WHAT IS TO BE DONE? TRUMP HAS SOME IDEAS

Donald Trump has come out with his “Contract with the American Voter.” Hmmm, where have we heard this “contract” language before? Do I see the roly-poly profile of the person who’s name rhymes with “flute” lurking in the shadows?

Actually this is a good idea for Trump. Beyond the wall, tax cut plan, and his views of tighter scrutiny for Muslim immigrants, he’s been lacking in details. His contract is quite specific, offering 28 specific items in four separate groupings. The first six are the things he pledges to on his first day in office. Let’s take them in order:

Probably still a popular idea, but of dubious effect. California has had term limits for 26 years now, and it hasn’t made much difference for the better that I can tell. But if President Trump really wants to get the full attention of Congress, he should go one step further than say that if Congress doesn’t pass and send to the states a term limit amendment, he will ask the states to call for an Article V convention to adopt term limits and a balanced budget amendment. It’s another bad idea whose time has come, as I argued in Forbes a couple years ago.

Better would be a call to reform civil service laws so that federal employees can be fired, and not just reduced by attrition. Trump is good at saying “you’re fired.” Why not ask for broader power to do this with federal employees, especially the ones who hold the American public in such contempt.

A nice gimmick, but clever bureaucrats will figure out ingenious ways around this, just as they have gamed the cost-benefit analysis process that the Reagan people imposed on regulators back in the 1980s. Better to demand passage of the REINS Act (which stands for “Regulations from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny”), which will require Congress to approve all new regulations that would impose a cost of $100 million or more. Also, Trump should also demand an end to “informal” regulation through “guidance” letters (such as the egregious Title IX regime that would never make it through the formal rule making process).

These three sound fine to me. Just make sure that there aren’t loopholes for ex-officials to be “lobbyists” without having to be formally registered as lobbyists. Right now these simple bans would be easy to get around.

These and the other ideas on the rest of his statement would have been great for Trump to bring up during the debates. Among other things, then the media would have had to cover them. Moreover, if he made more of these proposals instead of tweeting about rotund beauty queens and etc., he might be running away with this election. A couple other highlights from the list:

 FIFTH, I will lift the restrictions on the production of $50 trillion dollars’ worth of job- producing American energy reserves, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean coal.
 SIXTH, lift the Obama-Clinton roadblocks and allow vital energy infrastructure projects, like the Keystone Pipeline, to move forward.
 SEVENTH, cancel billions in payments to U.N. climate change programs and use the money to fix America’s water and environmental infrastructure.
 THIRD, cancel all federal funding to Sanctuary Cities.

FIRST, propose a Constitutional Amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress.

The problem with constitutional term limits is the following imo. Note that the Founding States had made the first numbered clauses in the Constitution, Sections 1-3 of Article I, to clarify that all federal legislative powers are vested in the elected members of Congress and nowhere else in the federal system. So Congress has a constitutional “monopoly” on federal legislative powers whether it wants it or not.

But corrupt Congress has not only wrongly been front-ending federal legislative powers with constitutionally undefined federal agencies run by non-elected bureaucrats, such bureaucrats essentially running the country, Congress has also been letting federal agencies get away with stealing and exercising 10th Amendment-protected state powers to interfere in the affairs of the sovereign states.

In other words, by letting non-elected bureaucrats do Congress’s dirty legislative work for it, corrupt lawmakers are able to keep their voting records clean so that they can fool low-information patirots into reelecting them.

So even if the states constitutionally limited the number of terms a member of Congress can serve, it remains that federal agencies run by bureaucrats appointed by the corrupt Washington cartel are running the show indefinitely.

THIRD, a requirement that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated.

Trump’s supporters need to get him up to speed with the following major constitutional problem with a bunch of federal laws and regulations. Trump needs to order an audit of all federal laws to make sure that corrupt Congress reasonably based a given law on a specific constitutional clause. And if no appropriate clause exists, then take the law out of the books

Activist justices have not been doing their job to throw out unconstitutonal laws, Obamacare an example of an unconstitutional law imo.

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