The politics of the Republican Party have now entered a political time warp that signifies its inability to adapt to the realities of modern American life so that instead they seek to take our government back to its origins. This involves playing on the politics of fear-mongering with a mentality that offer solutions that are entirely backwards looking in order to take the country back to the better days of the American past. They argue that we can return our economy and our society back to better days of the past by taking our government back to what it was decades and even centuries ago. Thus it is no accident that they have often chosen to anchor their movements in historical names from the American Revolution such as the Minutemen and the Boston Tea Party. For fundamentalists (both religious and political), the past is always better than the present and the goal is always to return to the way things used to be. Thus modern social, economic, and political norms – indeed modernity itself – are their enemy. They are attempting to return our government to an idealized version of its past which is preferable to the realities of modern America which clash with their imagined version of how great America once was and therefore should be again.
This explains why the favorite word in Republican debates is often “repeal” as the candidates compete to repeal the most pieces of our current Federal government and remove those services, regulations and rights that makeup much of what is best in modern American civilization. Each proposal they make is a call for us to step backwards and reject a generation of progressive change that has been necessary for the United States to deal with the challenges on the modernity. Consider this timeline off each call for a historical step backwards.
They seek to repeal critical reforms of the Obama era and even one made under President George W. Bush:
2011 – Almost all of the candidates want to repeal the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
2010 – They all want to repeal the Affordable Care Act that will expand access to health insurance
2010 – They all want to repeal the Dodd-Frank Bill (The Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act) that attempts to address some of the problems that caused the financial crisis.
2002 – Former Speaker Newt Gingrich and other candidates have called for the repeal of Sarbanes-Oxley (The Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act) that was enacted to correct the corporate abuses that caused the Enron collapse.
They seek to repeal reforms from President Carter’s time:
1979 – Texas Gov. Rick Perry has promised to eliminate of the Department of Education and thus eliminate just about any Federal role in Education.
1978 – Rep. Ron Paul has promised to eliminate of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and leave disaster management in the hands of local and state governments.
1977 – Both Perry and Paul have promised to eliminate the Department of Energy.
(That’s the one that Rick Perry couldn’t remember.)
And going back to President Nixon’s time:
1973 – All of the candidates have sought to appoint judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade and thus the Federal guarantee of abortion rights.
1971 – Ron Paul has promised to take us back to the gold standard.
1970 – Ron Paul and others want to get rid of or greater weaken the Environmental Protection Agency.
And President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society:
1965 – Most of the candidates have supported Paul Ryan’s budget plan which would block grant Medicaid so that each state would individually make decision for the program.
1965 – Most of the candidates want to essentially privatize and means-test Medicare (which was expanded to include prescription drugs under President George W. Bush). The result would be huge cutbacks in the benefits available to future generations of recipients.
1965 – Ron Paul wants to get rid of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
1965 – Ron Paul wants get rid of student loans which were originally contained in the Federal Higher Education Act.
1965 – Many Republicans have indicated their opposition to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act that requires Preclearance of changing to voting laws in states with a history of discrimination.
1964 – Ron Paul’s son Sen. Rand Paul has talked about his opposition to title II of the Civil Rights Act which prohibited private business from discriminating in public accommodations.
And going back further to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal:
1938 – Michelle Bachman wants to get rid of the Minimum Wage and Newt Gingrich has famously declared his opposition to child labor laws, both of which derive from Fair Labor Standards Act.
1935 – Rick Perry has called Social Security a “ponzi scheme” and promised to get rid of the Federal Social Security program and make it a state level program. Other candidates have sought way to privatize or otherwise scale back Social Security.
1935 – Most of the Republicans in Congress have regularly opposed extensions of Unemployment Insurance benefits.
But we can go back further to the Progressive Era reforms of Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt:
1916 – Most of the candidates have talked about getting rid of the Inheritance Tax, which they call the “death tax.”
1913 – Ron Paul wants to get rid of or greatly scale back the Federal Reserve.
1913 – Some elements of the Tea Party have talked about overturning the 17th Amendment which allowed for direct election of Senators since this is seen as an infringement on State’s rights (who used to be chosen by State legislatures).
1913 – Perry, Gingrich and other candidates have talked about replacing the progressive income tax – meaning those who earn more are taxed at a higher rate - with a flat tax which has been with us since the Federal Income Tax was legalized by the 16th Amendment. (Although this isn’t literally overturning the 16th amendment it is eliminating the progressivity that has always been inherent in the idea of a Federal income tax since it was passed.) Most of the Republicans have also sought massive reductions or the elimination of the Capital Gains tax rate which have been long been taxed and which were already been massively reduced under President George W. Bush.
1903 – Ron Paul and Rick Perry both want to get rid of the Department of Commerce.
But there are Republicans who want to go back even further:
1868 – Many anti-immigration activists have challenged Birthright citizenship was established by the 14th amendment (and guaranteed to the children of non-citizens born in the U.S. by an 1898 Supreme Court decisions).
1865 – In reality, the call for returning massive amounts of power to the states – particularly from Rick Perry – is, in essence, an attempt to overturn every progressive Federal reform in areas such as the environment and social welfare that has flowed from the establishment of Federal Supremacy over States’ rights that was established by the Union victory in the Civil War.
1849 – Ron Paul also wants to get rid of the Department of Interior which regulates Federal lands.
But we can go back even further to the origins of the American Republic.
1803 – Newt Gingrich is essentially talking about eliminating the independence of the Federal Judiciary by putting it under the thumb of the President and Congress. Instead of three co-equal branches he wants to return to the extremely weakened judiciary described in the Federalist Papers. In essence, he wants to get rid of judicial independence and judicial review which all flow from John Marshall’s 1803 Marbury vs. Madison decision.
1789 – Finally Ron Paul (and most of the other candidates to a lesser degree and Anton Scalia and the strict constructionists on the Supreme Court) is seeking to return the U.S. to the original scope of government, Congressional authority, and Federal-State relationship of the U.S. Constitution. While this idea sounds simple and rational enough, it is a truly radical idea that reverses over 200 years of Federal lawmaking, social progress, and Constitutional interpretation by Federal courts.
The core problem with this idea is that it assumes that the Constitution (and therefore our government) should operate in a vacuum regardless of the vast changes that have occurred in American society, population, culture, economy and technology over 2 centuries. The Constitution was written for a fairly homogenous country with a population of 4 million people in which women, blacks, and Native Americans had no rights and only 5% of the population (white male property owners) could vote. This was a pre-industrial society made up mostly of small farms and small shops. It was a society that lacked electricity, much less modern technology, modern medicine, or any of the economic and social advances that we now enjoy. It was economy that lacked any concept of the modern corporation and modern capitalism that now dominate our economy. Government lacked both the ability and the need to regulate such a simple economy. The Republican Party – whose leading candidates include ironically enough a History professor - has gone into an ahistorical denial of how dramatically our world has changed and the need for government to adapt to that change.
The idea that our government should be limited to the scope imagined in 1789 is patently absurd and ridiculous. Out of necessity, we have allowed the services provided by government to grow by broadly interpreting the commerce clause and the elastic clause of the Federal Constitution so that we could have a government that could function efficiently to regulate a modern economy. We have allowed the rights protected by government to grow by broadly interpreting the Bill of Rights and the applicability to the state’s under the 14th amendment’s due process and equal protection clauses so that we could adapt to an increasingly complex, diverse, open-minded, and progressive society that has emerged in the 20th and 21st centuries. Our understanding of text of the Constitution has grown so that government could stay relevant to modern times and allow for a “more perfect union” to be built. None of that could have been done under a
strict interpretation of the unamended Constitutional text.
The truly radical ideas being proposed by the modern Republican Party to take us backwards in time and reverse centuries of progressive change are positively frightening. They want to take modern America backwards to a legal and political structure that we have long since outgrown. It is an agenda - which is mostly fueled by the corporate greed - to reverse most of the political progress that has been made by American civilization over the last century or so. The Republican agenda also plays to regressive populist urge that emerges from an inability of a portion of our population to accept just how much our society has changed and the need of our government to change in order to be able to effectively govern modern America in a civilized manner. That such ideas have entered the mainstream of American political discourse and are being openly debated is deeply troubling.