If Republicans are to retain control of Congress this year, they need to return to the winning formula Ronald Reagan used to win his 1980 campaign and Republicans used in the successful 1994 Contract with America campaign to take control of the U.S. House for the first time in 40 years. This formula would require the Republicans to re-identify themselves with the values of the American people.
House Republicans can create a winning agenda for November with eleven issues. (The Senate’s constitutional design, its institutional rules, and the center-left coalition currently dominating its agenda make it too slow to take action on the eleven but could benefit from a successful House effort). I call them the “American Eleven” because each issue defines the right solution, which not coincidentally enjoys overwhelming support from the American people.
The American Eleven begins with our nation’s security.
As President Bush emphasized this week in his September 11 address to the nation, America’s war against Islamic fascists is a struggle for civilization. Republicans in Congress must effectively demonstrate that they are the party doing what it takes to defeat our enemies. Republicans must force those who would retreat and withdrawal to bear the burden of defending their proposals. The full responsibility of undermining our alliances and strengthening our enemies must be placed on those who would seek peace at the cost of defeat and who would advocate weakness in the face of hatred and tyranny.
First, it is impossible for the American people to believe that we are waging a serious campaign to defeat our enemies while our borders remain unprotected. Therefore, the House should pass a bill to secure our borders. Once passed, conservatives in the Senate should move everyday to bring it up for a vote, requiring its opponents to publicly explain why they are blocking efforts to keep terrorists from entering our country.
Second, Republicans in Congress should pass legislation to equip the president with increased powers for tracking terrorists and conducting military tribunals.
Third, Republicans must lift the nation’s national-security dialogue beyond Iraq and explain the reality that America is engaged in an emerging third world war which we are not yet winning. In this conflict, we face not only terrorist enemies like al Qaeda but terrorist states like Iran and North Korea. Iran actively supports terrorists and is seeking nuclear weapons. North Korea likely already has nuclear weapons. Both countries are developing their missile capabilities. With their words and deeds, the dictators of these two countries have been unambiguous in their enmity toward the United States. Americans should take very seriously the fact that North Korea deliberately ignored international warnings when on our Independence Day, it launched a ballistic missile that was developed to be capable of hitting the United States.
Congress should hold hearings on the scale of the threat posed by both Iran and North Korea and commit America to replace these regimes — the only strategy that will ensure that they will be unable to threaten the United States. Our efforts should be directed to bringing about this change about through peaceful means, in the model Ronald Reagan so brilliantly used in Eastern Europe in the 1980s. In this context, Republicans must force those who seek to cut and run in Iraq to explain why a dramatically weakened America would not further embolden a defiant Iran, as it most assuredly would.
Fourth, House Republicans should demonstrate that they have a “do-what-it-takes” attitude about energy independence. They should pass Rep. Jim Nussle’s (R., Iowa) bill on renewable fuels as well as a tax-incentives system toward the development of new automobile technologies that will help change the underlying nature of our energy economy.
Fifth, Republicans must remind Americans that they are the party that protects America’s unique civilization against those who would radically redefine America. A good first step in this effort would be to pass legislation to protect the right to say “one nation under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. Our founding political document — the Declaration of Independence — asserts that we are “endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights.” It is an attribute fundamental to the cultural DNA of America. But since the 1963 Supreme Court decision outlawing school prayer, the courts have steadily waged a 43-year assault on the core values of American liberty. It is time to return to a balanced constitutional system in which there is no constitutional case for five appointed lawyers on the court to act as if in a permanent constitutional convention.
Sixth, while Americans have always respected and honored a diversity of languages throughout the country, we should embrace English as the language necessary for success in America. Congress should pass a bill making English the official language of government, abolishing multilingual ballots, and reaffirming that new citizens should be required to pass a test on American history in English. Despite what the elite media may report, there are no anti-English congressional districts.
Seventh, Congress should move a bill requiring voters to present a photo ID card in order to vote. We must make certain that only legal U.S. citizens are voting. The bill should provide a mechanism for those without a valid photo ID to obtain one from their state for free. A photo ID for voting would be a huge step toward ensuring honest elections, strengthening our democratic system, and upholding the value of American citizenship.
The final set of initiatives in the American Eleven reasserts that Republicans are the party of taxpayers instead of the party of tax spenders.
Eighth, the House should force the Senate to vote on repealing the death tax, for good. It should pass the bill every week attaching it to various Senate bills until the Senate adopts it. It is simply un-American to ask a grieving family to visit the tax collector and the undertaker in the same week. The death tax destroys family businesses that, in the long run, collectively produce far more tax dollars to the government than the death tax ever collects. The death tax is like killing the goose that is laying America’s economic golden eggs and we should abolish it.
Ninth, the Congress should take steps to restore the property rights that were undermined by the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision that weakened citizen protections against the federal government’s eminent-domain power. Expanding the power of local governments to seize private property simply invites corruption. This decision will almost certainly lead to abuse at the expense of the citizenry’s property rights, especially those of the poor. Congress should pass legislation that restores the constitutional law to pre-Kelo rules and blocks the Supreme Court from reviewing this new law in the future.
Tenth, Congress should pass legislation to control spending with a step-by-step plan for returning to a balanced budget in seven years (the length of time we gave ourselves after winning the majority in 1994). In the mid-1990s, we balanced the budget for the first time in a generation and we did it four years in a row. We were able to achieve a balanced budget while cutting taxes and increasing defense and intelligence spending. Balancing the budget is not just a political issue; it is a moral issue because it forces politicians to set priorities. If politicians continue to spend as if they had open-ended credit with no consequences, then “yes” is the answer to every special-interest request — which is how we ended up with the current absurdly bloated, undisciplined federal budget.
Finally, Congress should tie education funding to school accountability. The No Child Left Behind law is making it blaringly obvious just how many schools are crippling and destroying children. We should save the children. Congress should require school systems to institute metrics-based performance standards in order to receive federal funding to ensure that every child is getting the education that they deserve.
House Republicans have two months to change history. With the American Eleven, they have a chance not only to save their majority in Congress, but also to return the Republican party to the center-right populist values of Ronald Reagan and the Contract with America. They can bring back the Reagan-Contract formula of listening to the American people and identifying with their values.
The choice is theirs — and ours.
– Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the House, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America.