Mike Johnson and Mitch McConnell are treated as the leaders, respectively, of the current house and of the current senate’s swing votes.
Johnson, on November 14, 2023, led 99% of Democrats and 58% of Republicans to pass a two-tiered temporary continuing resolution that continued the past and present congresses’ massive current spending spree. McConnell always supported such spending. Such collusion from the only potential opposition makes such Republican Progressives the root cause of inflation.
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To limit governments, we can’t just replace these Progressives, we must replace their process. The key power of the people who lead legislatures is their process power to control the agenda.
Making Governments Unlimited
Constitutionally, executives give legislatures information on the states of their governments, recommend measures, and on extraordinary occasions convene either legislative house or both houses. USA vice presidents are the presidents of their senates. Absent these express powers and duties, executives would still execute laws, which would still leave chief executives equipped with superior information and superior organizations, all empowering a single official.
Progressive executives use their positions’ powers to try as fully as possible to make the governments in every jurisdiction unlimited. If an executive is even a little less Progressive than the legislators are, then Progressive legislators work to choose and empower their own more-Progressive leaders.
Progressives in legislatures don’t use their main power, which is to pass limited rules and sanctions. Instead, they delegate the rulemaking to administrators, then mainly spend their time grabbing executive power. Progressive legislators claim they have executive power to organize departments and agencies, allocate budgets by line item, dictate appointments, prevent layoffs, and limit firings. They executively investigate in oversight hearings, while never using impeachment constitutionally to withdraw officials’ privileges from further depriving people of rights.
When called on to take any actions that are their real jobs, Progressive legislators unconstitutionally delegate their actual powers to their chosen leaders. These are people who the members rely on to do exactly what the members would do, while keeping the members far removed from spotlights and heat.
Progressives expand governments by sending scheming leaders behind closed doors to logroll complex pork.
Making Governments Limited
Constitutionalists must limit governments by having all members work in the open to mobilize voters’ strong support for dead-simple repeals.
Each member has various powers of critical thinking and persuasion. He may speak plainly, connect emotionally, or master the processes for enacting bills. Each person’s best contributions are needed and will help.
Good teamwork may appear to be leaderless, but it always includes leadership. When leadership is decentralized, leadership gets taken up right where it’s most needed by the people who will do it best.
This is much like how free people themselves work. When they’re producing, free people compete to add more of what customers will value. When they’re shopping, free people work to bring home what they value the most highly. Free people’s shopping incentivizes producers. It puts pressure on producers to not fail, and it gives producers opportunities to succeed even better. Producers keep making themselves better. Plus, even good producers keep getting replaced by better producers.
In governments, the producers of limits are the government people, and the customers for the limits are the voters. The limits are boundaries. Government people must limit themselves to stay within their boundaries. Government people also must limit others to stay within their own boundaries. Each government person must be limited to doing his own job.
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Legislators’ main job and power is to pass bills that define rules and sanctions that fall within the powers that are enumerated and that are prudent to use currently.
Politicians claim that enacting statutes solves problems, so we’ll always have more than enough statutes. Legislators’ main job always becomes to repeal any statutes that don’t constitutionally separate powers, exercise enumerated powers, and remain prudent to use now and in the future.
Full repeals can, and should, be quick. Full repeals don’t require legislators to spell out contingency rules in the event that various complications might arise. They don’t require legislators to create agency structures, processes, funding, and oversight. All such planning and operating instead gets done outside of governments, by free people working in their roles as producers and as customers. Full repeals are simple to write and sponsor, and simple to vote up or down.
The real tasks that belong on the legislative calendar are simple: taking votes on whether to eliminate the various contents of each existing statute. The duration of the legislative calendar should fit within the representatives’ terms in office, which last two years. The pace should be an order of magnitude faster—such that routine full repeal of every existing statute, with no filibustering, is voted on within, say, a total of ten weeks. This pace will reserve most of the calendar time for grandfathering-out all entitlements. (Remember, repeals are simple. Just do them!)
Each new legislative term, the main job throughout needs to be to complete a new, comprehensive set of full repeals.
Members leading together will follow this calendar better than any leader would.
Every action taken now by Progressives’ centralized leaders is destructive. If, at first, constitutionalist member‑leaders simply take no new actions, that will be a dramatic improvement.
When constitutionalist member-leaders do start slashing governments, this will be a dawning of freedom and recovery the likes of which the world has seldom seen, and the likes of which the world has always profited from handsomely.
