Obama’s actions and legislative agenda has revealed him as a leftist trying to evolve the country into a socialist heaven, but his approval numbers reflect an erosion of support for him and his government transformation ideas. His strategy has been to incrementally transform America into a big government nanny state.  The sheer volume of change has awakened Americans to their Constitution: (1) The nationalization of car companies and banks; (2) the subordination of the car companies' legal bondholders to union bosses; (3) the creation of trillion-dollar slush funds (the stimulus package) used for, among other purposes, the corrupt purchase of congressional votes; and (4) the mandating of individual health insurance purchase against the will of Americans. The rule of law emanates from our Constitution. It is the supreme law of the land and may only be altered only by a laborious process that requires the support of an overwhelming majority of the people. Obama would like us to ignore the specific language in the Constitution that limits the federal government to specific roles and responsibilities, and to accept unquestioningly his interpretation of certain clauses to justify his over-reach into roles never envisioned by the Founding Fathers. He employed the Cloward-Piven strategy to overwhelm the Congress and the electorate with the number and reach of his changes, hoping to pass legislation before the real agenda was understood. Public reaction was quick with the emergence of the Tea Party movement that protested against the runaway spending and the overall direction that America was headed. Now the latest polls show the American people awakening from their electoral dream to find not “change they can believe in,” but “change they can’t believe!”

Obama has been open about his disdain for the Constitution and the role of the federal government. His role model has been FDR who also viewed the Constitution as something to get around to justify his governmental expansion. One of the major themes of the Tea Party movement is a return to the original intent and limitations of the Constitution. The ninth and tenth amendments place limitation on the federal government that have been ignored or abused repeatedly in the last 75 years. Obama’s overreach may be the tipping point to finally begin the return of this country back the principles of the Founding Fathers. We not only need to change direction, but we need to repair the damage done by repealing a number of laws that stretched the Constitution all out of shape.

There are so many things the federal government does today that are not in the Constitution, and we should stop doing in the future. The first thing to do is to abolish more than half of the existing Cabinet departments and all of the programs that they manage in the Departments of: Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, and Transportation. These Cabinet functions are best served at the state level. There are many federal programs and agencies that should be privatized: 1) Privatize the entitlements: pension plans (Social Security) and medical insurance (Medicare etc.); 2) Remove the federal government from active management of the financial sector including: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, and ownership position is various private banks and insurance companies; 3) Sell all federal land not required by the federal agency that owns it and retain ownership of land on which the federal building is built and the military bases require.  The government does not need to be the biggest landowner in the United States; 4) Sell the Postal Service, since the private sector has already proven they can deliver mail faster and cheaper; 5) Sell the Amtrak train business and rights of way, since no need to subsidize transportation alternatives; 6) Sell the Tennessee Valley Authority, since the federal government has no role in energy production.  The federal government has no role redistributing wealth between the states, so abolish all federal grants that favor programs in select states. The best programs exist close to the customers that they serve, which precludes most federal management of programs. The federal government could easily be cut in half by privatizing or transferring them to the states where they belong.

Abolishing entire Cabinet department, privatizing major entitlement programs, and devolving many programs back to the states should cut the cost of federal government in half. This reduction is size and mission should also reduce federal taxes by at least half. The powers not delegated to the United States federal government by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the States respectively.  Many of these programs may be found to be redundant, outdated, or irrelevant.  The bad news is that the programs now residing solely in the states will require increases in state taxes. The good news is that these programs will execute closer to where the people live making these programs more accountable and responsive to the electorate. Differences in state politics may accelerate the migration between states as people vote with their feet to protect their wallets. Moving money to the states also moves the power to the states

A Return to Our Constitutional Principles is long overdue and will be a real transformative change that America will welcome. Obama has revealed a future that the American people reject. Now we need an American leader to show us a vision of what needs to be repealed, rolled back, or abolished to achieve that Founding Fathers principle-based vision. Cautious incremental change is not what is needed. The Contract from America was an excellent direction for the first 90 days of the next Republican lead Congress. Congressman Paul Ryan’s Framework for Growth offers a first draft of what needs to be done to save this country from its socialist demise. Most of these existing government programs can’t just be stopped, but require detailed planning to migrate from their current instantiation to the future state we need, and this change may need to require over a decade to migrate. Whoever leads this effort will require at least two full Presidential terms to accomplish, since the damage is huge and repairing this much will require continuity and a complex phased implementation. Now that we have seen the alternative, the American people will be energized and motivated to finally put this country back on track.

David Coughlin

Hawthorne, NY