Repeal and Impeach: Use Your Constitutional Powers, Flood the Zone, and Build Support

The latest house of representatives has a small Republican majority.

Of this house, the fraction that voted to nominate as the next speaker Kevin McCarthy, Liberty Score 54%, was a full 43%. Of the previous house, the fraction with Liberty Scores of 80% or more was 13%. This 13% fraction that supports freedom is sizable and is growing but is currently in the minority.

Politicians who support liberty wear multiple hats (chapter 3), as activists, media content providers, legislators or executives, and campaign influencers. They at least get paid to do this work full-time.

Like judges, whose branches are the least powerful, legislators who are in the minority must live by their wits, persuading others. Legislators recommend agendas, sponsor bills, co-sponsor bills, vote on bills, and support like-minded candidates.

Going into the midterms, I wrote that House Republicans should prioritize protecting life, liberty, and property. They should promise to increase these liberties with narrow actions I specified on moneys, emergency powers, generics, abortion, immigration, national criminal law, and Ukraine.

The liberty-supporting legislators who are in the minority would do well to focus now on these same priorities, but to start out holistically.

On moneys, elsewhere (papers 10 and 18) I’ve explained that the built-in instability of fractional-reserve lending brings crises in which politicians break bad. I’ve recommended that when a new major party gains power, it should limit crises by taking substantial actions specifically on moneys:

1. Repeal laws that interfere with using gold as money.
2. Repeal laws that interfere with using common-stock investments as money.
3. Disallow all unconstitutional features of our paper monetary system:
   1. Repeal legal-tender laws so people are no longer forced to accept paper money.
   2. Repeal the Fed, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (real-estate lending), Sallie Mae (higher-education lending), FDIC and FSLIC (banking insurance), NFIP (flood insurance), FCIC (crop insurance), and the like.
   3. End government inflation of the quantity of paper money.
   4. Repeal laws on lending, including laws that transfer risk to taxpayers.
   5. Repeal laws that allow banks to create money by lending using fractional reserves.
   6. Repeal laws that take over retirement income and medical payments.

Before the midterms, the narrow action I recommended that the Republicans pledge on moneys was item 3.1 above, repeal legal-tender laws. This one change would let producers create private moneys. Private producers could then commence a gold rush to replace government dollars with private moneys.

But in a holistic program on moneys, the legislators targeting this issue would sponsor the many repeals and changes above in standalone bills. They would continually make the case to voters that the various government programs surrounding moneys are central to the government’s abilities to inflate money and to obligate taxpayers to spend. They would work to get roll-call votes on each bill. They would work to replace Republicans who vote against any of these actions to increase liberty.

On emergency powers, a holistic program would include standalone bills to repeal national-government emergency powers and to outlaw state- and local-government emergency powers.

On generics, a holistic program would start with standalone bills to repeal the FDA and to repeal liability exemptions for drug manufacturers. Narrower standalone bills could repeal FDA power over efficacy, replace FDA discretion with statutory minimum safety tests, or repeal all FDA power over off-label prescribing. Along with such repeals and temporary compromise statutes, summary impeachments would indict all government people, present and past, who restricted people’s liberty to use drugs off-label against COVID.

On abortion, the bill needed would simply make life safe from abortion, starting at fertilization. No compromises would be acceptable.

On immigration, a holistic program would explicitly make the sole immigration criterion a person’s merit as a citizen who will support constitutional limiting of governments. It would include standalone widespread repeals of all existing immigration criteria and quotas and of DHS. It would include standalone bills creating enforcement rules.

On national criminal law, a holistic program would include standalone bills to repeal the national criminal code section-by-section apart from the constitutional statutes on treason and counterfeiting, and to repeal the DOJ including the FBI. Summary impeachments would indict all elected officials and DOJ and FBI officials who left persons deprived of liberty for exercising their rights to free assembly and free speech on January 6, 2021.

On Ukraine, a holistic program would start with standalone bills to repeal all overseas basing, all military actions, all support of other nations’ militaries, and all civil support of other nations.
Politicians who support liberty are voters’ strongest advocates.

Executives control the operation of governments, and so are in a position to close departments and agencies, lay off for the duration of their times in office, and recommend repeals.

Legislators are accountable for the whole existing corpus of statutes (paper 4). Given sufficient numbers, legislators can assault on many more fronts at once. For now, they must prioritize. But every citadel has points of weakness that are susceptible to initial attack.

Liberty-supporting legislators can control media Overton windows on substantial policy areas. So they can control Republican politicians’ policy focuses and, to some extent, Republican politicians’ actual positions.

These legislators can point out to presidents various priority policy areas where presidents are accountable for independently interpreting the Constitution. They can telegraph various statutes that if they themselves were president, they would not execute, they would recommend to congresses to repeal, and they would work to elect legislators to repeal.

Human development has been dominated by giant leaps towards greater liberty. Right here, right now, liberty-supporting legislators should get us started on our next leap up.