John R. Houk
© December 3, 2011
Newt Gingrich has consistently risen in the polls to the point now the MSM calls Gingrich’s position a surge. In military terms a “surge” defeats the enemy by connecting to the people and backing up the populace with a deadly force strategy. This could mean Newt is prepared to connect with Conservatives and attack the enemies of Conservatives.
Michele Bachmann has failed to connect with voters which I find a shame. Mitt Romney is a RINO and a Mormon (Romney’s religion is his free choice, but I am a Christian). Rick Perry demonstrated leaning toward Christian faith regardless of Separation of Church and State extremists of the Left; however his debate skills show an inability to think quickly and clearly on his feet. I was becoming wildly supportive of Herman Cain; however whether accusations of sexual impropriety is true or not, he will be spending the rest of his time campaigning on his character rather than what 9-9-9 and other economic plans can do for America. If Cain is innocent of the public accusations by the various women I pray the MSM does the right thing and expose the use of defamation as a political weapon to shoot someone out of a campaign race. If Cain is complicit in the accusations then God is good for shining light in the darkness of a man with moral problems that might have been elected President. I do not consider the other candidates running for the GOP nomination as viable and yes that includes Libertarian minded Ron Paul – wow is that guy out of sync with the meaning of American Exceptionalism and American National Interests or what?
Newt may be a - listen to me now and forget some of the choices I made in the past kind-of-guy. A lot of hard Conservatives are pretty unforgiving of past Newt decisions morally and politically while forgetting he was one of the architects for the Contract with America that offset Left Wing Clintonesque policies that President Barack Hussein Obama has rammed down America’s throat. Clinton’s Senate Dem majority gave him enough clout to battle the House GOP majority with a tangible amount of the Contract with America becoming unfulfilled. Newt has proposed a 21st century Contract with America as part of his GOP platform to gain the nomination.
Executive Summary
1. Repeal Obamacare and pass a replacement that saves lives and money by empowering patients and doctors, not bureaucrats and politicians.
2. Return to robust job creation with a bold set of tax cuts and regulatory reforms that will free American entrepreneurs to invest and hire, as well as by reforming the Federal Reserve and creating a training requirement for extended federal unemployment benefits to encourage work and improve the quality of our workforce.
3. Unleash America’s full energy production potential in oil, natural gas, coal, biofuels, wind, nuclear oil shale and more, creating jobs, stimulating a sustainable manufacturing boom, lowering gasoline and other energy prices, increasing government revenues, and bolstering national security.
5. Balance the federal budget by freeing job-creators to grow the economy, reforming entitlements, and implementing waste cutting and productivity improvement systems such as Lean Six Sigma to eliminate waste and fraud. Pass a balanced budget amendment to keep it balanced.
6. Control the border by January 1, 2014 and establish English as the official language of government; reform the legal visa system, and make it much easier to deport criminals and gang members while making it easier for law abiding visitors to come to the US.
7. Revitalize our national security system to meet 21st century threats by restructuring and adequately funding our security agencies to function within a grand strategy for victory over those who seek to kill us or limit American power.
8. Maximize the speed and impact of medical breakthroughs by removing unnecessary obstacles that block new treatments from reaching patients and emphasizing research spending towards urgent national priorities, like brain science with its impact on Alzheimer’s, autism, Parkinson's, mental health and other conditions knowledge of the brain will help solve.
10. Enforce the Tenth Amendment by starting an orderly transfer of power and responsibility from the federal government back “to the states, respectively, or to the people,” as the Constitution requires. Over the next year, state and local officials and citizens will be asked to identify the areas which can be transferred back home.
Released Executive Orders to be signed on Day One:
1. Eliminate the thirty-nine White House "Czar" positions created during the current administration. The president does not have the authority to appoint bureaucrats to power who are not accountable to the Congress.
2. "Mexico City Policy" of Respect for Life. Reauthorize President Ronald Reagan’s policy – also known as the "Mexico City Policy"— to stop tax payer dollars from being used to fund or promote abortions in foreign countries.
3. Restore conscience clause protections for Healthcare Workers. No American working in a medical environment should be forced to perform any procedure that he or she finds morally or ethically objectionable based on religious teaching. This protection should include, but not be limited to abortion. Existing conscience clause protections need to be strengthened.
4. Respect Each Sovereign Nation’s Choice of its Capital. Each sovereign nation, under international law and custom, may designate its own Capital. Accordingly, the U.S. State Department should be instructed to respect the choice of each sovereign nation and place the American embassy in their Capital. (Israel is the only country the United States discriminates against in this regard. The people of Israel have designated Jerusalem as their capital. Yet the United States retains its embassy in Tel Aviv.)
5. End the Attorney General's Assault on the States. Instruct the Attorney General to withdraw all immigration-related lawsuits against states immediately, including those pending in Arizona and South Carolina. The Obama Administration refuses to enforce federal immigration laws, and instead sues states who are merely trying to enforce the laws that the federal government neglects. The Gingrich Administration will secure the border by Jan. 1, 2014 by any means necessary.
6. The Keystone Pipeline
(Released: Nov. 17th, 2011)
Unleash American Energy by Approving the Keystone XL Pipeline. Instruct the State Department to approve a Presidential Permit immediately for the Keystone XL pipeline, a project that will send 700,000 barrels of oil a day from Great Plains and Southwestern states to Gulf Coast refineries lower staggering energy prices, and create up to 120,000 American jobs.
3. A training program for the transition teams and the appointees who will lead the shift back to Constitutional, limited government (coming soon);
4. A system of citizen involvement to help us sustain grassroots support for change and help implement the change through 2021 (coming soon).
Newt even provides a link for voters to share their ideas to add the 21st century Contract with America. I hope Newt has a dedicated staff for sorting through these because I would hate to imagine how many Obamunists email nut job ideas. If Newt was a centrist or a Center-Right guy, his campaign program shows a significant move more to the Right.
As to relevance to current affairs with Newt and illegal aliens residing in the nation, I understand shared some specific thoughts on illegal alien policy. Many Conservatives criticized Newt’s thoughts on matriculating long term illegal aliens into documented aliens with a path toward citizenship particularly if a generational family situation has evolved. So before we go to Newt’s relatively new plan for illegal immigrants/aliens looks examine what Newt previously has published according to his 21st century Contract with America.
Point One of the Contract subsection 6 states:
Control the border by January 1, 2014 and establish English as the official language of government; reform the legal visa system, and make it much easier to deport criminals and gang members while making it easier for law abiding visitors to come to the US.
The United States must control its border. It is a national security imperative.
Every nation has the right to control its border. Historically, every country that has been determined to control their border has been able to do so.
Controlling the border is a matter of resources and will.
…
This bill will waive every obstacle to controlling the border and would shift resources to achieve virtually 100% control by January 1, 2014. If necessary, we would move one-half of the 23,000 Washington-area Department of Homeland Security bureaucrats to the Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona borders.
At the same time we are controlling the border we should make it easier for honest people to visit America honestly.
Our current visa system is inefficient, expensive, and inhospitable and drives people away from visiting the United States. Americans and visitors deserve a system that works.
Americans will benefit from a fairer, more secure, more efficient system, which will ensure that foreign visitors, students, workers and job-creators alike provide as many positive benefits as possible to our economy and society.
We want legal visitors for our tourist attractions to increase the number of American jobs.
We want the best legal students in our universities and colleges, and then staying to create American jobs.
We want legal businessmen and businesswomen visiting the United States easily and comfortably so they can do more business in the United States and create more American jobs.
We want potential investors and entrepreneurs to visit America easily so they can create American jobs.
Finally, we want family members to find it easy to visit legally for holidays and family events to strengthen the human bonds that we Americans cherish.
At the same time, it is currently too difficult to deport criminals and gang members.
When someone is here illegally and is dangerous, there should be expedited procedures to remove them from the United States as rapidly as possible.
We can apply modern management techniques to create a more accurate, more secure, less expensive, and more hospitable visa system.
Combining border control with visa modernization makes it harder to be illegal and easier to be legal and that is a big step forward for America.
Point Five of a Gingrich Administration Executive Order is relevant to enforcing the rule of law against illegal immigrants/aliens.
5. End the Attorney General's Assault on the States. Instruct the Attorney General to withdraw all immigration-related lawsuits against states immediately, including those pending in Arizona and South Carolina. The Obama Administration refuses to enforce federal immigration laws, and instead sues states who are merely trying to enforce the laws that the federal government neglects. The Gingrich Administration will secure the border by Jan. 1, 2014 by any means necessary.
At this point demonstrates as President he will initiate stringent border control along Mexico while hinting at some sort of examination to divide long term hard working illegal aliens from illegal alien committers of violent or drug crimes. In Gingrich’s recent debate he gets a bit more specific about illegal aliens that show a bit of compassion that Conservatives are questioning and Leftists are mistrusting. Andrea Tantaros wrote an article about Newt on Thursday. Here is a quote:
Immigration has always been a hot-button issue for both sides of the aisle, and in the 2012 presidential election, things are not going to be different. That's why former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is making headlines for advocating for a more "humane" approach for dealing with the roughly 11 million illegal aliens in this country.
Gingrich, who is rising in most polls, endorsed a version of amnesty that would grant long-term undocumented aliens a "red card" visa, allowing them to gain legal status without earning U.S. citizenship.
"If you've been here 25 years and you got three kids and two grandkids, you've been paying taxes and obeying the law, you belong to a local church, I don't think we're going to separate you from your family, uproot you forcefully and kick you out," he argued.
"I don't see how the party that says it's the party of the family is going to adopt an immigration policy which destroys families that have been here a quarter century."
He also backed certain provisions of the DREAM Act, which would award a path to citizenship for young illegal immigrants who serve our country in the armed forces or attend college and have a spotless background.
I am like most Conservatives when images like this come to mind
Low income American citizens have to jump through hoops of paper work to get food stamps and often discover they make a few thousand more a year that disqualifies the American citizen from food stamps. A Spanish only-speaking illegal alien applies for food stamps without paperwork and gets food stamps.
An illegal alien is involved in a car accident and is at fault and without insurance. The undocumented illegal will not be ticketed and the victim will have to use her insurance to pay for repairs.
An illegal alien is pulled over for driving under the influence and has no driver’s license. Chances are the illegal alien will be let go and if he is arrested the few days he spends in jail are meaningless because what the heck – the illegal alien just keeps drinking and driving.
Illegal aliens have undocumented children residing with them in America. These children are non-citizens yet are afforded the American citizen right to attend public school and worse will get a free breakfast and a free lunch. The low income American citizen that does not qualify for a free lunch will have to pay for a school lunch. Further the illegal alien children have medical issues and the taxpayers pick up the tab. And I am not just talking about visits to the Emergency Room. Undocumented illegal aliens get regular doctor appointments to maintain their health. American citizen children without insurance do not get regular doctor visits because it cost money even with insurance. If an American citizen goes to an Emergency Room as the only access for a medical emergency and has no insurance, the American citizen will receive a hefty bill in the mail followed by debt collection calls because the medical was not affordable. Then there are American citizens that are on Medicare and pay for their supplement insurance to get a better deal than just Medicare and to get their meds, yet an undocumented illegal alien will get medical care and meds scot free because the government and the medical professionals know they won’t get paid.
Now this is just a small example of what irks me about illegal aliens. I am sure someone could tell loads of more stories how there is no justice for American citizens vis-a-vis illegal aliens. This is not mentioning crimes of drugs, gangs, theft, rape and so on.
Then there is the side of the coin that Newt is probably thinking of. I worked many years in the restaurant industry and when I left my small home town for the big city a significant amount of the restaurant staff were of Latin American origin (and not necessarily all Mexican). I have to tell ya most of these guys were undocumented. And I have to tell ya 99% of these guys were hard working. In fact they saved or sent portions of their pay check to Mexico. Sometimes they would disappear for awhile and visit family back in Mexico and come back to work for what we would call peanuts but their families back in Mexico would a good provision.
I am with Newt on immigration. It should become easier for Mexicans to enter legally to work a job and thus be taxed thus making them taxpayers. At the same time I believe the border with Mexico should become an Iron Curtain because of the ruthless reign of drug cartels just south of border. The drug cartel pestilence in Mexico is spilling into America’s border States like Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California (though I get the impression Californians have their heads in the sand when it comes to drug cartel violence).
