WaPo | It is time, Jim DeMint told his fellow conservatives, to come up with a program beyond opposing everything President Obama does.
“It’s not sufficient for conservatives to run against agendas; they
must advance ideas,” the head of the Heritage Foundation advised an
audience at his think tank Monday morning. “A mandate to lead without a
plan, without a proposal, without original legislation, is no mandate at
all.”
And so Heritage Action, the group’s political wing,
convened a Conservative Policy Summit to “show Americans what a bold,
forward-looking, winning conservative reform agenda looks like.”
But
conference organizers must have misread “bold” as “old,” because the
proposals they assembled have been collecting dust for years:
They
would cut hundreds of billions of dollars from means-tested programs,
including Pell grants, school lunches, Medicaid and food stamps.
They
would impose a work requirement on food-stamp recipients and perhaps a
drug-test requirement on all who receive any form of welfare.
They
would open up the outer continental shelf, the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge and more federal lands to oil drilling, and they would curtail
medical-malpractice lawsuits.
They would expand private-school
vouchers and introduce Medicaid vouchers, while giving bigger tax breaks
for health-care spending — as long as insurance plans don’t cover
abortion.
They would abolish Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and cut
the federal gas tax by 80 percent, leaving it to the states to fund
roads and infrastructure.
They would repeal an 83-year-old law
that requires the federal government to pay prevailing wages and they
would look into cutting the minimum wage to $5 an hour in some places.
Oh, and they’re backing two more bills that would repeal Obamacare.
DeMint
acknowledged the obvious: “Some of the ideas have been introduced
before.” But Heritage chose this slate of issues — and not, say,
entitlement reform — because “the ideas we’re talking about unite
people.”
