Some modest proposals

An enterprising author for nbc News weighed in the other day with a proposal to withdraw suffrage from citizens inclined to vote for Donald Trump. “Racist voting isn’t an accident,” we read. “It’s a choice that may violate the principles of our Constitution and our legal system.” People who voted for Donald Trump are “motivated” by racism, he argues. And since racism, he contends, is banned by the U.S. Constitution, those votes should not be counted.

This dream of disenfranchisement is of a piece with one advanced a few years ago by a professor at Harvard Law School. Looking ahead confidently to the election of Hillary Clinton, he suggested that conservative leaders and Christians be treated like enemies (“Nazis”) defeated in war, exiled perhaps, deprived of rights, and even sent to concentration camps or re-education schools.

This seems to be a perennial issue in the liberal mind: how do we get rid of the conservatives? For the most part, they have solved this problem on the college campus, where conservatives are prohibited from speaking or even raising their hands in class.

It has dawned on some leftists, like the nbc writer, that the campus crusade might now be expanded into national politics, with the goal of cleansing the polity altogether of conservative voices, so that the country as a whole will take on the political character of the Yale or Berkeley campuses.

Good for them, I say. They are at least expressing their candid views, instead of hiding them under a pretense of civility.

The progressives have put everyone on notice about what they plan to do if they acquire power or win another national election. It sounds ugly—but there’s not much use in denying that they are saying it.

But what if, in the spirit of reciprocity, conservatives decided to play that game, too, in their own self-defense? Their proposals, mirroring those of the nbc author and the commissar-minded law professor, might look like this:

First, let us withdraw suffrage from graduates of Ivy League institutions, and from a handful of other left-wing colleges as well.

It is well known that these graduates have been indoctrinated on their campuses in left-wing identity politics, ideologies antithetical to the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution is color-blind and gender-blind, but these colleges teach their students that identity is all, and that to advance their interests it is perfectly legitimate to deprive others of their Constitutional liberties. Does it make sense to allow such people to vote? No. The vote should be taken away from them, unless and until they pass a two-year civics and history course taught by the faculty of Hillsdale College.

Second, in order to purify the federal courts and ensure proper respect for the Constitution among judges, it should be a rule to require prospective judges to sign a pledge supporting an originalist interpretation of the Constitution and disavowing the proposition that the Constitution is a “living” document to be rewritten at the will of Supreme Court justices.

Federal judges, of course, take an oath to uphold the Constitution, but progressive judges do so with a wink and a nod, believing that the Constitution means whatever they say it means. Progressive advocates now say that they must “pack the courts” with judges who will enact constitutional mischief, such as declaring the Electoral College or the First Amendment unconstitutional, or (as in the case of the nbc author) depriving conservatives and constitutionalists of the right to vote. Those claims cannot be allowed to stand—and so let us ban from the courts candidates flirting with such views.

Third, while everyone is in favor of free speech and freedom of the press, there should be no such liberties for journalists, newspapers, and television stations that broadcast anti-constitutional and unconstitutional doctrines, including identity politics, confiscatory taxation, the suppression of opposing views (see nbc, above), and the like.

For these reasons it will be necessary for a time to close certain institutions, such as cnn, The New York Times, The Washington Post, nbc, and perhaps a few others, while they are reconstituted with new crews of journalists and editors whose views correspond with the U.S. Constitution.

Fourth, let us recognize at last that the Democratic Party is an organized conspiracy against the Constitution and the public interest, an operation not much different from the Mafia, with its practices of fraud, theft, corruption, manipulation of the press, vote buying with tax dollars, and much more.

In fact, the Democratic Party is far worse than the Communist Party of old because it has mastered the arts of subterfuge under which it conceals its real aims—to subvert the Constitution and deprive Americans of their god-given liberties. Such a party cannot be allowed to operate in a free country. For that reason, let us outlaw the Democratic Party across the nation, under so-called rico statutes that ban criminal conspiracies against the public interest. Let us further say that, when new parties propose to form, they must first seek approval from the Republican National Committee.

Fifth, let us have a “Second Reconstruction” in those states, like New York and California, that have been subverted by progressive ideas and other unconstitutional doctrines—which means that an army of occupation should be sent to those states to administer the laws for a period of time until constitutional governments can be set up, as in the first Reconstruction after the Civil War.

Naturally, those states cannot play a role in national elections, nor can they send representatives to Congress until their constitutional governments can be organized.

In the meantime, Congress and the states, in the interests of legitimate constitutional government in the tradition of the Founding Fathers, should pass and insert into the Constitution Mark Levin’s “Liberty Amendments,” to wit:

1. Impose congressional term limits;
2. Return the election of U.S. Senators to state legislators;
3. Require balanced budgets and tax limitations on the federal government;
4. Change the deadline for filing federal taxes to a week before national elections;
5. Sunset all federal laws and regulations so that they expire after ten years;
6. Restrict the powers of the federal courts to overturn state and federal laws, and impose term limits for federal judges;
7. Create a process allow two-thirds of the states to reject federal laws or Supreme Court decisions;
8. Require photo identification in order to vote in federal elections, and get rid of “early voting” altogether.

These modest proposals are set forth in homage to Jonathan Swift and in a spirit of constructive reform for the purpose of building solid foundations under a constitutional system sagging under sustained liberal and progressive assault. They are advanced in the belief that extreme measures should be disdained until these modest proposals have been given a chance to do their work.