Eagle Forum’s Wish List
for the 106th Congress
Cut Taxes
Cut taxes across-the-board to put money in the pockets of all taxpayers. Cut rates — the proven way to keep the economy moving. Americans are overtaxed. With the current prosperous state of the economy, now is the time to cut taxes. If not now, when? Don’t claim that the budget rule inhibits Congress’s power to cut taxes; repeal the stupid rule.
Return any budget surplus to the taxpayers, or at least return half in tax cuts and use the other half for Social Security. Impose a spending freeze and a hiring freeze until tax cuts are passed.
Eliminate the “marriage tax” without discriminating against homemakers or families in which one spouse is the sole or primary wage earner.
Reject all targeted tax cuts through deductions, credits, or exemptions. “Targeted” is a code word for the government saying, “We’ll give you a tiny tax cut if you spend the saving the way the government tells you to spend it.”
Preserve American Independence
Reject the Global Warming Treaty because it would require us to reduce our energy consumption to 7% below 1990 levels, a drastic reduction in our standard of living, while other countries are not bound. Forbid the Clinton Administration to implement this unratified treaty or the Kyoto Protocol through bureaucratic regulations.
Reject all pending treaties, and pass legislation to sunset all treaties that have not been acted on within six years, including treaties on the International Criminal Court, UN Rights of the Child, Discrimination Against Women, Biodiversity, and Law of the Sea.
Cut off appropriations for Clinton’s phony “peacekeeping” expeditions, such as Bosnia and Kosovo, that have never been constitutionally authorized by Congress. Cut off appropriations for “Wag the Dog” bombing raids.
Pass the American Sovereignty Protection Act to prohibit the United Nations or UNESCO from designating UN World Heritage Sites or Biosphere Reserves.
Remove the UNESCO plaques and all UN supervision from the 22 parks and monuments already designated as World Heritage sites, including Independence Hall and the Statue of Liberty. Withdraw from the 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage, which authorizes this offensive intervention by UNESCO.
Stop funding the Man and the Biosphere (MAB) program, and forbid all designations of biosphere reserves by MAB or UNESCO without Congressional authorization. Abolish the unauthorized designations of 47 biosphere reserves.
Designate English as our official American language for all government activities.
Protect Personal Liberty Against Invasions of Privacy
Prohibit the Federal Government from building (or assisting the states or private corporations to build) databases of personal information on American citizens that is none of the government’s business and which facilitate government monitoring of the private actions of law-abiding citizens.
Repeal Health and Human Services Department authority to establish or maintain “unique health care identifiers” for individuals.
Stop federal funding to coordinate databases of individual health records, including immunization records. Order the destruction of such databases that have been compiled with federal funds and without individuals’ written consent.
Stop the FDIC attempt to require banks to monitor individuals’ bank deposits and withdrawals and to report deviations from a “normal” pattern to a government database.
Stop the government from building or maintaining a database of lawful purchasers of guns.
Do not pass any legislation to create new copyright-like protections for databases.
Repeal any federal requirement for states to use fingerprints, Social Security numbers or other federal identifiers on driver’s licenses.
Forbid federal spending to develop or use a national I.D. card or “smart card.”
Do not pass any legislation that would interfere with the right of individual Americans to use encryption for their personal files or e-mail. Defeat Clinton Administration attempts to adopt “key recovery” or “key escrow,” or to criminalize encryption, or to treat encryption as a suspect activity. Americans must have the First Amendment right to speak in code, as well as in English.
Stop the government from conspiring with the telephone companies to mandate equipment that will allow the government to spy on law-abiding citizens.
Stop the FCC from requiring phone companies to track the location of users of cellular or wireless phones.
Restore Respect for Life
Do not appropriate any taxpayers’ funds for abortions except to save the life of the mother (this would ban abortion funding through Medicaid, military services, federal employee health plans, District of Columbia appropriations, and fetal tissue research), or for organizations that perform abortions (e.g., Planned Parenthood).
Pass legislation that denies federal funds to any state, health care provider, organization, or other entity that permits assisted suicide (which the Supreme Court has held is not a constitutional right).
Require parental consent or notification for minors to receive federally funded contraceptives.
Forbid cloning of humans and experiments on human embryos.
Restore Individual Control Over Health Care
End the discrimination in health insurance against all those who don’t have the advantage of working for a company with a health plan. Reform the tax code to allow all Americans to have 100% tax deductibility for the purchase of health insurance (just as employers have 100% tax deductibility for company-paid plans).
Hold hearings on various plans to restructure federal laws so that individuals can effectively control their own health plans, insurance, care, and treatment.
Amend the 1996 Kennedy-Kassebaum Act to make MSAs practical.
Repeal the “health care identifier” program authorized in the 1996 Kennedy-Kassebaum Act.
Empower patients to access the books and records of their health plans or HMOs, including any contracts between health plans or HMOs and their physicians.
Enforce current laws against the corporate practice of medicine by making it illegal for any corporation to control, influence or interfere with the medical advice of a physician. Remove the privileged exemption from lawsuits that HMOs now enjoy.
Repeal all authority, contained in 1996 Kennedy-Kassebaum and the 1993 Comprehensive Child Immunization Act, to compile or coordinate health records, including immunizations, on databases.
Do not pass any legislation that forces health insurance plans to have “guaranteed issue” or “community rating.”
Do not pass any legislation that preempts state laws protecting the privacy of medical records.
Reform and Restrain the Imperial Judiciary
Refuse to confirm any more Clinton nominations for federal judges or the Supreme Court. We already have too many federal judges. Clinton uses a pro-abortion litmus test for his selections, and that is unacceptable.
Adopt a Senate rule that no judicial nominee can be confirmed without a roll-call vote.
Restrict federal court jurisdiction by preventing a single federal judge from overturning state laws or referenda. (It is outrageous that a single federal judge was able to overturn the New Jersey law banning partial birth abortions, which was passed by a super majority in the State Legislature over the Governor’s veto. It is outrageous that a single federal judge can overturn or nullify the majority who approve a statewide initiative or referendum.)
Prohibit the federal courts from imposing a tax, because taxes are a legislative prerogative.
Recognize that the preeminent example of judicial activism is Roe v. Wade, and it must be overturned if we are to stop judicial activism. All federal court nominees should be required to state opposition to the activist arguments in Roe v. Wade.
Roll back the expanded jurisdiction of federal courts by repealing the federalization of traditional state crimes over guns, drugs, white-collar offenses, and property rights.
Hold extensive hearings to educate the public about the court’s usurpation of power.
Education: Restore local control by parents and teachers
Remind the public that only 6% of public school money is federal, and that our biggest problem is illiteracy, which is not a federal problem.
Terminate all Clinton Administration efforts to control classroom curricula through Goals 2000, School-to-Work, National Testing, National Standards, Sustainable Development, and Education Laboratories.
Do not reauthorize or appropriate funds for Goals 2000 (which imposes federal mandates on public schools and is used to control children’s medical care) or School-to-Work (which makes workforce training the mission of the schools).
Forbid database collection of non-academic information on students, such as attitudes, behavior, health, and family privacy. Forbid the establishment of student computer profiles that include personal and non-academic information.
Pass the Family Privacy Protection Act to require written parental consent before schools subject children to psychological testing or treatment (as promised in the Contract with America).
End Bilingual Education, which prevents immigrants from learning English and is opposed by both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking parents, as shown by the California referendum.
Build up National Defense
Deploy an anti-missile defense immediately. Congress’s most important responsibility is to build whatever military hardware is necessary to protect American lives from attack. Communist China has 13 of its 18 ballistic missiles targeted on U.S. cities. Russia still has its awesome arsenal of nuclear missiles, and its unpredictable rulers, strapped for cash, might sell them to some rogue dictator.
Defeat Clinton’s ABM Expansion Treaty, a backdoor attempt to give new life to the defunct ABM Treaty of 1972 with the Soviet Union, based on the discredited theory of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). Furthermore, it cannot possibly protect us against other countries trying to build nuclear missiles: North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Libya, India and Pakistan.
Prohibit the assignment of U.S. troops to serve under foreign command or in United Nations or NATO uniforms. Repeal Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 25. Honor Michael New for refusing to wear a UN uniform.
Stop all technology transfers to China and forbid U.S. sales to China that require technology transfers.
Investigate and expose the technology transfers that the Clinton Administration permitted to go to Communist China, and determine whether those were the result of campaign contributions to Clinton-Gore re-election.
End coed training and coed barracks for U.S. troops, and forbid the assignment of women to military combat.
Stop illegal aliens from entering or remaining in the United States.
Restore Respect for the Tenth Amendment
Repeal Clinton’s overreaching Executive Orders (e.g., on Federalism and on Human Rights).
Repeal Clinton’s Executive Order called the American Heritage Rivers Initiative, under which he federalized 14 rivers this year, and plans to federalize ten more rivers every year.
Forbid federal regulation of state driver’s licenses.
Stop creating new federal crimes (which Congress has been doing every year). Recognize that, under our Constitution, criminal law is a state matter except for the few crimes specified in Constitution.
Start the process of repealing hundreds of the thousands of recently enacted federal crimes that should not be federal crimes. In particular, protect landowners against environmental regulations that proscribe use of their property and devalue their assets.
Dangerous Bills that Must Be Defeated
- The Ominous Patent bill, which would “harmonize” our successful patent system down to the level of the unsuccessful Japanese patent system, and which was a major component of Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown’s Asian policy.
- Puerto Rico statehood, which would make the United States a bilingual nation and give us language and culture problems like those suffered by Quebec, Bosnia, and other countries that do not share a common language.
- Clinton’s daycare proposal. The Republican Congress already addressed the child care problem by giving parents a $500 per child tax credit, which properly allows parents to spend their money for parent care of children as well as for hired daycare.
Protect and Defend the Constitution
Oppose any attempt to call a new Constitutional Convention. Respect our magnificent Constitution that has proved so successful for two centuries.
Oppose any reintroduction of the defunct Equal Rights Amendment. The Supreme Court of New Mexico recently held that the state ERA requires New Mexico to fund Medicaid abortions because (according to the court) denial of abortion services is sex discrimination. A federal ERA would (among other bad effects) nullify Harris v. McRae, which held that there is no constitutional right to have the taxpayers pay for abortions.
Social Security
Address the issue of saving Social Security, which is destined for bankruptcy and is now perceived as unfair to young Americans. Republicans and Democrats must work together, but we must observe these caveats:
There must not be any tax increases, not even the raising of the income cap on current taxes.
The government must not be allowed to invest Social Security funds in the stock market.
Any reform must not diminish Social Security’s current favorable treatment of wives and widows.
Foreign trade
Defeat all proposals to use taxpayer funds to prop up foreign currencies, to subsidize foreign investments, or to bail out bad foreign loans.
Do not renew Fast Track (which would surrender one of Congress’s enumerated constitutional powers to the President).
Do not renew Most Favored Nation trading status for Communist China.
Withdraw from the World Trade Organization, which has already tried to order the United States to change our domestic laws.
Equalize tariffs between the United States and countries that impose high protective tariffs on goods they import from us.
Stop subsidizing foreign industries that compete with American jobs.
Cut Big and Mischievous Government Spending
Here are some agencies and programs that should be abolished:
- National Endowment for the Arts, which continues to subsidize obscene and offensive materials and events.
- National Endowment for the Humanities, which was responsible for the revisionist history “standards,” condemned by the Senate in a 99 to 1 vote.
- Legal Services Corporation, which engages in radical leftist litigation and lobbying.
- Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which uses taxpayers’ money to safeguard risky investments in 140 countries made by the politically well-connected.
- International Monetary Fund, which is a ripoff of the taxpayers’ money, lines the pockets of corrupt foreign dictators, and promotes more bailouts.
- Taxpayer-paid benefits to illegal aliens.
Investigate Interferences with Honest Elections
The right to vote loses its meaning when people lose confidence in the honesty of the election process. We must have new Voting Rights legislation to assure the integrity of the ballot box. Congress should:
- Investigate frauds in federal elections.
- Investigate and stop voting by illegal aliens.
- Repeal the Motor Voter law.
- Expose electioneering and politicking by the gambling industry.
- Investigate frauds in absentee ballots and assistance voting.
- Investigate the integrity of voting machines.
- Require photo identification in order to vote.
- Prohibit voting by mail and same-day registration.
- Install video cameras in all (or random) voting places.
Improve Honesty in the Legislative Process
Don’t put anything in a Conference report that was never passed by both Houses of Congress.
Always have real opponents control Senate and House floor debates, not phony debates in which the ranking Republican and the ranking Democrat both support the legislation.
Require all witnesses before Congressional committees to disclose any taxpayer funds that they, or the organization they represent, receive.
