By John Sykes
If you’ve read the GOP Pledge to America, I hope you reacted better than I did. It is wordy, cumbersome and has been called “dreck”. I won’t go that far but I am afraid that, once again, politicians don’t seem to get it. They’ve given us platitudes and rhetoric.
We want simplicity and honesty. We want more action and less verbiage. Most of all we want commitment but, as offered, this piece of work requires no such physical pledge or signature!
Doug Ross in his A Critique of the GOP’s New Pledge to America offers the following one page version which is far more to the point:
We pledge that every action we take will be gauged by the answer to a single question: Does it show fidelity to the Constitution, our highest law?
With that as our guide, we solemnly pledge the following as our first actions:
• We will repeal the Democrat health care bill and, if vetoed by the President, will de-fund every aspect of that bill until such time as the American people have input into a sensible health care reform process.
• We will slash the size of the federal government bureaucracies (Commerce, Education, Energy, the EPA, Labor, etc.) by 20% in 2011 with a goal of reducing each by 50% over the next three years, thereby saving hundreds of billions of dollars.
• We will secure the border with physical fencing suitable to repel drug smugglers, human smugglers, and terrorists, while encouraging legal immigration and enforcement of the law.
• We will confront the entitlement crisis -- Social Security and Medicare -- by preserving benefits for those who depend upon them and moving to privatized options for younger workers. Anything less condemns future generations to mountains of debt and economic catastrophe.
• We will strengthen our armed forces, space and missile defense programs to retain our unparalleled superpower status.
• We will begin the process of paying down our debts, spending within our means every year.
• We will ban public sector unions, which exist solely to wage war against the taxpayers who fund their operations.
Put simply: we intend to adhere to a strict interpretation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Faith, Family, and the Founding. That is our creed.
And for your support and with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
I applaud the effort but quit trying to spin us, to impress us with 21 pages when 1 will do. And don’t forget that the political class will be trying to demean us by calling a posting like this divisive. Ignore them.
Simplify it! Sign it! Then implement it! We’ll “Remember in November” that actions speak louder than words!
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