A friend of mine was invited recently to a meeting with President George W. Bush to discuss public policy issues. “Any advice on what I should say to the President?” she asked.
Oh yeah, I thought, I’ve got a few ideas. The following is what I suggested she say.
We Cheered for You
Mr. President, I represent one of more than 100 nonprofit think tanks and advocacy groups in the U.S. committed to less government and more individual freedom. Our spokespersons appear every day on television and radio, on the letters to the editor and op-ed pages of daily newspapers, and before Rotary Clubs and countless other civic and business groups. We are like a hundred PR firms devoted to promoting the very issues that got you elected.
We cheered when you defeated Al Gore in 2000, because we knew Gore favored higher taxes and bigger government. We cheered when you announced the death of the Kyoto Protocol, the global warming treaty negotiated by the Clinton-Gore administration. And we cheered when you fulfilled your pledge to cut taxes and each time you talked about privatizing Medicare and Social Security.
Not all of us agreed with the way you responded to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. We have deep reservations in general about an interventionist foreign policy and the Patriot Act’s threat to our rights to privacy and due process. But most of us said a quiet prayer that it was you, and not Al Gore, in the White House at such a critical time for the nation.
What Have You Done Lately?
I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, Mr. President, but what have you done for us lately? Discretionary spending by the federal government is increasing at twice the rate it did under Bill Clinton, according to David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union. “Government spending is simply out of control,” writes Keene. “It is increasing at a far faster rate than at any time since Lyndon Johnson laid the foundations for his Great Society, and it’s happening with Republicans at the helm.”
During Ronald Reagan’s eight years in office, domestic discretionary spending actually fell an average of 1.3 percent per year, according to the Club for Growth. During the Clinton years, spending rose an average of 2.5 percent per year. So far under your administration, Mr. President, spending is rising at the rate of 8.2 percent per year.
One of my brothers said to me, “if a private company was run the way the federal government is run, its executives would be sent to jail.” He’s absolutely right. Between outright corruption, downright incompetence, and doing things government just has no business doing, hundreds of billions of dollars a year are going right down the toilet … and you’ve put us on a track to double the federal government’s size in nine years. What’s with that?
You haven’t vetoed a single bill, not one. You may become the first President since John Quincy Adams in the 1820s to complete a full term without vetoing one bill. How do you expect to control spending without standing up to Congress and saying “no” to some of its waste, pork, and baloney?
Property Rights Under Assault
During the Clinton administration, the federal government ran rough-shod over small property owners, locking up millions of acres of land in “national monuments” and letting government bureaucrats impose new regulations seemingly at will. Millions of farmers, ranchers, and recreationists voted for you because they thought you’d stand up for them. But little has changed.
Your Department of Justice has argued in court that plowing a farm field causes pollution, since the soil is “wrenched up, moved around, and re-deposited somewhere else.” This logic, your legal eagles said, puts all farming under the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act and therefore the Environmental Protection Agency.
Your National Park Service is reneging on a hundred-year-old policy of guaranteeing access to private property surrounded by national parks. Jack McFarland, who owns property in Glacier National Park, is one of thousands of landowners losing their land because the NPS won’t let them cross public land to get to it.
In Southern Florida, your Army Corps of Engineers is condemning and confiscating homes in the name of protecting the habitat of an endangered bird. That would be bad enough, but it’s also flooding out landholders beyond the reach of its confiscation powers by raising the water table in the Everglades.
In Klamath Falls, Oregon, your Bureau of Reclamation cut off irrigation water that serves more than 90 percent of the farmers in the Klamath Water Basin, allocating nearly all the water for the benefit of sucker fish in Upper Klamath Lake and salmon in the Klamath River. That breaks a promise made to the region’s original settlers in the 1900s.
You haven’t lifted a finger to reform the Endangered Species Act (ESA), probably the most dysfunctional environmental regulation ever enacted. By imposing land-use restrictions without compensation, the ESA punishes landowners when wildlife migrates onto their property. No wonder some landowners have taken to cutting down trees they believe might support endangered birds and other species.
And why, during a “war on terrorism,” is arresting and punishing eco-terrorists given such a low priority by your administration? They are attacking biotech scientists and fur farmers and burning down ski lodges, homes under construction, and car dealerships. Where is the FBI? Are radical environmentalists somehow more “politically correct” than their victims?
Ending the War on Drugs
When you were elected, I told people you might be the guy to finally end the nation’s War on Drugs. They all laughed, but I still think it could be true.
Your administration has made a strong and disciplined effort to win the War on Drugs, but surely you know we are no closer to victory than we were before you took office. The cost goes up every year, with estimates that include the cost of incarceration and crimes associated with the drug trade reaching hundreds of billions of dollars a year. It is ruining countless careers, wrecking families, and corrupting our police, courts, and banking system.
It’s time to try something new. Why not call for a national dialogue on decriminalizing drug use and releasing from prison people who are serving time on drug possession charges? It would be a popular idea: Nearly two-thirds of Americans favor treatment over incarceration for nonviolent drug offenders, according to polling by Peter Hart Research Associates.
Some of the resources freed up by ending the War on Drugs could help balance federal and state budgets, and some could be mobilized to make our neighborhoods safer and secure our borders against terrorists. Releasing the Drug War’s hundreds of thousands of victims from prison would allow them to lead productive lives, providing a boost to the nation’s economy several times bigger than your tax cuts.
Mr. President, you have a unique opportunity to speak with conviction on a topic that touches every home and business in America. You admitted to having used illegal drugs yourself, so you know recreational use doesn’t turn people into criminals. The law does that. As a conservative Republican, nobody can accuse you of being soft on crime.
You can single-handedly break the political logjam that has kept the two major political parties from embracing drug decriminalization and allowed a self-serving anti-drug bureaucracy to flourish at the expense of our civil and economic liberties.
That’s all the advice I have to give for now. If you’d like to talk some more, I’m sure your people know where to find me.
