of Obamacare from the economy or recover the $831 billion in stimulus that was wasted. If the GOP innovates when it comes to infrastructure investments and combines those investments with an immigration overhaul it will make the Democratic Party and its ruinous instincts of the past decade as relevant to the next thirty years as Republicans were to the thirty years that followed FDR’s landslide of 1932.
And it all begins with Jaguars in the water and Christian doctors in the Phoenix barrio. It begins with Waddell Pool in Niles, Ohio, and it all depends on the GOP rejecting the extreme fringe of hate and bigotry that thinks it rode into power in November while finally doing something about the pressing need for a border fence and an immigration overhaul. This spending cares about the homeless population and acts in concert with the private sector to shelter them, not use them to score political points.
Waddell Pool was where I learned the joys of lifeguarding in the summer of 1974, fresh out of high school. My brothers made more money working at a mill, but I made the better choice, getting Red Cross certified and spending summer outside with zinc oxide on my nose, a red hat of authority on my head, and an ocean of really wonderful-looking young women around from dawn until dusk. The Waddell Pool was built in the Depression by FDR’s Works Progress Administration (WPA). The WPA constructed more than 600,000 miles of roads and built or repaired more than 124,000 bridges, 125,000 public buildings, 8,000 parks, and 850 airport runways in its eight years of existence. These buildings included the structures surrounding the big pool at Waddell Park, which was still working to the benefit of the Niles community—and generating revenue—four decades later when I went to work there, and which continues to do so to this day. It is a trophy of the New Deal, one of hundreds of thousands, including artworks of all sorts, stadiums, and of course roads and bridges.
President Trump needs trophies, too. If his first bill combined a huge burst of purpose-driven infrastructure—consisting of physical structures housing real programs and endowed with the means of continuing across the country—along with an immigration overhaul (including the border fence), President Trump will have delivered. The difference between these tangible achievements with physical addresses (call them “tangible Trump trophies,” or T3s) and the “shovel-ready projects” of Obama-Biden stimulus fame in 2009? The key will be that, like Waddell Pool, you will be able to point to the T3s. The T3s will have many purposes: immediate employment, lasting community impact, and health and fitness—especially for the poorest Americans.
One of the great joys of being in the radio business over the last eight years has been asking Democrats—again and again and again—to point me to any building left behind by President Obama’s $831 billion stimulus. They can’t because there aren’t any. President Obama’s stimulus was almost the reverse of the WPA. It all went poof. I like to press my lefty friends when they come on my show about what was actually done with the money. One of the brightest and most affable, Jonathan Alter, once offered up improvements on New Jersey’s Route 3 as I pressed for details in September 2010. I’ve always loved that. Route 3 in New Jersey got new yellow stripes or something. The point is, it was most definitely not on par with the New Ramsey High School in Ramsey New Jersey, built in 1936 and 1937 through WPA funds matched by the local school district. (I know about the New Ramsey High School because my longtime pal and occasional guest host, retired lawyer and Vietnam-era carrier pilot Joseph Timothy Cook, always reminds me of his WPA-built alma mater when we talk of such things.) Maybe the 2009 stimulus helped juice the economy out of the Great Recession, and maybe it didn’t and the bubble bursting worked itself out—is working itself out—as these things do.
But whatever the 2009 stimulus did or did not do, it most definitely left few if any easily identifiable marks of ever having been. Eight hundred thirty-one billion, gone without a trace. Can you imagine Donald Trump spending $831 billion and not leaving a mark? Whatever the size of his infrastructure program, you are going to see it, and see if for a hundred years.
Andrew Carnegie is another example for President Trump. I spent nearly every Tuesday night of my youth with my dad and brothers at the Carnegie Library in Warren, Ohio. I loved the place. I can close my eyes and summon its smells. I didn’t realize for years that our Tuesday night ritual gave my mom some quiet time to herself, while also establishing in us Hewitt boys an insatiable love of reading. That respite and that love came from Andrew Carnegie’s beneficence.
A total of 2,509 Carnegie libraries were built between 1883 and 1929, with 1,689 of them built in the United States. The libraries were built according to “the Carnegie formula,” which demanded of local jurisdictions some financial contributions of their own—“earnest money” we could call it today. Carnegie insisted on local dollars mixing with his because, he wrote, “an endowed institution is liable to become the prey of a clique. The public ceases to take interest in it, or, rather, never acquires interest in it.” Carnegie warned about projects where “[e]verything has been done for the community instead of its being only helped to help itself.” Thus Carnegie required the local governments to:
demonstrate the need for a public library;
provide the building site;
pay to staff and maintain the library;
draw from public funds to run the library—not use only private donations;
annually provide 10 percent of the cost of the library’s construction to support its operation; and,
provide free service to all.
Carnegie assistant James Bertram got the assignment of making the principles become brick and mortar. Bertram created a “Schedule of Questions” for would-be recipients, simple, direct questions that probed local need and commitment. They weren’t complicated and the evaluation of each proposal was swift. Carnegie’s program ultimately took nearly forty-five years to complete, but each building was an “immediate infrastructure improvement,” increasing literacy while also employing carpenters and masons and staff. Tangible. Trophy. For Carnegie.
Obviously we don’t need Carnegie-style libraries in the twenty-first century, though many of the buildings have been repurposed over the decades. Physical structures are capital, and though they can and do deteriorate, they last far longer and are likelier to serve more needs than do grants to individuals to seek meaning and fulfillment in self-directed endeavors. President Trump should insist on a fund of $83 billion—a tenth the size of the Obama stimulus—and it should be mixed in with lures for conservative must-haves such as tax reform and entitlement reform (discussed below).
How can President Trump use this fund to further the goal of unity in the country, even as he consolidates his political revolution? The way to do this is to create new local agencies, run by citizens on a voluntary basis, to which these funds would be sent and through which these funds would be spent. The job of these “Trump boards” would be to use general guidelines set by the new president and Congress to build and endow buildings and programs in needy neighborhoods of their communities. The boards’ appointees would serve at the discretion of their appointing authority—the president, the Speaker, or the majority leader (see below)—and its members would be appointed by those three leaders. This highly successful model is based on the actual experience of the boards established in the aftermath of the passage of California’s Proposition 10.
In 1998, actor, director, and liberal political activist Rob Reiner wanted to push for universal preschool for children under five. But he realized a mandate for such a program would be an intrusive, big-government jam-down that many parents and most conservatives would resist. So Reiner decided to slice the sausage. He began by hunting for money.
Reiner teamed up with former United States congressman Republican Michael Huffington to sponsor an initiative (eventually denominated “Proposition 10”) that would add fifty cents to every pack of smokes. The revenue raised by the new tax would then be divided 80 and 20 percent, respectively, between new county commissions and a new state agency. The commissions were obliged to spend their share of cigarette tax money on programs that would work to make children ages zero to five “healthy and ready to learn” by the time they entered kindergarten.
Note the bipartisan appeal of the Reiner-Huffington project. The program was pro-life from the start, treating the not-yet-born as persons and investing in them and their moms and families. The principle of “subsidiarity” (governing from the level closest to the citizen) was also embedded within the proposal. The vast majority of the initiative’s money went to new local bodies in every California county, with at least half of these commissions’ appointees coming from the private sector. But the greatest innovation was that these boards had only the most general of guidelines: (1) the expenditures needed only to benefit the target audience, children zero to five and their families, and (2) the spending could not be simply “substitutionary” or “supplemental.” That meant the commissions couldn’t just throw the new dough into old county government pots. They had to spend the money on new things. All the county commissions became innovators.
I was cohost of a nightly news and public affairs show for the then PBS-affiliate KCET at the time the Prop 10 initiative went to the voters. Reiner came and stumped for it there, as well as on my radio show.
I bit. Hard. Reiner had cunningly devised a program that conservatives would love: a sin tax on smoking that would empower local boards—the majority of whose members had to be private citizens paid no more than a token stipend—to devise solutions to the most pressing problems faced by children in their own backyards. Not only did I endorse the initiative and urge its passage, but when it did pass I applied for and was appointed to the Orange County Board—now renamed the Children & Families Commission of Orange County—and have stayed on these eighteen years. This single county commission has spent $546 million in those years, directing the money to more than 260 different recipients and serving more than 1,830,000 children. Much of that money has been spent on what could be called “health and education infrastructure,” with no supervision from state or federal authorities and with a staff of no more than twenty. The part-time commissioners in charge meet monthly and are “paid” one hundred dollars a meeting. It is government the way government should be done.
No public service has given me more satisfaction than this board, not even the honor of serving in President Reagan’s White House Counsel’s Office under Fred Fielding and Dick Hauser and alongside the future chief justice. And that is because of what the commission has been able to do for children in need in my home county through partnerships with the best and the brightest there. Along the way I’ve come to understand the enormous challenges faced by the immigrant community—those in the country legally and those not—the homeless community, the foster care community, and the community of families with children with autism and other diagnoses and disorders. I’ve also been able to hear monthly from experts about what works for these communities.
We have made the occasional expensive mistake along the way, like paying for the county to lay up antiviral supplies when bird flu threatened. But we have also figured out how to have the most powerful impact on young lives in stressed communities like Santa Ana. And we did it all at the local level, without much staff and with almost no oversight. This is how government ought to work: close to the ground, flexible, free of bureaucracy, lean, and quick to innovate. We have had three extraordinary staff leaders along the way: Michael Ruane, Christina Altmayer, and now Kim Goll. Each is a dedicated public servant. Each took guidance from political appointees and carried it out. Each was willing to push back when they thought the commissioners wrong. Their small staffs worked tirelessly. Government workers never had better representatives than the small team at this commission.
I don’t intend to recap eighteen years of the commission’s work, but here are some highlights that illustrate what President Trump’s infrastructure investments can do.
Among my very favorite public health “infrastructure investments” by our commission is the Healthy Smiles clinic, located in the heart of the county in Garden Grove. Because of this clinic and its associated outreach programs, thousands of children are spared each year from the short- and long-term effects of tooth and gum diseases. This is basic public health for the poor. Rather than provide people with insurance for dentistry—which is very expensive and often impossible to use because of the scarce supply of dentists willing to accept minimal insurance payments—the commission funded the bulk of the start-up costs and endowment of Healthy Smiles. The idea behind Healthy Smiles is to actually provide dentistry to people who need it at a much lower cost than could a broad dental-insurance program. If President Trump followed this model and became the biggest booster of public health dentistry, with five hundred Healthy Smiles clinics opening across the United States, it would do far more good and last longer than the “stimulus” did.
Dental cavities are the single most common chronic disease among kids, five times more common than asthma and seven times more common than hay fever. About one in three kids in Orange County kindergartens had untreated tooth decay a decade ago. So kids need dentists, especially when cavities turn painful or worse and you can’t sleep, much less learn.
So we helped start and fund Healthy Smiles. This year, Healthy Smiles will see 14,434 kids. In fact the number of children and family members receiving some sort of oral health service will top 45,000. Ninety-four percent of the children receiving these services are below 200 percent of the poverty level, with the majority simply below the poverty line. In other words, they’d get little or no treatment if we hadn’t built and staffed a brick-and-mortar dental clinic with the help of some amazing private sector partners. Along the way the Healthy Smiles clinic has also partnered with the Children’s Hospital of Orange County and the University of Southern California’s School of Dentistry to train seventy-nine pediatric dentists.
Since 2001 the Children & Families Commission has spent $15.6 million on the Heathy Smiles clinic. In 2012 we transferred an additional $20 million into its permanent operating endowment. The Healthy Smiles clinic is here to stay. That’s tangible, enduring infrastructure.
The cost of a Healthy Smiles program in every major urban area in the country? Probably about $25 million for a dental clinic like Healthy Smiles. One billion dollars would thus launch forty such clinics around the country. They would never go unused if endowed. Think of all those “Trump teeth.”
Tooth disease that begins with simple cavities is relatively easy to treat and even prevent. Childhood obesity is not.
The commission had a multifaceted response to Orange County’s exploding childhood obesity problem, two parts of which are discussed below. The problem is real and easily measured: a consequence of the cheapest calories coming from starchy fast food and the sedentary lifestyles of children often without options—any option—for safe outdoor play and calorie-burning/fitness-inducing sports.
It is an insidious epidemic because while obvious, treatment is complex. Left unchecked the obesity epidemic will add billions of dollars of preventable health care costs to our nation. This epidemic is already well established in the adult population, with over two-thirds of Americans suffering from its long term effects. With the surge of children afflicted, it will choke our health care system in the next decade or at most two. Obese youth are more at risk for health problems once they become adults, including heart disease, type-2 diabetes, strokes, several types of cancer, and osteoarthritis. Obese children are four times more likely to have impaired school function, to be depressed, and to have anxiety issues. Childhood obesity can be stopped, however. Not by federal programs but the old-fashioned way: through activity (like sports) and good food.
In Orange County, the Prop 10 commission adopted, among other steps, two that can be replicated anywhere. First, we recruited Dr. Patricia Ronald Riba and funded her community clinic for families struggling with weight issues. Then we put the Jaguars in the water.
In 2007, the commission granted Dr. Riba $600,000 to get started as a solo practitioner in her own clinic. Because we were simultaneously bestowing a huge grant to one of the local YMCA chapters to build pools, we conditioned that grant on the Y creating space for Dr. Riba’s trailers and staffs. Those trailers and the programs they house—still open because of the difficulty of finding permanent construction spending and land—have spread to many other sites and spawned numerous after-school programs. Ninety-seven percent of the patients Dr. Riba treats are below the poverty line.
Dr. Riba’s approach is unique and yet basic. Her team works to address the root causes of overweight and obesity, rather than the symptoms, to ensure that the entire family becomes stronger and healthier. The intervention is the same whether the children are obese or overweight:
1. Address the psychology of feeding
2. Improve the quality of their nutrition
4. Assess and treat medical, dental, and psychological comorbidities
5. Empower children to grow up healthy
Eight out of ten of her patients stop gaining weight and almost as many reverse their gains at least in part. One hundred percent of her patients—100 percent!—become more physically fit. Through after-school programs stressing physical activity (running around outdoors), she and her team are developing a new generation of active kids in the poorest neighborhoods of Orange County who engage in sports and the sorts of healthy pastimes that ward off obesity.
Are there lots of Dr. Ribas around? It’s hard to say, but if they exist, the federal government isn’t going to find them. President Trump has to push the dollars down so that they’re spent by local folks capable of finding the Dr. Ribas in their counties. Or luring them there with the promise of a funded clinic.
Dr. Riba’s multidisciplinary team now reaches more than six thousand underserved families through individualized patient care plans. And Dr. Riba’s plan can scale. She’s very special but—and this is key—she isn’t unique. What she did can be done elsewhere. Anyone looking to build a “tangible Trump trophy” just needs to replicate her program in other poor neighborhoods. The would-be T3s that find her will learn how to “do” government from the ground up, how to “do infrastructure.”
Overweight kids don’t stop gaining weight at age five, though, and the Prop 10 initiative said we could help children zero to five “and their families.” So we stretched the rules to the limit to accomplish my own pet project: an aquatics center in Santa Ana, part of which was built on the campus of Segerstrom High School, and part of which was built on adjacent land owned by the YMCA. Segerstrom had been built with the possibility of a pool eventually being constructed on the campus, but with no money to do it. The Y had land and plans for a pool and a soccer field, but was millions short in their fundraising because the facility would not serve the affluent or even the middle class. YMCAs have to raise money like everyone else, and Santa Ana recreation facilities is a tough ask. But they pitched me as a member of the commission, and I visited their land and saw it was adjacent to a new high school—a high school with no pool in a community beset with childhood obesity.
When my two boys were in high school more than a decade ago, they played water polo. They were blessed to be coached by an amazing man, Matt Campbell, who got them in the water early (or the gym in the off-season) and kept them there for hours. He built successful teams, and disciplined young men—and after a few years I could sort of understand the rules of the game. It didn’t take long to recognize that water polo players are in fantastic shape. It is very, very rare to see an overweight polo player. Ditto swimmers. Get a kid in a swimming or polo program and they burn calories. Lots of them. And they develop cardiovascular fitness that is the envy of all athletes.
One summer league game for one of my boys was scheduled during the period when the commission was getting briefed on the local obesity epidemic at the Santa Ana High School. I got myself there, parked in a nearly 100 percent Spanish-speaking neighborhood, and walked into what is probably the worst high school pool in Orange County. The Santa Ana High School pool is old, small, crowded, and was also, at the time, the only pool in Santa Ana. The local club team wasn’t very good. It was awful, in fact. There weren’t many players, and the teams from down in south Orange County—mostly Anglo kids from middle- and upper-middle-class families—crushed them. There isn’t a “swimming culture” in deeply Latino neighborhoods because there aren’t a lot of pools. Pretty simple cause-and-effect there.
But then I noticed—and, again, it was soon after the commission’s briefings on the soaring rates of adult-onset diabetes in Hispanic kids in the county—that these terrible water polo players in this terrible pool had one thing in common with their much better counterparts from down south: they were in shape. They were not obese. Bingo, I concluded. Santa Ana needs more pools. Better pools. A culture of swimming and water polo.
So, prompted by the Y’s pitch and our briefings, and nudged along by my enthusiasm and the wily ways of our chair (then supervisor Bill Campbell), we found the millions necessary to build an aquatics center on land belonging to both the high school and the Y. Two pools, one center, one joint operating agreement.
“You don’t have to know how to swim; we will teach you.” The words crackled through the intercom at Segerstrom High School in Santa Ana one sunny morning in 2010. The brand-new $22 million aquatics center had just been finished in partnership with the YMCA next door, brought to fruition by an $8 million grant from the commission. The school’s then athletic director, Frank Alvarado, was excitedly trying to drum up interest for the school’s newly announced water polo and swim teams. He told the Los Angeles Times that for years he didn’t think the school could afford a swim team, let alone a pool, but now he was proud to boast that an aquatics program was on the way. Frank was a dynamo. When I first floated the idea of a joint effort between the Y and his Jaguars athletic department, the pool was done and built in his mind in ten minutes. He truly gets the credit for making it happen—once the door cracked open even a bit, Frank Alvarado wasn’t going to let it close.
Top-of-the-line pools are nothing new in sun-soaked Southern California, known for powerhouse competitive swim teams and as the birthplace of numerous U.S. Olympic athletes. But for the Segerstrom Jaguars of Santa Ana, being located smack in the middle of Orange County didn’t automatically make them part of Southern California’s rich aquatic dreamland. The school was built with an empty space where a pool might go some years down the road, but so too was Woodbridge High School in wealthy Irvine. Woodbridge opened in 1980 but even its pool wasn’t built until 2010. That was a wealthy district’s idea of priorities when it came to pool construction. Imagine how far down the list “pool construction” is on a strapped school district’s list of spending needs.
Indeed, much of the population of Sana Ana has simply never had the opportunity to learn how to swim, which creates a major drowning hazard when families head to local beaches. Jon Voget, the executive director of Santa Ana’s YMCA branch at the time, told the Los Angeles Times, “Here you have a city with over 140,000 young people, and many kids are just not learning how to swim. They go to the beach and they just don’t have the training to be safe.” Voget was an early backer of the plan championed by Frank Alvarado. They made quite a pair.
In response to this drowning hazard, and with the hope that a new aquatics center could be used to promote youth development, healthy living, and social responsibility, Segerstrom High School and the Santa Ana School District formally partnered with the YMCA—$8 million expedites a lot of paperwork—and set out to build a $22 million aquatics center, funded mostly by private donations and the $8 million from the Children & Families Commission of Orange County. Rob Reiner has no idea, but this pool was built thanks to him.
The Santa Ana School District hoped the pool could become sustainable, in part because while pools are expensive to build, swimming sports cost almost nothing to participate in. All you need are Speedos, lane lines, balls, goals, and chlorine.
“If you build it, they will come,” said Segerstrom’s athletic director, Nick Canzone, when asked recently if he had advice for schools thinking about investing in aquatics centers. But few could have predicted in 2008 just how fast the city’s new pool would catch on and the kind of positive impact it would have on both the school and the community.
Since the aquatics center was completed, the Segerstrom Jaguars have been swimming to success. There have been two dozen “seasons” between the four sports—boys and girls polo and swimming teams—culminating in ten league championships and three California Interscholastic Federation championships. That’s astonishing. That’s a trophy.
“We have averaged about seventy kids per year in our Aquatics Program,” Canzone proudly concluded. That’s seventy fit kids ready to move on to college and the many NCAA swimming programs across the nation.
Another benefit of the new aquatics center is that it allowed the school to proudly host the U.S. Olympic water polo team, smack in the center of the poorest community in the richest county in Southern California.
Segerstrom’s aquatics center has made worries like a student population that doesn’t know how to swim seem like problems from a distant past. The school now looks ahead at building a list of new student opportunities like surfing and training in water safety, which is itself a pipeline to jobs and college application success.
So how about a hundred new aquatics centers at urban high schools across the country? There are thirty-seven thousand public and private high schools in America. Reliable numbers are hard to come by but it appears that fewer than a third have pools. (Of course most of those are in warmer climates, though the benefits of an aquatics center don’t depend on it being indoors or outdoors.). If President Trump’s infrastructure boards build pools, the kids will come and the kids will swim. And they will be fit.
• • •
Smiles and pools. And Dr. Riba’s clinic. And beds. Our commission has built lots of bedrooms and stocked them with beds and all the other necessities homeless families need.
When the commission was established in 1998 there were few places where a homeless family could seek shelter as a family (fewer than one hundred shelter beds, in fact). The lack of services for families meant a well-documented local need. The building community, already organized through a not-for-profit called Home Aid, asked the commission to help support their efforts to build facilities that families could use as they got back on their feet, while staying together. Thus was born the Commission-HomeAid Partnership.
Since its inception, a dozen projects have been built. The result: 457 new transitional and emergency shelter beds across the county. The majority of these projects are small, embedded in eight different but typical American neighborhoods in cities like San Clemente, Fullerton, and Los Alamitos. The projects blend into their communities, providing opportunities for families to integrate more permanently into stable settings that allow the children to enroll in schools and their parents to receive workforce training, with a goal of gaining self-sufficiency.
There are real solutions—tested and proven to work—to meet the urgent needs of families in crisis with small children caught up in that crisis. That funding has been matched with $13.7 million in in-kind donations. The commission also works in partnership with the shelter and HomeAid Orange County to generate all possible leveraging opportunities. Once the building has been acquired or rehabilitated, ongoing operation is sustained by individual local government agencies or not-for-profits. Again, brick-and-mortar spending is key. It supplies the infrastructure around which communities of good-hearted people can organize.
Smiles and pools. And Dr. Riba’s clinic. And beds.
• • •
I want to propose a fourth and fifth clinic as examples for President Trump as plans his infrastructure initiatives.
Some of life’s hardest challenges have nothing to do with poverty and illiteracy but instead with challenges to the brain and body. This rising tide of “spectrum disorders” cuts across class, race, and ethnic distinctions.
Among the most common cultural identifiers of “special needs” are the diagnoses of autism and other “spectrum disorders,” including Asperger’s syndrome. Because of the great writing by Ron Fournier in Love That Boy and Emily Colson in Dancing with Max, more and more Americans are aware that tens of millions of American children have unique brain wiring that makes life more challenging for them and their families. Challenges can be met and in the meeting of them life can even be joy-filled beyond belief—the story of every family I personally know, for example, into which a child is born with Down syndrome.
My Prop 10 commission set out to help out county’s community of families with children diagnosed with these conditions early in our existence, beginning in 2001. We began by funding a small clinic at a Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC) that worked with the University of California, Irvine (UCI) Medical School to diagnosis and treat autism and related conditions.
As a small start-up this “Center for Autism” was located in just under 9,000 square feet of space, and saw 1,700 children in 4,209 visits. (We measure everything at the commission. It’s the only way to separate promise from actual performance.) The annual budget of $2 million supported three staff. We learned as they learned.
Then in 2012, in partnership with the Thompson Family Foundation for Autism and in continuing partnership with CHOC and UCI and also Chapman University, we opened the Center for Autism and Neurological Disorders in its own building of 23,185 square feet, with an annual budget of $6.4 million, more than fifty staff, and a patient roll of 2,500 children who have made more than 10,000 visits to the Center in the past five years. That’s called scaling what works.
The need in Orange County, as it is everywhere, is huge. Thus we have seen a 138 percent increase in visits to the center, where treatment and therapeutic disciplines and services now include these categories of specialization: Social Work, Speech and Language, Occupational Therapy, Physical Therapy, Applied Behavioral Analysis, Behavioral Therapy, Educational Consultants, Gastroenterology, Nursing, Psychiatry, Psychology, Pediatrics, and Neurology. The number of subspecialties required to assist the child and his or her family are vast, as are the number of challenges associated with these conditions.
Outreach to the community is a key to the Center’s explosive growth and instant success as a magnet for families with needs. The Center has pushed a 358 percent increase in the number of parent-education workshops offering services, including an “Autism Education” series and “Families and Schools Together” programs (which help families navigating the IEP—Individual Education Program—process in school districts). The center has provided hundreds of caregiver workshops on such crucial yet basic issues as coping with tantrums, toilet training, and estate planning.
The point is that in addition to the medical needs of the patients, the center’s establishment and funding provides for community-based programs that offer enrichment services for autistic children and their families, including music instruction and performance, art, dance, yoga, robotics, camps in winter and summer, and of course family and sibling support groups. Spectrum disorders impact the entire family and the center is working to expand and refine its model and in doing so has connected a community that exists, inchoate, in every county in the country.
Along the way the Center for Autism and Neurological Disorders has trained 2,400 physicians on diagnosing developmental and behavioral issues.
The cost? An almost unbelievably low $14 million start-up, funded half by the commission and half by the amazing Thompson Family Foundation. While the country was educating itself on the growing needs of children located somewhere on “the spectrum,” a local commission and a private foundation leapfrogged all the studies and researchers and provided a replicable platform. Add money and grow.
Of course it isn’t easy to find other doctors as amazing as pediatric neurologist Dr. Joseph Donnelly, whom the commission helped recruit to the county a dozen years ago and who, like Dr. Riba, is a hero to thousands of patients and their families. But while extraordinary, these doctors are not unique. They can step forward everywhere to provide specialized life-changing care if the money gets to them and houses and empowers them, not bureaucracies. I think President Trump will get this key point: it doesn’t take a government bureaucracy to get infrastructure built and working. It takes trust in good-hearted citizens and a lot of private sector expertise. It isn’t easy to find high-net-worth individuals to donate as generously as has the Thompson Family Foundation, but they do exist and can be drawn to follow the leads of Bill and Nancy Thompson because the “return on investment” is so immediate, the lack of red tape so obvious, the professionalism and the virtue of the doctors and staff serving this community so palpable. The generosity of already-inclined philanthropists can be jump-started with funding from Washington that is locally controlled and serves the needs of the community at their doorsteps.
This is “subsidiarity” at work, a core component of long-standing Roman Catholic social teaching and widely adopted outside of the church by conservatives of other faiths or no faith at all. The idea is that pressing problems ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest, or least centralized competent authority. Political decisions should be taken at a local level if possible, rather than by a central authority. All of our commission’s work is done by a part-time board receiving token stipends (to make us subject to ethics laws) and with a very small but highly competent staff using flexibility as a tool and drawing on the best experts for the season in which they are needed. Thus three times over eighteen years the commission has retained the Bridgespan Group, the not-for-profit-sector’s equivalent to Bain & Company or McKinsey & Company, to come in and audit our work and critique our grants while providing strategic guidance for the future. Humility about abilities is crucial to the success of every infrastructure investment. “We approached our work,” our second executive director Christina Altmayer wrote me, “with tremendous humility. We recognized that we weren’t experts in autism, pediatric care, or homelessness, but we knew how to create the environment to get the experts’ best ideas and deploy them.
“As a public agency,” she added, “underpinning all of this was a strong system of audits and financial accountability.” She is absolutely correct about both the need for humility and the indispensability of transparency every step of the way. If you can’t follow the money, the endeavor has gone off the rails, and likely into a deep ditch.
To show subsidiarity doesn’t just work in Orange County, let me show you the Neighborhood Christian Clinic (NCC) in Phoenix, Arizona, and where I’ve been honored to speak a couple of times over the years. Unlike the programs outlined above, the NCC is funded by private citizens, not by a cigarette tax. It shows how very far public money can go if it is invested in similar models.
“The specialists could not help me because I didn’t have health insurance,” Alejandro Garnica, a local Phoenix resident, explained, “So my aunt told me to come over here [to the Neighborhood Christian Clinic] and finally I said okay.” Alejandro’s story isn’t unique. Hundreds of thousands of people in Maricopa County, Arizona, have been turned away or refused medical care because of a lack of insurance or an inability to pay copays. It is these underserved men, women, and children whom the small Neighborhood Christian Clinic was founded to serve.
More than 417,000 residents in Maricopa County currently don’t have health insurance. Phoenix, the biggest city in Maricopa County, holds the vast majority of those uninsured individuals. Couple those already dreary numbers from the recent report by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that Obamacare premiums for the “second-lowest rate silver plan” are soon to rise 116 percent in Arizona, from $196 to $422, and you have a lot of individuals who simply can’t afford to see a doctor no matter how bad their ailment.
A recent report by consumer market research giant GfK found that half of Obamacare enrollees already skip doctor visits, either to save money or because they simply don’t have enough money to pay their copay. Of course the health care gap long preceded the arrival of Obamacare. It has existed for decades and decades. But some don’t wait for the government to fix things.
Seeing the massive need in Phoenix years ago, Dr. Paul Lorentsen decided to start the Neighborhood Christian Clinic in the city in 1999. Dr. Lorentsen founded the clinic with two major objectives. First he hoped “[t]o provide medical and dental healthcare services to the uninsured, under-served community.” And, second, he wanted, “[t]o share the Gospel and love of Jesus Christ with interested patients and colleagues.”
Dr. Lorentsen’s dream, however, would have to overcome many hurdles before becoming a reality. A top-of-the-line dental and medical clinic that could provide affordable services to those without health care would cost considerable money. And even if Lorentsen could find enough to launch the clinic he would also need to find skilled doctors willing to donate their time to serve the clinic’s patients.
Caring doctors responded to Lorentsen’s plea. “There’s a tremendous amount of need in this part of the community,” said Dr. Philip Cooke, a dentist who decided to volunteer his time to the NCC. Dorn Dunlap, a donor and clinic champion, explained why she believed so many Christian doctors and community members decided to volunteer and donate: “Christ said the poor will always been among us, but his heart’s desire is that we would not neglect them.”
Early on, Dr. Lorentsen and his team decided that the Neighborhood Christian Clinic wasn’t going to be completely free, because they believed that unless patients paid something they wouldn’t value the care they received. Gary Plooster, the current executive director of the clinic explained: “We made a decision to have a patient charge . . . for two reasons. One is that it dignifies the patient, gives them a sense of integrity, but it also invests them into their own health care. If they’re paying for it they feel a little bit more committed to following through on anything that the doctors instruct them to do.”
Currently the clinic charges uninsured patients only $30 per medical visit and $40 per dental visit, relatively little compared to the actual cost of each patient’s visit. Each visit over the past five years has cost the clinic on average $128.13.
What the Neighborhood Christian Clinic can handle is impressive—from gynecology to chiropractic care—but the list of specialists the clinic can refer patients to at little or no cost is even more impressive. More than fifty are on the list, and they charge either nothing or a minimum copay. On the two occasions I have visited, Dr. David Tellez, the chairman of the board, has truly glowed with satisfaction over what he and the entire team does out of their shared mission. Of course, such a place is unique, but the kind of people who built it and maintain it are not. They are in every community across the country and can be brought together through the local boards and clinics like this one.
The total operating cost of the Neighborhood Christian Clinic is around $1.5 million annually. While the overhead is low—about $180,000 for administrative and fundraising expenses—the annual cost to see and treat patients currently exceeds $1.3 million. The amount of revenue generated from the patients last year was only $341,000. The rest of the clinic’s operating cost, more than $1 million a year, is paid for through donations.
Most clinics and hospitals across the country operate in part because of private sector donations. The boards and auxiliary organizations that operate these not-for-profit institutions are almost always made up of extraordinary volunteers supporting professional management, supplemented by professional staffs who are, in turn, supported by volunteers doing everything from the gift shop sales and candy-striper flower deliveries to surgeries. Skeptics will scoff at the idea that public health centers of excellence can be built and sustained through a model of up-front taxpayer-funded construction spending and a public endowment followed by private donations and volunteer oversight, along with some combination of staff and volunteers. But that is exactly what works in Phoenix and can work elsewhere. The left will complain it is not a comprehensive approach but it is an effective approach to actually delivering heath care to the poorest of the poor, and to communities where health insurance means nothing because deductibles are too high or Medicaid-accepting doctors too rare. The perfect must never be the enemy of the good, especially when the perfect never existed or will never exist in the first place.
The state of Arizona has a program that allows its taxpayers to receive a dollar-for-dollar charitable tax credit up to $800. Instead of sending the money to the state coffers, the taxpayer can send it to the charity of their choice. The credit just expanded under Governor Doug Ducey and his GOP legislative majorities, and that makes it even more advantageous than ever to partner with the mission of restoring health and restoring lives in Phoenix. You don’t have to be an Arizona resident to contribute (but you do need to be an Arizona taxpayer to claim the tax credit). You can donate from their website: www.thechristianclinic.org.
More to the point, it is clinics like this one that could spread with help from a Trump infrastructure program.
If TPRM sets its sights on getting clinics like this one up and running in the major urban centers of America, they will have worked a revolution in the delivery of actual health care, and it won’t be health care on paper, the way much of Obamacare has turned out to be. It will be the real deal: actual medicine for the people least likely to be able to afford it.
Note that everything I have described above from both Orange County and Phoenix is relatively inexpensive, homegrown, and, crucially, has a physical home—a presence in the community, an address. The actual blueprints for dental clinics, medical clinics, swimming pools, fitness centers, family shelters for the suddenly homeless and transitional housing for those on the rebound are out there. If President Trump and the Speaker and the majority leader want to leave a mark—want to collect those T3s, those “tangible Trump trophies”—they will block-grant large sums to the new county-based boards appointed in conjunction with the president and the Speaker and the leader (the patronage!) and limit their expenditures to 50 percent of the grant and force the rest of the money to serve as a permanent operating expenses endowment.
It would establish Donald Trump and his colleagues as savvy humanitarians even as it helps launch a political revolution, and would do much to erase the aftereffects of a campaign waged against immigration. The infrastructure investments are part one of the package but its rhetorical positioning is so powerful as to define his presidency at home even as Obamacare defined President Obama’s tenure. And these clinics and pools can be authorized and funded by April, under construction by fall and open by next year. Make the money available and put a deadline on using it and the local authorities will make it happen.
This is a mixture of George H. W. Bush’s “1,000 Points of Light,” which honored the not-for-profits that change lives, and the stimulus bill that squandered $831 billion. It is a politically potent and ideologically compelling innovation of government that moves federal money immediately to local control without either state or federal bureaucrats intervening to drain off resources or distort local need. And it came from the brain of Meathead. What’s not to like?
And of course the political payoff is there as well: Set up county commissions to spend their money, naming a majority of members on each from the president (say five), with the Speaker and the majority leader getting two each. Give them lots of leeway and only general guidelines. Some will explode. Some will explore forever. But the vast majority will quickly move to build and endow lasting infrastructure. And cut out the local elected officials and their staffs, with their own agendas and pet projects. Empower new people—successful, private sector professionals and entrepreneurs—to make new investments in new approaches to old, intractable projects.
Infrastructure investment—“tangible Trump trophies”—is only one of the five big components of the “going big” package. The “T-cubed” or “I-cubed”—immediate infrastructure improvements—statutes need to be added to passing tax reform, the military rebuild, the reworking of the courts, and through them the administrative state, and, crucially, unexpectedly, an immigration overhaul.
There are 3,144 counties (or county equivalents, such as “parishes” in Louisiana). It is the ubiquitous unit of government, and the average county population is just slightly more than 100,000. Using that as a “delta”—every 100,000 of population—let’s figure that a new county board will get $100 per resident in infrastructure spending, or $10 million for the average county.
In Orange County the Prop 10 commission has spent $538 million over eighteen years and accomplished an amazing amount of infrastructure funding. That works out to $30 million a year of unrestricted funding for a county of 3 million people. So I can say with certainty that great infrastructure strides can be made at about $10 per resident per year in spending over eighteen years, but the average federal block grant for infrastructure to a county shouldn’t be a million bucks ($10 per resident in the average county). Rather, it should be ten times that amount—$100 per resident—so that the new boards have endowments from which to draw every year on interest income as well as a mandate to spend the initial block grant down to zero within five years. Like the John M. Olin Foundation and many other foundations, these new county boards should be on a steep descent to a wind-down. The Philanthropy Roundtable summarized Olin’s experience:
The John M. Olin Foundation closed its doors in 2005, 23 years after the death of its founder. Olin carefully selected his staff and board members and instructed the foundation’s trustees to disburse its assets over their lifetimes. The Olin Foundation was the crucial early funder of the Federalist Society, and its funding launched a flourishing field in law and economics at leading law schools. Its commitment to sunsetting enabled Olin to achieve a level of grantmaking comparable to foundations three to four times its asset size. Observers on both right and left acknowledge that compared to what a perpetual foundation would have trickled out, Olin’s grantmaking strategy and accelerated disbursements significantly strengthened the conservative policy network.
With 3,144 boards of nine people each pushing out grants and then permanent endowments to organizations that use the first and second round of grants in accordance with the general guidelines propounded by the Congress and the president, we will watch a conservative revolution in infrastructure spending. Total cost? One hundred dollars times 330 million Americans: $33 billion of the suggested $83 billion in infrastructure appropriations made early in 2017. That’s $33 billion spread out across the land via the new local boards composed of local citizens acting within the loosest of guidelines funding the construction of tangible Trump trophies just as the WPA did, but also endowing their long-term operation—an operation independent of bureaucracies and federal oversight. (Yes, that leaves $50 billion unspent. More on that below.)
Just to make sure even the Pittsburgh Steelers fans get it, I will illustrate how to block-grant the infrastructure dollars using Allegheny County, home to the city that blights the NFL. (I’m a Browns fan.)
There are about 1,230,000 residents in this western Pennsylvania county. So an infrastructure spending bill pegging the endowment to $100 per county would send $123,000,000 to the new nine-member board appointed by the president, the Speaker, and the majority leader. Hopefully they’d put a Rooney on there, a couple of doctors and hospital administrators, some leading public-minded citizens, and a savvy Yinzer journalist like Salena Zito, for example. TPRM will have their networks working and since these jobs don’t pay, aren’t permanent, and shouldn’t come with any benefits save insurance against lawsuits, most applicants will be public-spirited. Those nine will have to hire some staff just as Orange County’s Prop 10 commission did, but overhead should be low and lawyering can be done by outside firms. Our commission has the grant forms on file, developed over eighteen years. Again, none of this is new. And none of it needs a single federal bureaucrat. It needs a federal statute and an appropriation.
They’d be told by the new law and the new president: “Spend twenty percent on construction projects within six months—dental and medical clinics, pools, hockey rinks—whatever makes poor kids and their families healthier and fitter—and then go about endowing those programs and other good programs in the county surrounding them. Be out of business in five years.”
These 3,144 county commissions will move fast, will make mistakes, and will have to hire some staff to execute contracts and supervise grants. To repeat: mistakes will be made. But crucial infrastructure will get built, endowed or both. There’s no reason an existing Y, for example, with plans for a new aquatics center but not enough funds, shouldn’t get a big grant to build and operate it in perpetuity. Allegheny County can find nine worthy folks to guide its projects and more than enough projects on which to spend about $24 million in immediate construction dollars and organizations on which to expend the remaining approximately $100 million in endowment funding. Then these good citizens can go away, their work done, but the good work begun by them carrying on—without federal bureaucrats or continuing “oversight” costs that are as unnecessary as they are draining of community initiative and energy.
The Obama stimulus failed to leave a trace because it was done by and for Washington, moved at D.C. speed, and insisted in seeing plans and benchmarks as opposed to trusting good and virtuous citizens to do good and virtuous things quickly. President Obama and his team had forgotten the American tradition of “barn-raising,” of selfless acts of community building. It is our genius, as Alexis de Tocqueville remarked early in the nineteenth century.
“Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite,” he wrote. “Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools. Finally, if it is a question of bringing to light a truth or developing a sentiment with the support of a great example, they associate. Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive in association in the United States.
“In America I encountered sorts of associations of which, I confess, I had no idea, and I often admired the infinite art with which the inhabitants of the United States managed to fix a common goal to the efforts of many men and to get them to advance to it freely.”
Everywhere in this country there are projects that need doing, clinics that need opening and doctors who need a place to volunteer as they do in Phoenix, parents of special needs children who need services and a place to collect and compare strategies and challenges, and sports teams waiting to spring into being once given a place to swim or run. TPRM can do this. They can. It requires trust in the ordinary citizens far from D.C. who have no desire for a paycheck or a D.C. address.
Keep in mind as the new Congress works with the new president that we have not always needed vast federal bureaucracies watching over vast state bureaucracies watching over professionalized cities where legions of paid staff superintend all decisions. We used to believe in short, clearly written laws and in the good faith of most citizens. Thus the Homestead Act of 1862 is my key example of the Fourth Way as it appeared in the past and as I hope it appears again.
Signed into law in May 1862, the Homestead Act opened up settlement in the western United States, allowing any American, including freed slaves, to put in a claim for up to 160 free acres of federal land. By the end of the Civil War, 15,000 homestead claims had been registered and the rush west continued. Eventually 1.6 million individual claims would be approved, with more than 400,000 square miles of federal land conferred very easily on private citizens.
The Homestead Act of 1862 was four handwritten pages long. I reproduce it in the Appendix in its entirety to show that vast things can be accomplished with very short laws and with only a small federal bureaucracy to watch it being carried out.
Sure, there was a General Land Office—established in 1812 in the Department of the Treasury and moved in 1849 to the Department of the Interior, and today known as the Bureau of Land Management. And, sure, the General Land Office was authorized by this short 1862 law “to prepare and issue such rules and regulations, consistent with this act, as shall be necessary and proper to carry its provisions into effect.” But the Land Office’s size was tiny compared to the vast bureaucracies of today, and its mission specific and executed quickly. Today’s BLM has about 10,000 employees. I cannot find a source for the number of the employees in the General Land Office in 1862, but the Census Bureau had a grand total of 182 staff in 1860, so it is a fair guess that the Homestead Act was executed with very little supervision and a whole lot of hurry on the part of very few federal employees. And the land was settled. Lots got done.
This can be done again today. The “Immediate Infrastructure Improvements Act” can be every bit as short—I could write it in a day—and a parallel law with a parallel structure and appropriation for airports and ports could be done the same way. (Recall there’s another $50 billion in new stimulus to invest.) The Fourth Way. And renewal would follow, rapidly, effectively, transparently. “It is a truth as important as it is agreeable,” wrote Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton in his 1791 Report on The Subject of Manufactures, “and one to which it is not easy to find exceptions, that everything tending to establish substantial and permanent order in the affairs of a country, to increase the total mass of industry and opulence, is ultimately beneficial to every part of it.”
Do well by the poorest parts of the country and the country will do well, if Hamilton is to be believed. And Hamilton is much, much more than a Broadway hit. Hamilton is the father of the Fourth Way. He passionately believed in infrastructure improvements, as did a young Illinois congressman who in 1848 argued for them on the floor of the House.
“Congress should establish a list of projects that met the test of national advantage, even if indirectly,” Abraham Lincoln argued from the floor, “the way the Illinois–Michigan canal benefits New Orleans as well as New York and every place between.”
Lincoln’s faith in “infrastructure”—“internal improvements” they were called then—was near complete, no matter how they were constructed. Now of course we don’t need canals or steamboat docks any more than we need Carnegie libraries. We need health care and fitness facilities, homeless shelters and transitional housing, and, yes, airport expansions and new port facilities. We especially need shipyards, as will be discussed in the chapter on defense.
But for immediate pop in the populations most in need of it, follow the model of the Prop 10 commissions, especially Orange County’s.
“[I]f the nation refuse to make improvements, of the more general kind, because their benefits may be somewhat local, a state may, for the same reason, refuse to make an improvement of a local kind, because its benefits may be somewhat general,” Lincoln argued. “A state may well say to the nation ‘If you will do nothing for me, I will do nothing for you.’ Thus it is seen, that if this argument of ‘inequality’ is sufficient any where, it is sufficient every where; and puts an end to improvements altogether.
“I hope and believe,” Lincoln concluded, “that if both the nation and states would, in good faith, in their respective spheres, do what they could in the way of improvements, what of inequality might be produced in one place, might be compensated in another, and that the sum of the whole might not be very unequal.”
Thus would infrastructure investments in the poorest communities redound to the benefit of every American. And those improvements could be married to the biggest, most breathtaking move of all.
When it comes to actually proposing, passing, and implementing an immigration overhaul, the “key of we” will be most unexpected and most difficult to hit and maintain.
But Donald J. Trump can do what perhaps no other American politician can do: he can reform the immigration system while regularizing the 11 million immigrants in the country without permission and while also building a “wall”—in reality a long, strong, double-row border fence with an interstate running between the two fences for the Border Patrol to travel on quickly. He can do this without any credible number of serious critics branding it an “amnesty” or a “sellout.”
Trump can do a “Nixon to China” with an immigration overhaul. In fact he may be the individual with the last, best chance to get this done. And paired with the infrastructure above and the initiatives of conservative orthodoxy that follow, he can have it done by June 2017, accomplishing in half a year what President Obama could not do in eight (as well as securing the nascent political realignment President Trump began, away from an American version of European socialism).
To repeat: President Trump can hit “the key of we” on immigration and in so doing stun his critics and secure his place in history.
We begin with the simple fact that if Donald Trump is for an immigration overhaul, whatever its components, any attempt to brand it as an amnesty will fail, just as the efforts to brand Nixon as “soft on Mao” failed forty-plus years ago.
When the credentials on a controversial subject are established beyond argument, no argument overcomes the credentials.
If President Trump pronounces himself satisfied with a package on immigration, even if it amnesty (and it won’t be), it will be passed and it will be accepted by the right. If he grabs this particular “third rail”—there are many third rails in American politics—he will electrify American politics. And he will guarantee himself and his party a governing majority for as far as the eye can see.
The specifics of a “good deal” on immigration have been hiding in plain sight for a decade, but Republicans afraid of their base, have alternated between hesitation and bad compromises, and Democrats have not minded the political sufferings that have befallen the GOP as a result of its series of perfectly executed half maneuvers that left it exposed to withering political crossfire. Gridlock and political losses for the GOP as well as paralysis on key reforms have been the result.
President Trump can smash the gridlock. He can secure lasting political realignment along the way.
Having proposed spending to benefit lower-income communities across the country with infrastructure initiatives, President Trump can cut the Gordian knot on immigration by having his engineering team lay out the fencing plans in great detail, and then mandate that upon its completion (or 50 or 75 percent of its completion) all law-abiding immigrants shall be regularized and permitted to stay in the United States with a new “purple card,” but of course not allowed to become citizens unless and until they return to the countries of their birth to stand in line with everyone else. With this package of measures he hits a political grand slam. Everybody wins.
The objections are easily anticipated and answered.
Why not let the regularized vote? Because they entered the country illegally. Would-be citizens ought not to begin a journey to citizenship with an act of lawlessness.
Why let the small percentage of immigrants in the country illegally who are convicted criminals or known gang members stay? Didn’t you see the part about “law abiding”? They shouldn’t be.
The Department of Homeland Security, some will object, can’t handle 11 million applications! True, which is why President Trump should ask Congress to authorize him to establish “regularization” panels in each county that can hand out purple cards upon a reasonable showing of an immigrant’s good record and good prospects. Populate these panels with retired military officers—professional assessors of talent and character, all of whom have dealt with people of all backgrounds—and the job gets done in a hurry. Retired officers have completed or reviewed hundreds if not thousands of “fitness reports.” They are skilled readers of personnel files, hearers of stories, assessors of claims. Using the county structure even as draft boards once did, regularization panels in every county can simply invite the would-be purple card recipients to appear with their files, including their best-case statements, their paid bills, the evidence of where they have been and what they have done, and issue decisions. Stay or not. Families intact. Productive people hurried along to regularized status. Sketchy applications studied more intently, referred to law enforcement for assistance, but with a strong presumption that they be allowed to stay and thrive. No benefits for the purple card holders that are not paid for by their state or local governments, but access to education of course. The message will be sent: “You are forgiven your trespass and welcome to stay, you and your families, but if you want to vote you will have to go home and get in the long line.”
After a couple of years of processing, employers will be expected to insist on proof of legal residence, or suffer extraordinary penalties. Problem solved. Message sent.
And the fence too will send a message. Understand that seven hundred miles of “fencing” was authorized a decade ago in one of the Dean Martin Republicans’ series of failed efforts to entertain their base instead of solving the problem. Most of the authorized fencing was never built. A lot of what was built were traffic barriers easily walked over. Some of it was transparently absurd “virtual” fencing that always runs into a bad comparison with the “real fencing” that surrounds the White House or cuts through the West Bank and which is being constructed as fast as can be done in various Middle East and European countries. “Virtual” is not what Americans want. They want the real deal: tall, double rowed, with a paved road between them so that Border Patrol vehicles can speedily, well, patrol. And apprehend and return fence jumpers.
(An aside: Nonserious people say fourteen-foot fences mean fifteen-foot ladders. Yeah, right. Think it through. Even where some very crafty “coyotes” manage to move not one but two or three fifteen-foot ladders to a fence crossing point, can’t everyone just admit that the immediate consequence of a completed double row of fifteen-foot fences will be to cut illegal border crossing by nearly 100 percent? People are not stupid. Signal “serious” and border crossers will start giving up. Americans want border security. And long, strong, high double-row border fences with a road in between the two fences is the visible expression of an invisible commitment to border security that they have long demanded and been refused by the Beltway elites.)
The vast majority of Americans are not in the least anti-immigrant and most citizens living in the states most considerably impacted by illegal immigration—California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas—live close to and daily work with some who are not in the country lawfully and think nothing of it and fear regularization not at all. Legal immigrants often resent the idea of an “Olly olly oxen free!” path to the citizenship that they had to work hard to secure. But even this group should not object to a noncitizenship regularization of the vast majority of the 11 million who want to get on with their lives.
The fence is the key to the deal, but it is not the whole solution as people will continue to overstay visas and human smugglers will continue to cross waters and get in via our ports.
But the big deal that President Trump can get done is right before our collective eyes. Paired with the infrastructure spending it will leave his harshest critics sputtering.
And the 29 percent of the Hispanic population that voted for him? It will soar beyond the 42 percent that George W. Bush achieved.
The payoffs are too great for President Trump not to deploy an infrastructure and immigration bill to launch his presidency. The deal is there for the taking. And concurrent with its razzle and dazzle must come the delivery of another promise: the rebuilding of the American military.
If I had my way, I’d spend every dollar of infrastructure through the Trump boards, thus putting federalism and subsidiarity on steroids, and turn the 100 pools into 1,000 aquatics centers. But Congress is going to be Congress and pork is gonna be pork. Thus I’d take half that amount—$25 billion—and put it directly into the hands of every representative or senator who votes affirmatively for the overall package of infrastructure spending, immigration overhaul, defense spending, and tax reform package to use for projects within their district or state as they see fit, as long as it is spent on funding endowments for existing not-for-profits within the year and as long as it is done transparently. That’s about $50 million per representative and senator. They can’t mess up endowment spending too much, and they will end up again bypassing bureaucrats and get the money into the hands of the little platoons of virtue throughout their states and districts. Ask a congressman what they would do with this, and their eyes will light up. They are elected representatives; they know who gets what done. And transparency and speed means a minimum of corruption. (There will be some. There always is.) And conditioning receipt of the funds upon an affirmative vote? That’s just good politics (and an idea I owe to Grant Starrett, whom I hope will someday be elected to office).
Of the other $25 billion? Into the capable hands of Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao for her—and only her—direction to the ports and airports that can show immediate need for new actual facilities. This would free Democrats of the fear that President Trump will be directing dollars to friends and away from enemies (though what is much of federal spending over its two-plus centuries except that very thing?). President Trump spent quite a lot of time talking on the campaign trail about the need for airport and port improvements and he is right. These are the facilities of growth. Injecting capital into them is a fine thing. The Homestead Act of 1862 was four pages. The airports and ports infrastructure portion of the Immediate Infrastructure Improvement Act of 2017 should be four paragraphs. We need to especially learn from Lincoln—the man behind the Homestead Act, the Second Inaugural, and the Gettysburg Address—and from the Constitution’s Framers that length is no substitute for clarity and purpose. The out-of-control administrative state thrives on tens of thousands of pages of fine print and hundreds of pages of unread legislation. The cure is judgment empowered by brevity in law.
Throughout this chapter there are themes of the Fourth Way: Trust local people. Don’t trust or enrich federal or state bureaucracies or even a permanent local bureaucracy. Transparency. Accountability. And above all, speed. Speed doesn’t kill; it powers the Trump boom, even as the Trump immigration overhaul will shock tax receipts in a positive enduring way as the shadow economy comes into the open.
All of this is possible, and more, provided the country also attends to the spending it needs to reinvigorate and expand its military, to which we turn next.