In the midterm elections, Republicans are running against an all-Democratic government that has produced record inflation, falling real wages, insecurity at the border, and weakness abroad. The indictment is just, the instinct to capitalize on public dissatisfaction sound.
But there’s something missing from the Republican campaigns. With rare exceptions, Republicans are doing little to explain what they would have the government do differently if they took power. If Republicans take the House and the Senate, what kind of legislation do they intend to send to President Biden? Detailed plans aren’t needed; nor must all the candidates agree on a singular platform, Contract with America–style. But voters deserve to have a sense of how Republicans intend to wield the power for which they are asking.
Spelling out a sensible conservative policy agenda might even help Republicans win their campaigns. But that consideration, weighty as it is, is secondary. As Yuval Levin elaborates in the lead essay of our new issue, the point of the campaigns ought to be better, and more conservative, government. Defeating Democrats and their terrible ideas is important, but if that is all Republicans want they are acquiescing to every past victory for progressivism and every other outdated or dysfunctional policy. To seek nothing more is to say that Americans are already governed as well as they can be — and thus to undercut the premise that they are right to be dissatisfied in the first place.
That’s why our offerings at NRO regularly include proposals to address America’s challenges in ways that are consistent with our constitutional order. Our special issue on a GOP agenda presents several that are particularly compelling at this moment. Daniel Lips explores the new opportunities that post-Covid America offers for giving parents more control over education — including letting states use schools’ unspent pandemic-relief funds to promote school choice. Beth Akers argues for holding predatory colleges accountable for saddling students with debt without giving them the skills needed to pay them, and for ending government-backed loans for graduate school altogether.
Adam White takes up the hydra-headed problem of Big Tech. He would have Republicans in the next Congress conduct oversight hearings on the way Big Tech has insinuated itself into American classrooms and what legislation could do about it. He also recommends some practical reforms to mitigate the damage Big Tech is doing, such as restricting social-media accounts to adults and placing controls on TikTok. Perhaps most important, he urges Republicans to look at regulatory changes that would provide start-up firms with more sources of financing outside Silicon Valley.
Alexander William Salter urges Congress to use oversight and legislation to constrain the activism and discretion of the Federal Reserve, arguing that requiring more predictable monetary policy would enhance its credibility. In this way Congress could do its part to prevent the continuation or recurrence of today’s inflation. Chris Pope explains how government keeps health premiums too high, and what legislators could do to lower them if they wished. And Ramesh Ponnuru argues that congressional Republicans will be in a better position to win the abortion debate if they renew their push for a 20-week ban.
That list hardly exhausts the ways conservatives could make American government less burdensome. Republicans have been listless even on taxes, with few of them calling for an extension of tax cuts that are due to expire. Legislative attention to immigration, where action is needed if we are to have a system that looks like someone designed it on purpose, is sporadic at best.
This is a moment of liberal overconfidence and failure that should create numerous conservative opportunities. But those opportunities will be squandered if Republicans persist in not even trying to identify them.