I wrote this in March of 2022 and decided to post it now due to the recent events associated with the election of the new Speaker of the House:
It is time to get serious about reducing the size of the
federal government and return to the limited federal power over our lives that
our founding fathers envisioned. To that
end I recommend the following “progressive” conservative ideas:
1.
Reduce the power of the federal government over
the use of federal land and reduce federal deficits by selling back federal
lands to the states. Today the federal government owns and manages roughly 640
million acres of land in the United States, or roughly 28% of the 2.27 billion
total land acres.
2.
Codify a more limited definition of “interstate commerce”
to reduce the use and abuse of federal power using the regulation of interstate
commerce as the pretext.
3.
Pass a law to clarify that a child born to an
illegal immigrant living in the U.S. does not become a U.S. citizen. Since there was no such thing as an illegal
immigrant at the time of the writing of the 14th amendment, it is
possible to argue that such a child is not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the
U.S. Pursue a constitutional amendment
if necessary.
4.
Eliminate Omnibus appropriation bills. Omnibus appropriation bills combine the proposed
budgets from the 15 federal departments into one bill which gets a single up or
down vote. Each department should be
required to submit budgets and each department’s budget should be voted on
individually. This would not only make
each department more accountable; it would
also reduce the need to shut down the entire government when there are budget
disputes in congress.
5.
Baseline budgeting should be eliminated. Federal baseline budgeting assumes a
department’s spending will increase every year.
That increase is added to the prior year’s budget to create a new
funding baseline. This baseline increase
includes automatic adjustments for inflation and anticipated increases in
program participation. This means the
size of the government grows every year without any action required by the
congress. With the current rates of
inflation, this is particularly egregious.
Citizens have to deal with the effects of inflation on our budgets when
the government just gets more money that then becomes the baseline for future
budgets.
6.
Pass a “Clean Bill” law restricting the ability
of congressman from adding items to a bill unrelated to the subject of the
bill.
It is time for conservatives to get “progressive”.
