GOP should just keep on saying no
Come on, Republicans, snap out of it. Get over just saying no to everything the Democrats propose or have recently done. If you want to win big in November’s congressional elections, you’ve got to come up with an agenda you subscribe to as a group, something particularized on a wide variety of fronts. That’s the advice from any number of supporters fearful of obstructionist allegations and maybe anxious themselves about embracing something as nebulous and negative as opposition without alternatives. There’s a good reply to the advice. No, no, a thousand times no. With qualifications.
To begin with, it can be enormously worthwhile in and of itself, a means of preserving life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, to stand in front of a bulldozer shouting that the mindless driver should by heavens stop. Just preventing wreckage of precious objects is a good thing, a very good thing, and it is not somehow made a better thing to have a different wreckage plan of one’s own.
That’s what a great many alternatives on the federal level would be, other means of unaffordable, socialism-furthering, unwarranted intervention on matters that either aren’t so horrible to begin with, that could be handled by states or localities or that will happily take care of themselves if left alone.
This conclusion happens to be supported by repeated historical evidence that free men and women operating through markets and voluntary associations will time and again do more to serve the overall public interest than overreaching central planners not nearly smart enough to figure everything out for a huge, diverse nation and unfailingly supplying us with unintended consequences of inhumane destructiveness.
Time now for the qualifications, starting with the proposition that some matters are clearly issues that only the federal government can address, and then noting that the Republican proposals can be something other than bulldozers with a different coat of paint. They can be prudent and inexpensive. They can respect the Constitution and credit fellow Americans with the ability to lead their own lives without nanny-state leftists holding their hands.
One issue that Congress absolutely has to act on is federal debt ruinously racing to ever-higher percentages of gross domestic product. The federal government created this problem and only the federal government can fix it. We have a pretty good notion what President Obama and congressional Democrats appear to have in mind. They would like to tax us into slow growth, then no growth, then an everlasting recession. What the Republicans have been blessedly insisting on is reduced spending.
But will the Republicans really cut back significantly, and how will they do it? How will they deal with the escalating costs of Social Security and Medicare, two hugely popular programs that have to be controlled for the sake of their own survival as well as for the country’s solvency in the decades ahead. Individual candidates need to address this and similar matters with courage and sense, and if they don’t, they deserve to lose.
The party, for its own good and the good of the citizenry, ought to keep apologizing for its reckless mistakes of the past, clarify its principles and agree broadly on the most pressing needs, even if it does not go as far as to adopt as an entity the details in Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap for America’s Future,” a widely discussed and seemingly useful action guide.
Don’t suppose Republicans are incapable of positive proposals. They made a number of reasonable suggestions during debate on the Democrats’ vast, rambling health-care remake that is already slowing down recovery from the recession. But with a White House still held by Barack Obama and a slim majority at best in Congress, their chief function after November will be to stop the madness, to keep saying no.
Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay@aol.com.