Contract With America: The Betrayal Begins

Democrats In Drag: Third Way Fall From Grace, Part 6

Read Foreword, Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

On the steps of the U.S. Capitol on September 27, 1994, more than 300 candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives stood under an unusually warm, sun-filled sky and made history. All of them were there, joining hands and rubbing shoulders, with one goal in mind: To help launch a new revolution; the Republican revolution.

This catapult into a new order of things for the U.S. Congress began with the reading and then the signing of a Contract With America, a contract which committed its 357 signatories to a bold 10-point program promising a “return to the wisdom and brilliance of the Founding Fathers.” Included in that context was a promise to return to limited government, individual liberty, free markets, personal responsibility, and the protection of American sovereignty. (1)

What a refreshing vow! And it seemed just in time. For two years American citizens had suffered under the shock wave of a radical new approach to politics under the Clinton administration.

President Clinton had, in short order, authorized the installment of gays in the military; stood behind a surgeon general who sought to legalize illicit drugs and teach sex education to 5-year-olds; ordered and then publicly justified the police-state-like tactic of warrantless gun sweeps and immigration sweeps of public housing units; filled traditionally non-gun- toting federal agencies, like the FDA, with armed agents who then began conducting raids on such enemies of the state as garlic researchers; condoned the tank-led assault on a church filled with men, women and children in Waco, Texas; zealously promoted socialist medicine even while the celebration over the ‘fall’ of communism was still echoing in our ears; and aggressively launched America’s soldiers into several New World Order commitments, transforming the U.S. military into a busybody welfare agency that was, for the first time in history, subservient to U.N. command.

And then there were the scandals …

Who shouldn’t have been alarmed? Conservative action groups flourished, Democratic faithful ran for cover, and the Republican Party leadership seized the moment.

The Contract With America was the result. The overall goals, already alluded to, sounded good. They were “to limit and hold government accountable, to promote economic opportunity and individual responsibility to families and businesses, and to maintain security both at home and abroad.”

Who could argue with that? These goals sounded vaguely conservative, and vagueness sells.

Just as vague were the Contract’s 10 planks or bills, which the signers promised to introduce and vote on within the first 100 days, each bill having a catchy conservative title. They were: The Fiscal Responsibility Act, The Taking Back Our Streets Act, The Personal Responsibility Act, The Family Reinforcement Act, The American Dream Restoration Act, The National Security Restoration Act, The Senior Citizens Fairness Act, The Job Creation and Wage Enhancement Act, The Common Sense Legal Reforms Act, and The Citizen Legislature Act. (2)

With all those commitments to restoration, American dreams and security one would think the millennium had arrived, and finally everything would be as it used to be, and as it should be. But when vagueness gave way to specifics and fine-print legislation followed, it became clear enough that this was not to be so. At almost every turn – despite a few noteworthy concessions to conservatives – the proposed and/or passed legislation centralized power from the individual to the state, from the states to the federal government, from Congress to the president, and from the United States to the United Nations – the antithesis of what the founders stood for.

More devastatingly, consistent with the Third Way call to radically overhaul or overthrow the U.S. Constitution, the Contract was the genesis for 18 Gingrich-proposed constitutional amendments in the first six months of the Republican Revolution. (3) Considering the fact that there were only 16 amendments added to the Constitution following the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791, one can confidently say that the Republican Revolution was in fact a revolution, an assault, a revocation of the political wisdom of our forefathers.

Consider some of the Contract’s more subtle betrayals:

The Personal Responsibility Act

The Personal Responsibility Act promised to “reduce government dependency, attack illegitimacy, require welfare recipients to work, and cut welfare spending. The legislation’s main thrust was to give states greater control over the benefits programs, work programs, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) payments and requirements.” (4)

Remembering that the Third Way employs double talk to sway both left and right to the “safe” center, observe:

1. The Personal Responsibility Act denied increased welfare benefits to parents on AFDC (Aid to Families With Dependent Children) who have another child. Denying money to “irresponsible” welfare mothers sounds conservative enough, since it saves money and teaches a lesson – but to return to the Founders, one would have had to question the legitimacy of federal welfare and move toward its elimination. This bill did neither. Instead, it added a socially provocative, inherently coercive proviso.

Think about it. A woman already on welfare gets pregnant with another child. The state won’t pay additional money for the new baby. The doctor won’t deliver the baby. The state will pay for an abortion – its cheaper! Thus, the state and the doctor pressure the mother to take the life of the child. The taxpayer rejoices over the decrease in the surplus population and the money saved. Legitimacy for government efficiency, government coercion, and government genocide – in the hearts of conservatives – is won.

Moreover, extend the principle to a nation edging ever closer to socialized medicine, and the question arises, “How soon till tomorrow’s “balance sheet bloodletting” of welfare babies spreads its carnage to middle-class babies?

2. The Personal Responsibility Act promised to curb drug and alcohol abuse. Conservative sounding, indeed. The solution? A Clinton-like (5) demand for random drug and alcohol testing for welfare recipients identified as abusers. (6) Again, targeted for an abrogation of their rights are the poor, who apparently, by way of their accepting welfare, are no longer full-fledged citizens with all the protections thereof. Moreover, extend the precedent broadly to a nation where more and more people work for the government, are paid by government contracts, and receive government aid (including free education, subsidized loans, and grants of all varieties) and we must ask, who will be next and how might such tactics be used by unscrupulous individuals in the future?

3. The Personal Responsibility Act promised to deny various forms of welfare to immigrants, legal and illegal. Conservative sounding? Yes. But, as the previous law already denied the right, (7) this legislation denied a non-existent right and then, audaciously, granted the same “right” in fine-print exceptions, exceptions wide enough for an invading army to stroll through in broad daylight.

Who were excepted?

• Refugees – including Castro’s worst criminals and agitators.

• Temporary (migrant) agricultural workers (which makes Bush’s immigrant benefit plan, but part 2 of the same).

• Any who apply for selective housing assistance programs.

• Any who apply for emergency aid programs.

• Any who apply for non-means tested programs.

• The biggy of all biggies: any and all who have “physical, developmental, or mental impairment.” In fact, ever since, thousands upon thousands of immigrants are arriving in America with notes from doctors back home declaring them unfit to work and thus eligible for every American handout – including SSI benefits.

• To top it off, for any illegal and legal immigrants who might have been “left behind” – throw in the Contract With America’s faith-based subsidy program, a program which permits “privately” run welfare agencies to hand out public tax dollars with absolutely no check on immigrants. Bush is working to open this door even more. (8)

If all of this sounds like a Third Way bread and circus/no national boundaries/dregs recruitment scheme to increase minority power, tear down capitalism and raise up a communist welfare state, you’re catching on.

4. The Personal Responsibility Act’s boast that Republicans intended to transfer control of welfare to the states and peg the distribution of welfare funds to a market-based approach – that is, to a performance-based model akin to free market competition – was ludicrous.

First and foremost, grants, no matter how loose the strings hang initially – equal control, iron chord, iron-clad control. Period. To claim otherwise was to perpetrate one of the greatest frauds of all time. This was fraud.

Second, rewards and punishments in a free market operate upon private companies according to their ability to provide a product or a service that the people like in competition with others. A private company, if it is wise, finds a niche and provides superior service or an unbeatable price in order to prosper, but regardless is free to walk its own path. But a federal incentive/disincentive that feeds money into programs that are anti-free enterprise, anti-private property, anti-constitutional means only one thing – the state, which does the best job at being efficient socialists, wins the crown.

Further, one has to marvel at the idea that “winners” may take 20 percent of their block grants and use them as they please. (9) An interesting proposition. That is, let the states trickle the money into other state programs formerly free from federal dollars, so that they might get addicted too. Furthermore, narrowly tailored individual grants might be more easily forsaken if federal abuses arise. Those which come in one great block, and impact the state broadly, cannot. What a grand idea to increase the iron grip hold of federal over state power.

5. The Personal Responsibility Act, though it helped to move millions of welfare recipients (among legal citizens) out of dependency and into productive jobs, strangely it did so by creating financial incentives to the states to force hard-working, middle class families into the welfare net (so much for achieving conservative ends via liberal tactics, that is via federal block grants). Eagle Forum Founder Phyllis Schlafly in a March 29, 2006 editorial, unveiled how this works:

The major goal of the 1996 Welfare Reform was to reduce the budget deficit by, among other things, recovering welfare costs from absentee fathers. Without justification or public debate, the rules to accomplish this were then applied to middle-class “never welfare” families.

Formerly, to receive welfare benefits, recipients had to demonstrate eligibility by “need” (i.e., a test measured by income level), but the new policy omitted income eligibility requirements. Without a means test, a high-income mother with custody can use the power of the state to collect from a low-income father.

The federal government annually provides $4.2 billion in block grants to states to serve as collection agencies. States are reimbursed for 66 percent of their costs of child support enforcement activities, 80 percent of their costs for technology, and 66 percent of their costs of DNA testing for paternity.

The more cases the states can create and the more operational expenses they incur, the more federal funding states receive to expand their welfare bureaucracy. No performance standards are required to get this money and, in addition, the feds provide a bonus fund ($458,000,000 in Fiscal 2006) for which the states compete.

In the welfare class, most absentee fathers are unemployed or working for wages so low that little or no money can be squeezed out of them. State bureaucrats discovered they could cash in on the pot of federal money by exploiting middle-class divorce and creating a whole new class of absent fathers who have good jobs and are willingly making payments to their ex-wives.

When a married couple with children is divorced, the family court typically retitles the husband and wife as noncustodial and custodial parents. The more time with the children that is awarded to the custodial parent, the more money the noncustodial parent is ordered to pay and then can be reported by the state as collections that merit federal bonuses.

Federal funding thus provides powerful monetary incentives for states to maximize the number of single-parent households with high transfer payments, and to minimize equal child custody which would lessen transfer payments. Depriving or reducing children’s access to one parent is thus a source of revenue for the states.

These incentives drive family-court discretion and skew the opinions of the vast army of lawyers, psychologists, custody evaluators, and parenting counselors who are used to rationalize the process. They hide their predetermined custody rulings under the subjective slogan “the best interest of the child.”

Put another way, forcibly depriving children of access to one parent, usually the father because he usually has a higher income than the mother, is a big source of revenue to the states. The more support orders that are issued, the higher they are, and the more fathers who are threatened with jail and suspension of their driver’s and professional licenses for challenging the system, the better chance a state will receive more money from the feds.

This result was accurately predicted by Leslie L. Frye, chief of Child Support for the California Department of Social Services. In testifying to the Human Resources Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee on March 20, 1997, Frye said the new regulations “encouraged states to recruit middle class families, never dependent on public assistance and never likely to be so, into their programs in order to maximize federal child support incentives.”

Of the 40% of American children now growing up in homes without their own father, some are victims of the stereotypical “deadbeat dad.” But most are victims of disastrous federal policies that provided incentives to create female-headed households, first by the Democrats’ welfare system and then by the Republicans’ so-called welfare reform. (10)

6. Finally, The Personal Responsibility Act promised to shrink the size of government by streamlining the number of existing welfare agencies, when in fact all it did was consolidate agencies, not eliminate their regulatory duties and effects. (11) If you will recall, this Al Gore Third Way modeled streamlining program introduced police powers into agencies that previously had none.

So many “great,” constitutionally “conservative” ideas. What were we thinking?

The Taking Back Our Streets Act

The Taking Back Our Streets Act’s stated intent was to “stop violent criminals.” (12) If this was so, it might have sought to reverse the host of federal court decisions and other federal laws which have hamstrung state and local law enforcement and prosecution efforts for the past 30 years. Not so. Unremarkably, this Republican-sponsored act chose to enhance federal power and expand federal jurisdiction, the exact opposite of what a return to the Founders’ approach would have done.

The Constitution limits the federal government criminal law powers to a very narrow spectrum: counterfeiting, treason, piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, offenses against the law of nations, crimes committed by foreign nationals, crimes regarding: treason, bankruptcies, patents, copyrights, military members, and citizens of the District of Columbia – as well as appeals from the state courts and extradition disputes between states. (13) Nothing else. Cut and dried.

Madison noted in Federalist 45: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce. … The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.”

The Ninth and Tenth Amendments firmed this statement up and made it law. But not to worry – the “Taking Back Our Streets Act” had little regard for such technicalities. Instead, it called for more multibillion-dollar federal block grants to the states for the “prosecution of habeas corpus cases”; to “hire, train, or employ [state or local] police officers; to pay overtime to [state and local] police officers; to purchase [police] equipment and technology; [to] enhance school security measures [including closed circuit cameras]; [to] establish citizen neighborhood watch programs; [to] fund programs that advance moral standards [whose – Clinton's?]; to build, operate, and expand [state] prisons”; and to convert “old military bases” into “correctional facilities” for “nonviolent offenders.”

The act also imposed upon the states truth-in-sentencing laws, a ‘three strikes you’re out’ law, habeas corpus laws, death penalty laws, sexual predator laws, minimum sentencing laws, mandatory victim restitution laws, appeals laws, and parole laws.

Plus, the act federalized an expansive list of crimes, to include much stiffer sentencing for mere possession of a gun during the commission of a crime (10 years for first offense) and triple the minimum sentencing if the gun “possessed” was an automatic weapon (minimum 30 years). Strangely, inconsistent with the Founders’ principle of equality before the law, if the criminal intended to do violence with a knife, with a baseball bat (the growing weapon of choice nationally and internationally), with fire, with chemicals, with one’s bare hands or with a car, those are lesser crimes with lighter sentences. Therefore, gun ownership, rather than the criminal act itself, is the greater evil. And owning a gun that might be used for something other than hunting (an automatic weapon) is the greatest evil of all. (14)

This, then, was a blind-side on states rights, local government, local police and the Second Amendment right to self-defense, masquerading as a conservative tough-on-crime bill. It swept so much power and so many duties from the local and state governments to the federal that one American Spectator writer summarized it as one of the greatest federal power grabs in our nation’s history, a dramatic step toward a federal police state. He was right.

The Fiscal Responsibility Act

The Fiscal Responsibility Act sought “to restore fiscal responsibility to an out-of-control Congress” via a Balanced Budget Amendment and a Line Item Veto. (15) Again, these goals appear conservative and, at least in the former case, something many (not all) of the Founders would have strongly approved of.

However, the proposed Balanced Budget Amendment contained an outrageous provision which gave the president of the United States the new dictatorial power of overriding the balanced budget any time he deemed it necessary under the vague umbrella of “imminent or serious threat to national security.” (16) The potential for abuse is enormous as, in recent years, the economic plight of Mexico, the violence in Somalia, the economic woes in Japan, then later all of Asia, and the conflicts in Africa, Bosnia and Kosovo – these and so many more were all declared by the president to be national security threats. Even domestic disaster relief and major industry strikes have been, at times, so classified. Imagine the potential for dictatorial abuse!

The Fiscal Responsibility Act just as radically proposed a Line Item Veto power for the president (17) that was later declared unconstitutional. (18) Why? The Constitution demands that only Congress shall legislate. By giving the President the power to line out however many items he chooses, he may, if he will, fundamentally alter, undermine, or radically change any piece of legislation, and make it law (only the rejected item goes back to the Congress, and in the case of the Senate under an absurd maximum ten hour debate rule, with each item being forced to become a separate piece of legislation). The President, then, like a king, becomes the legislator, not only by way of this far reaching veto power, but also because it empowers the President to, with greater ease, manipulate Congress before the fact. This was too radical a shift in power from Congress to the President even for the Supreme Court! But this was not all, they rejected it on the premise, also correct, that the Republican Party tried to accomplish this radical change, not by amendment, as originally promised, but by a simple majority vote – another dangerous and radical maneuver of the Third Way. (19)

Major power shifts by shifty means. Conservative? Think again.

The National Security Restoration Act

The National Security Restoration Act demanded that the president “stop putting U.S. troops under U.N. command [and] stop raiding the defense budget to finance social programs and U.N. peacekeeping.” (20) A very conservative, pro-American, pro-sovereignty goal. Remarkably, once again the fine print did the precise opposite.

Under the title “Prohibition of Foreign Command of U.S. Armed Forces,” the Act reads: “The President may waive this provision if he certifies to Congress that operational control of our troops under foreign command is vital to our national security interests.” (21) That is what President Clinton asked for, to the letter – thus creating a radical new presidential authority (again circumventing the Constitution without amendment) to put U.S. troops under foreign command.

Likewise, even as the act pretends to be a check on the U.N. and its funding, it asks for the “acceleration of the expansion of NATO,” (22) a key subsidiary organization of the U.N. It denounces endless expensive U.N. peacekeeping operations, yet calls for military, financial and technological assistance to the “former” communist bloc so that they can more easily meet NATO’s entry requirements for absorption. (23) Worst of all, it creates a slush fund for the president to “hold advanced funding for … [U.N.] peacekeeping operations.” (24) The latter, had it passed into law, would be perhaps the most radical step this nation has ever taken to undermine our sovereignty, as a long-solicited (and rejected) U.N. rapid response force would be created, a force whose goal is to deploy anywhere and everywhere, without the consent of the U.S. Congress. (25)

After denouncing the raiding of defense funds for welfare and peacekeeping operations, the bill gives the president the authority to do just that, just so long as the defense department has not supplied written notice and proof that the funds are “vital to national security interests” “30 days” prior to the transfer. (26) Open season begins.

Even the act’s salutary proposal for a missile shield defense, to this day, includes plans for sharing of that technology with all of our “allies” – including Russia and perhaps China, both of whom, by some imaginative definition of the word “rogue,” are not rogue nations. (27)

The National Security Restoration Act, like everything else Third Way, represents another unconstitutional upward shift in power, this time from Congress to the president, and from the United States to the United Nations, even as it masquerades as a pro-sovereignty anti-U.N. measure.

Summary

The foregoing has been a brief introduction (more will follow) to Third Way betrayals found within the Contract With America, a right-of-center approach which appealed to the right even as it legislated to the left, with but one design in mind, to radically alter or replace the U.S. Constitution. In time, the Contract With America will be remembered for what it truly was, a blind-side attack on constitutional conservatism. Its claim to a restoration of the Founders’ views was, and is to this day, blatantly false. A return to limited government cannot be achieved by seizing power from the people, the states and Congress, and move it upward to the President and our ‘friends’ at the United Nations. The Republican Party elites who pulled off this gimmick to greater empower their party – at the expense of the U.S. Constitution, only reinforced what some, for so long, have felt so strongly about who these Republicans really are – even, Democrats in Drag.

Footnotes

1. Gingrich, Newt; Armey, Dick; Edited by Gillespie, Ed and Schellhas, Bob. “Contract With America,” United States of America, Times Books/Random House, 1994, p. 4.

2. Ibid., pp. 9-11.

3. Hoar, William P. “The ‘Transformational’ GOP,” The New American, July 24, 1995. Including information from researcher Jeffrey Tucker, Ludwig Von Mises Institute.

4. Contract With America, p. 66.

5. It was President Bill Clinton who authorized random, warrantless gun sweeps of government housing projects. Speaking in defense of this unconstitutional practice back in 1994, President Clinton dismissed the charge that this violates people’s freedom. “The most important freedom we have in this country is the freedom from fear.” Apparently “give me liberty or give me death” is irrelevant. Benjamin Franklin noted: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” The Republican-dominated Congress was “outraged” when Clinton began the practice, but par for their course of speaking like constitutionalists even while they betray that Constitution, they did nothing. The institution of their own random-sweep program to bring about “freedom from drugs” evidenced the reason.

6. Ibid., p. 74.

7. See “Personal Responsibility Act of 1995: Fiscal Effect on California.”

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Schlafly, Phyllis, “Unintended Consequences of Welfare Reform,” March 29, 2006.

11. “Personal Responsibility Act of 1995: Fiscal Effect on California.”

12. Contract With America, p. 37.

13. U.S. Constitution.

14. Contract With America, pp. 38-53. See also William F. Jasper’s excellent article, “Gingrich’s Constitution Con,” The New American, July 9, 1995. And check out In Brief Analysis No. 153: “Me Too Crime Reform.” The National Center for Policy Analysis notes: “The ‘Taking Back Our Streets Act’ – the crime-fighting plan in the Contract With America – was cobbled together from old Republican proposals intended to marginally improve bad legislation in the old Democratic Congress. It tinkers with the problem and piles conservative activism on top of the existing mess.” One example: “Title II federalizes every crime of violence or drug trafficking in which the perpetrator possesses or discharges a firearm. This is a breathtaking and foolish federal power grab.” [emphasis added]. Return

15. Contract With America, p. 9.

16. Ibid., p. 32.

17. Ibid., pp. 32-33.

18. In Clinton v. City of New York the Supreme Court ruled that the Line Item Veto violated Articles 1 and 7 of the U.S. Constitution.

19. Ibid. In a concurring opinion, Justice Meyer noted that separation of powers was designed to implement a fundamental insight: Concentration of power in the hands of a single branch is a threat to liberty. The Federalist states the axiom in these explicit terms: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” (The Federalist, No. 47) So convinced were the Framers that liberty of the person inheres in structure that at first they did not consider a Bill of Rights necessary. (The Federalist, No. 84, pp. 513, 515; G. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787, pp. 536-543, 1969). It was at Madison’s insistence that the First Congress enacted the Bill of Rights. (R. Goldwin, “From Parchment to Power,” pp. 75-153, 1997). It would be a grave mistake, however, to think a Bill of Rights in Madison’s scheme then or in sound constitutional theory now renders separation of powers of lesser importance. (See Amar, “The Bill of Rights as a Constitution,” 100 Yale L. J., pp. 1131-1132, 1991).” Meyerthen scolds Republican lawmakers: “Failure of political will does not justify unconstitutional remedies.” They have no right, he continues, “[to] reallocate their own authority” to the President. … The Constitution’s structure requires a stability which transcends the convenience of the moment. … Liberty is always at stake when one or more of the branches seek to transgress the separation of powers.”

20. Contract With America, p. 91.

21. Ibid., p. 101.

22. Ibid., pp. 92, 107-109.

23. Ibid., pp. 107-109.

24. Ibid., p. 99. This Contract provision was another proposal by President Clinton that had been rejected by the previous Congress.

25. Kissinger, Henry. “U.S. Foreign Policy: Expanded Edition,” New York, W. W. Norton & Company Inc. 1974, p. 249. Here Mr. Kissinger restated what was a U.N. goal from the beginning – bringing an end to the “ad hoc,” “impasse” nature of deployments which Result from the resistance of sovereign nations. “The time has come to agree on peacekeeping guidelines so that the United Nations can act swiftly, confidently, and effectively in future crises.” The key was and is to create an independent U.N. army and enhanced powers to the Security Council to act on their own.

26. Contract With America, p. 106.

27. Ibid., pp. 91, 107-109.