A Conservative Agenda for the 107th Congress — January 2001

Congress should fulfill the Republican Platform promise to stop using the military as “the object of social experiments.” As spelled out in the Republican Platform, Congress should “affirm traditional military culture,” “affirm that homosexuality is incompatible with military service,” affirm women’s continued “exemption from ground combat units,” forbid putting women on submarines, and fulfill the Platform’s promise to implement “recommendations of the Kassebaum Commission, which unanimously recommended that co-ed basic training be ended.” We salute Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) for his sponsorship of legislation to achieve these goals. Congress should also defund the mischief-making tax-funded feminist lobby called DACOWITS (Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services).

Congress should bar U.S. service members from wearing UN or NATO uniforms or insignia, fulfilling the Republican Platform promise that U.S. service members “must never serve under United Nations command.”

Congress should pass the American Land Sovereignty Protection Act (passed by the House in the last two sessions) to reaffirm that U.S. lands are under the authority of Congress, not the UN or UNESCO.

The Senate should reject the Kyoto Protocol (Global Warming Treaty). Congress should forbid U.S. representatives to future Global Warming negotiations from agreeing to any system of U.S. purchase of “pollution permits” from foreign countries, which is just a convoluted way to bleed U.S. taxpayers for foreign handouts. Congress should also prohibit federal agencies from trying to implement this unratified, discriminatory treaty through regulations.

Congress should fully investigate and expose Communist China’s military goals and capabilities and how China acquired U.S. technology, legally and illegally. Congress should stop future transfers of technology with military applications. The 1999 Cox Report (P.S. Report, July 1999) is only a start toward the full investigation we urgently need.

Congress should open negotiations with Panama in order to station U.S. troops there to curtail drug traffic from Colombia and to carry out our responsibilities under the 1978 Panama Treaty to protect and defend the Panama Canal beyond the year 2000. Congress should conduct on-going hearings to underscore the continuing validity of the Monroe Doctrine and the possibility of violations by the Communist Chinese or by the leaseholders of bases at each end of the Canal.

Congress should pass legislation terminating appropriations for Clinton’s Bosnia and Kosovo operations by a date certain, and serve notice that no further funds will be forthcoming for “peacekeeping” or “nation-building” or UN or NATO conflicts unless U.S. national security interests are at stake.

The Senate should reject all United Nations treaties, especially those signed by Bill Clinton or promoted by Hillary Clinton such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The former is based on the Hillary/

Children’s Defense Fund notion that children should be raised by the “village” instead of their parents. The latter would be a global Equal Rights Amendment to implement the entire feminist agenda. Both treaties set up a compliance mechanism enforced by a committee of “experts” (feminists, of course). The Senate should pass legislation terminating the life of all treaties that remain unratified five years after submission.

Congress should refuse to admit any more countries to NATO because that would mean guaranteeing controversial borders of faraway countries that people have been fighting about for centuries.

Congress should pass a resolution putting other countries on notice that, if the United Nations attempts to grab any of the powers spelled out at its Millennium Summit last September, the United States will cut off all future payments to the UN. Unacceptable proposals considered by the UN include imposing a global tax on foreign currency transactions and foreign travel, creating a UN standing army (as recently endorsed by George McGovern), setting up registration of personal ownership of firearms, and eliminating the U.S. veto and permanent membership in the UN.

Congress should move promptly to carry out the Republican Platform promise that “the role of the federal government must be progressively limited as we return control to parents, teachers, and local school boards.” This should be done by defunding and rejecting re-authorization for Clinton’s two controversial and unpopular 1994 laws, Goals 2000 and School-to-Work, and by passing the Dollars to the Classroom Act.

Congress should drastically revise and amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, whose re-authorization fortunately failed to pass last year. Re-authorization should be improved by (1) converting Title I (a proven failure by the government’s own evaluation) to scholarships, (2) eliminating all funding for the failed and unpopular Bilingual Education (which the voters rejected in California and Arizona), thus making funds available for more constructive purposes, and (3) initiating a full investigation of fraud in the Drug Free Schools and Community Act funds and the failure of schools to spend those funds for authorized purposes.

Congress should continue all bans on federal testing and federal standards.

Congress should pass the Department of Education Fraud Audit bill sponsored by Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI).

Congress should finally pass the Medical Savings Accounts (MSA) that virtually all Republican congressional candidates promised when they won Congress in 1994, and as promised again in the 2000 Republican Platform: “MSAs should be a permanent part of tax law, offered to all workers without restrictions.” The MSA plan in current law was designed to fail by the liberals who want nationalized health care and by the HMO lobbyists who fear competition from MSAs.

Congress should reject all plans to give government more control over health care or spend more tax money.

Congress should establish rigorous conflict of interest standards for persons approving vaccines for the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration. We need more Congressional hearings to expose conflicts of interest among those who, while enjoying financial benefits from pharmaceutical companies, make life-and-death decisions to approve or recommend vaccines.

Congress should investigate the many diseases brought into the United States by immigrants and initiate a program of vaccinations of immigrants. This is a better way to promote public health than vaccinating healthy newborn American babies.

Congress should carry out the promise of the Republican Platform to “replace `family planning’ programs for teens with increased funding for abstinence education.” We want to encourage the trend just reported by the Alan Guttmacher Institute that the percentage of secondary school teachers who present abstinence as the way to avoid pregnancy has risen from 2 to 23 percent. (New York Times, 12-28-00, p. 1)

Congress should not regulate the internet but should set privacy standards. Under no circumstances should the Senate ratify, or Congress encourage in any way, the new Convention on Cyber-Crime, a treaty drafted by the Council of Europe and Janet Reno’s Department of Justice. It purports to combat computer crime, but its real purpose is to give governments control of the internet.

Congress should legislate better financial privacy by prohibiting any Know-Your-Customer-style regulations to spy on and make computer profiles of our bank accounts. We salute Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) for sponsoring many bills to safeguard personal privacy.

Congress should legislate adequate medical privacy, including genetic, by repealing authorization for the government to assign a unique national medical identifier to every citizen. We salute Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) for getting Congress to pass annual prohibitions; now is the time to permanently ban this centerpiece of the 1994 Clinton Health Care bill.

Congress should immediately terminate the Clinton-style expansion and networking of government databases of information on law-abiding citizens, such as is being done with the New Hires Directory and the Centers for Disease Control’s attempt to combine and federalize state vaccine registries.

Congress should defeat the effort to grant government protection, with criminal penalties, to private databases (such as the “anti-piracy” bill).

Of course, we want a tax cut for all taxpayers, not just targeted cuts that require us to spend our money the way the government wants us to spend it; and the sooner the better because the American people are greatly overtaxed. The opposition to tax cuts comes from two powerful lobbies: the 50 percent of Americans who pay no federal income tax at all but are eager to impose taxes on others, and the advocates of Big and Bigger Government who want to keep revenues flowing to the bureaucracy.

The best way to reduce taxes is to raise the bracket caps (reducing “bracket creep”) with more reduction for joint returns (thereby reducing the marriage tax penalty for all couples along the lines of the bill passed by the 106th Congress and vetoed by Clinton).

Congress should abolish the death tax.

Congress should fulfill the Republican Platform promise to pass “legislation requiring a super-majority vote in both houses of Congress to raise taxes.”

Congress should cut the federal budget by abolishing highly controversial and mischievous agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Legal Services Corporation, and the Violence Against Women’s Act. Congress should prohibit all tax funding of abortion, as promised by the Republican Platform, as well as funding for “organizations which advocate it.” Of course, Congress should reject all attempts by Hillary Clinton to make daycare a federal function.

Congress should repeal all regulations that dictate how much energy (water and electricity) Americans are permitted to use in washing machines, toilets and showers.

Congress should pass a Scouts Honor Act prohibiting federal funds to agencies that discriminate against the Boy Scouts.

Congress should reject all attempts to tinker with the Electoral College. Congress should repeal the Motor Voter Law, which is the cause of so much fraud and mischief.

Congress should pass a resolution urging President George W. Bush to rescind Clinton’s Executive Orders that have no justification in law. Some of the most outrageous include EO 13166 purporting to make not speaking English a new civil right, EO 13087 requiring federal agencies to grant affirmative action status on the basis of sexual orientation, EO 13107 implementing UN treaties even if unratified, EO 13061 putting ten new rivers every year under federal control, PDD 25 giving the President authority “to place U.S. forces under the operational control of a foreign commander,” and all Clinton’s “midnight” orders on the environment and land grabs.

The Senate should confirm only judges who meet the standard of the Republican Platform: “judges who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life.” Congress should reduce the number of federal judges; we have twice as many now as we did during Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

Congress should reject all proposals to create more federal crimes because criminal law is constitutionally a matter of state, not federal, jurisdiction. Specifically, Congress should defeat all proposals to create new federal hate crimes, gun crimes, copyright crimes, and medical crimes. Congress should begin to repeal some of the hundreds of recently created federal crimes, all of which increase the power and jurisdiction of the Imperial Judiciary. Congress should start by repealing laws creating federal crimes that are already state crimes.

Congress should use its Article III power to limit the jurisdiction of the federal courts, particularly in such areas as imposing taxes, overturning state referenda, inventing new rights such as the “right” to same-sex marriage or assisted suicide, and micro-management of schools and prisons.

Remembering how, in order to create new voters for Clinton-Gore in 1996, Vice President Al Gore rushed through naturalization of 75,000 aliens with arrest records, 115,000 whose fingerprints were unclassifiable, and 61,000 who never submitted fingerprints at all (David P. Schippers, Sellout, and P.S. Report, Oct. 2000), Congress should tighten up the naturalization process to assure that all laws are complied with.

Congress should fulfill the Republican Platform’s promise to “support the recognition of English as the nation’s common language.”

Congress should reject attempts to make the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico a state. Puerto Rican referenda in 1993 and 1998 rejected statehood anyway.

The new census figures just released show that nearly two-thirds of America’s unexpected population increase in the 1990s was from immigrants plus their new babies. Congress should hold extensive hearings on the effects on language, disease, schools, welfare, assimilation, and reapportionment.

Congress should fulfill the Republican Platform’s promise to reopen Pennsylvania Avenue, which was closed by the paranoid Clintons. Let’s terminate this annoyance and inconvenience to all visitors and residents of our nation’s capital.

Is the Republican Congress Moving Left?

The biggest education question is: Will we continue to implement Bill Clinton’s two controversial 1994 laws, Goals 2000 and School-to-Work, or will we instead call a halt to the mission and curriculum changes those laws initiated?

“School-to-Work” (STW) is bureaucratic jargon for imposing a new paradigm on public schools that de-emphasizes traditional academic studies and replaces them with vocational-technical (Vo-Tech) courses for all students. There’s nothing wrong with vocational education; that’s always been an option for high school students. But School-to-Work is not an option; it’s a federal law, quintessentially Clintonian. States that accept STW funds, and all states have accepted them, are subject to STW regulations.

School-to-Work is the mainspring of the Clinton Administration’s audacious plan to impose German/Japanese style national economic planning to parallel the 1994 Clinton health care plan to take over the entire health industry, one-seventh of our economy. Indeed, the same schemers were the principal architects of both plans: Hillary Clinton and Ira Magaziner.

The writings of Clinton’s economic adviser, Robert Reich, show that he is a frank admirer of the German model, which exercises government control over the economy by controlling access to the workforce through the schools. School-to-Work is easily sold to U.S. corporations that envy the privileged corporate-government relationship their peers enjoy in Germany and Japan.

The STW paradigm is marketed to public schools all over the country by Marc Tucker’s National Center for Education and the Economy, whose letterhead boasts the names of Hillary Clinton, Ira Magaziner and David Rockefeller Jr. The STW paradigm is packaged for Governors by offering them federal funds, a route to bypass state legislatures and school boards, and attractive “partnerships” with corporations.

One marketing outreach aimed at Governors is a 501(c)(3) organization called CDS International. CDS brags that it has organized STW programs for representatives of public schools, government, industry and labor in more than 20 states. CDS’s brochure explains that STW’s goal is to move American children into “The German Dual System of Vocational Training” under which Germany transfers nearly 70 percent of its students at age 16 from full-time secondary school to spending most of their time as apprentices in the workplace. National training standards have been established for each occupation in Germany, and company training is governed by German law.

The German system requires the student to spend 3-4 days a week in the workforce under an employer’s mentorship, and only 1-2 days a week in traditional education learning mathematics, science, social studies and languages. CDS states, “The dual system regulations and examinations are products of close cooperation among schools, government, employers (operating through their associations), and workers (represented by their unions).”

The STW paradigm establishes the mindset that the mission of the schools is to serve the workforce and the global economy, rather than to give all American children the basic knowledge and skills that can enable them to be all they can be. This is why the 1994 STW law dictates that the Secretaries of Education and Labor “shall jointly provide for, and shall exercise final authority over the administration of this Act,” and why the House committee that wrote this law is called the “Education and the Workforce Committee.”

Unfortunately, the 107th Republicans just elected as chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), who has made it clear which side of the STW controversy he is on. In a December 7 letter circulated on Capitol Hill, he came out strongly against proposals to separate education and the workforce into two committees. His letter states in bold italics that “it is simply impossible to consider workforce and education issues separately. . . . The two are becoming even more indistinguishable as lifelong learning becomes absolutely necessary in the New Economy.” Boehner’s letter reminds us that “a structure that allows education and workforce issues together also allows us to add employers to our coalition efforts.”

Tying workforce and education issues together is a prescription for federal control of classroom curriculum. Adding “employers to our coalition efforts” is a formula for getting corporations to donate political soft money. These policies will make America’s schoolchildren the big losers.

The Republican Congress made another bad mistake in electing the wrong man as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Bill Thomas (R- CA). The scholar M. Stanton Evans explained (Human Events, 12-29-00, p.8) why it was wrong to elect Thomas over the one with the seniority, Rep. Philip Crane (R-IL) — whom, incidentally, we could have relied on to give us the tax cuts we’ve been promised. Evans wrote:

“HMOs are basically collectivist-style machines for rationing health care — the last thing the Republican Party (or anyone else) should be supporting. They are also big players in the Medicare arena, part of the Ways and Means domain. Unfortunately, nobody in the House of Representatives symbolizes the HMO/GOP misalliance more visibly than Bill Thomas — point man for repeated efforts to put seniors into managed care.

“As Phil Crane has long understood, the right answer to our health care woes is not the rationing of medical services by green-eyeshade accountants, but greater choice and consumer freedom through devices such as Medical Savings Accounts (MSAs) that empower patients.”

It is well known in Washington that Bill Thomas’s cozy connection with HMO lobbyists is the reason why the then cash-rich HMOs were able to keep Congress from passing the MSAs we were promised — the HMOs didn’t want them.

Has the Republican leadership in the 107th Congress already adopted the liberal agenda on education, health care, and tax cuts? If so, the grassroots conservative movement should help the real conservatives in Congress to gird for battle.