“Progressive” Conservatism

 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 14^th 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”.