The Coming Clinton Dynasty

...Even if a President cannot gerrymander his district, he can expand it...

...And the Justice Department itself would be filled with junior league Lawrence Walshes, each eager to put a Reaganite's scalp on the wall—or at least bankrupt his family with plausible, if false, charges...

...Nationwide, dues average $500 per with respective budgets of $19 million and $4 million a member per year for the 17 million union members...

...Indeed, why not gressional action and the President's signature...

...And with the Soviet threat removed, we have less to fear from a four-year period of left-wing weakness in the White House...

...It would be tempting to view a Clinton administration as a rerun of the Carter years, when Republicans sacrificed the presidential veto and four years of judicial nominations in return for the chance to go into full, bold opposition...

...A Clinton presi- York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and Detroit...

...How brave can we expect the relatively small band of corporate and individual supporters of established conservative organizations to be—never mind the backers of the small or more aggressive groupsthat spearhead change...

...Dukakis actually thought that vetoing legislation requiring children to say the Pledge of Allegiance every morning would elicit support—it always did in Cambridge and Newton...

...Nineteen ninety-two is to be a reprise of 1976...

...Your tax dolRemember, each presidential candidate can officially spend lars at work...

...Thus, an unrepresentative group of congressmen may well continue in office for an additional ten years, regardless of voter discontent and promises to "throw the bums out...

...You cannot gerrymander a nation, after all...

...funding their activists...

...This is already approxithe first month of a Clinton administration...

...Almost every Democrat in the House received his own subcommittee chairmanship, the better to extort campaign contributions from industries under his jurisdiction...

...Assuming by the taxpayers...

...citizens—to register to vote while renewing driver's licensBut because the Supreme Court's ruling in Beck was based es...

...Unfocused voter rage has finally toppled record numbers of sitting congressmen through retirement or defeats in primaries...

...All were paid to attend these "leadership" seminars...

...themselves with larger budgets...

...Soft money" expenditures for voter registration, get-out-the-vote efforts, and voter "education" have no ut the wondrous and varied powers of the federal limit and few effective public reporting requirements...

...Imagine similar threatening phone calls to potential donors to conservative or anti-statist causes coming from the White House...

...He will not allow that to happen to him...

...He does not believe, as Mondale did, that the union boss/black leadership/liberal intellectual/white ethnic coalition still exists in a form or size to win majorities at the federal level, Second, Clinton knows that the American electorate is uncomfortable with who and what he is...

...And we must not forget the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which during the Reagan years pulled in their regulatory claws and gave individuals and companies some breathing room...

...If the Bush Administration continued for a second against the LSC's direct participation in politics...

...They stacked the deck...

...Rules were changed in other ways...

...captain that he had indeed registered to vote...

...off-duty EPA agent who, during office hours, can decide Changes in labor law would return clout to the AFL-CIO whether the firm faces thousands of dollars in fines...

...They changed the rules...

...And so will a we won't see the likes of that again...

...Even so, the countdown to the cleanup of the Augean stables in those fifteen states won't begin until November 3, 1992, with a fuse that is six, someThe American Spectator November 1992 25 for all Clinton's rhetorical nods to moderation, he has pub- might be asked to contribute to the Clinton campaign by an licly promised the Court to the left...

...and to disenfranchise, discourage, and even imprison his opponents...

...History chastens us...

...But why should we fear that President Clinton could cement his hold on the presidency...

...And Clinton, they were smart enough to know it...

...how time-consuming it is to pick off the Jim Wrights and Tony Coelhos one by one...

...Federal funds can quickly more than take in compulsory dues only that amount of money used replace any market discipline...

...Besides, two-thirds of the nation—those states without ballot initiatives—will continue indefinitely without term limits...

...How has that been possible in the face of the Carter failures, Abscam, the twin Reagan landslides, a Bush victory, Jim Wright's corruption, check bouncing, and polling data that continue to rate Congress below all other public institutions...

...Beginning on January 21, 1993, Bill Clinton will have forty-five months to change the rules before facing the voters again...

...Growth subsequently leveled off only They changed the rules...

...How would tion: virtually every organization that worked with or proyou like it if your local IRS agent came to visit you (after moted North or Robertson found itself harassed by the IRS...

...Imagine term, its efforts to enforce Beck would cost labor unions five, ten, fifteen foundations engaged by the left and funded $5.8 billion if every member exercised his rights...

...And so will a Clinton administration...

...Meanwhile, the factory down the road simply point out that even groups exonerated by such 26 The American Spectator November 1992 "investigations" will not speak on the record for fear of inviting retribution...

...A Before my talk, every student was informed that his payfew hundred million dollars in additional union soft money check was being withheld, pending a report from his precinct would overcome a great deal of citizen opposition...

...only $88 million...

...They also showered Clinton administration...

...If Clinton and Gore learn from their House brethren and mimic their rites of self-protection, they won't need to order any change-of-address kits for 1997...

...Like Clinton, this liberal band of congressmen did not command the support of a working majority of American voters—and, like Grover Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform...

...dency would rescue organized labor from certain crack-up...

...dencies, conservative groups found themselves disproporDemocrats have fought yearly to "reform" this legislation, tionately singled out for "routine" investigations...

...Ell The American Spectator November 1992 27...

...Clinton has promised to grant statehood to the District of Columbia and, in the process, give himself two liberal Democrat senators, most likely Jesse Jackson and Marion Barry...

...Do you recall how Speaker of the House Tom Foley worked over those individuals and companies that contributed to the term-limits initiative in Washington state...

...With Clinton's sup- agencies as capable of having a serious dampening effect on port, Congress could quickly repeal the Hatch Act, political discourse...

...The Legislative Branch Appropriation, Congress's funding legislation, jumped 18.6 percent in 1975 and 20.6 percent in 1976—an astounding 44 percent increase before the Class of '74's first bid for re-election...

...how long in coming is the tidal wave of term limits...

...George Bush is to be thrown overboard, as was Gerald Ford, to lighten the load and prepare the party for true victory...

...Clinton can take this nationwide...

...And if a President can isolate himself from the voters, why didn't Jimmy Carter protect himself...

...Even during the Reagan and Bush presiwhich limits the political activities of federal employees...

...They cheated...

...In 1988 I spoke before a group of move toward forcing more and more workers into dues-pay- Washington, D.C., students who were in a special summer ing relationships with union bosses, who would most oblig- program hosted by the city's past and future mayor, Marion ingly kick back a goodly portion of those dues to the re-elec- Barry...

...In the CWA case, only 21 percent of dues tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, were legitimately spent...

...The entire judiciary can be expanded overnight in the name of fighting the war on drugs or cleaning up all that white-collar crime from the "decade of greed...

...Bill Clinton, while sharing Dukakis's cramped view of the world and America's place in it, knows perfectly well America rejects that world-view...

...The Watergate babies and their left-wing allies in the Democratic caucuses have firmly controlled the House for eighteen years...

...And he will cheerfully use the government to kneecap his critics and rivals...

...Well, well...

...And why not two more from the Virgin Islands...

...Well, Bill Clinton knows two things that Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis never grasped: First, that the Democratic coalition is self-contradictory, shrinking, and moribund, unless it receives massive infusions of taxpayer dollars...

...Those who have watched a minority ideological cabal control the House of Representatives for nearly two decades should abandon their pipe dream of a brief Clinton interregnum...

...The term-limits movement will be on the ballot in fifteen states in the wake of recent successes in Oklahoma, Colorado, and California...

...24 The American Spectator November 1992 times eight years long...

...House of Representatives...

...Many effective conservative groups throughout the nation are small enough that a simple unthreatening request to "look things over" by the FEC or IRS would serve the purpose of intimidation...

...But why stop there...

...And more, if needed...

...Countless laws remain on the books, and Bill Clinton's appointees would be free to reawaken the Orwellian potential of each of these alphabet-soup agencies...

...They cheated...

...B ill Clinton watched Jimmy Carter put forward the liberal agenda and get swept from the White House in 1980...

...Why not allow registration at welon the Wagner Act as written, it can be voided by simple con- fare offices and at prison induction centers...

...They stacked under Gramm-Rudman, and the deck...

...The 1976 election of Democrat Carter was the only time since Grover Cleveland's 1892 victory that a party has regained the presidency for a fouryear term and then lost it...

...Democratic members of Congress in formerly Republican districts found that voters learned to appreciate and understand them better when the amount of franked (taxpayer-funded) mail for Congress increased from 321 million pieces in 1974 to 401 million in 1976, 430 million in 1978, and—when the heavy artillery was brought out against the Reagan insurgency-511 million in 1980...

...This new conservative—Reagan II—would sweep away the follies of the interregnum and finish the Reagan revolution...

...while the Republicans unite in opposition, rediscover their Reaganite souls, and elect a truly principled President in 1996...

...T he Watergate babies went to work fast to dig a moat around their incumbency and pull up the drawbridge...

...The certain demand that welfare recipients become responsible citihemorrhaging of monies away from organized labor would be zens—starting with the demand that they "work" for their stanched in a little noticed and less understood law passed in handout by registering and voting...

...And did conservatives hope that alumni might begin to In 1988, the Supreme Court ruled in Beck v. Communi- discipline the sillier excesses of "political correctness" on cations Workers of America [CWA] that labor unions can campuses...

...Clinton and his congressional cohorts...

...And by micro-managing contracts and grant-making, congressmen took for themselves unprecedented billions in campaign funds and vote-producing pork barrel projects...

...Of that, fully 79 percent of the tanks to serve its ends merely by doubling the size of the money could be demanded back by union members under Legal Services Corporation and removing the feeble rules Beck...

...Furthermore, a better analogy than 1976 is the 1974 Watergate-driven election of seventy-five freshman Democrats to the House of Representatives...

...For since Watergate, Democrats have learned to deal behind the scenes to ensure their re-election—with or without popular support...

...Within months, twelve years' worth of Reagan and Bush appointees would find themselves surrounded by former grantees of Hillary Clinton's New World Foundation...

...Again like Clinton, they were certain enough of the righteousness of their cause that they were willing to change the rules to ensure their continuation in power...

...Labor law would mated in some cities...

...It is estimated that in the 1988 election cycle alone, better to accomplish this than to share tens of billions of labor unions gave Democrats some $388 million dollars in dollars with the corrupt big-city machines that conveniently "soft money"—roughly what the entire Republican party also serve the Democrats' get-out-the-vote effort in New has raised and spent in the last four years...

...creating new, channeled into politics, Bill Clinton can organize a 1996 powerful, and permanent institutions...

...and hundreds of millions of dollars to Democrat campaign Of course, the infrastructure must be rebuilt, and how coffers...

...by Grover Norquist Certain well-intentioned Americans are saying that the nation, the Republican party, and the long-term prospects for a free society would be improved if Governor Bill Clinton were to defeat George Bush on November 3. The argument runs as follows: Bill Clinton will raise taxes, overregulate, inflate the currency, cripple the economy, and champion his party's left-wing cultural values...

...Other powers were seized from the executive—including recision and impoundment...

...Total year, a Clinton White House could create dozens of think dues come to $8.5 billion...

...He will use the power and finances of the state to build an impregnable fortress, following the model of the congressional barons of 1974...

...Bill Clinton is to play the role of Jimmy Carter...

...Jimmy Carter's ghost will stand before him as he uses his powers to create, empower, and drag to the polls a new coalition...

...Those initially passed—and still needed—to protect government who irritated the permanent government publicly—like Pat workers from demands for political campaign contributions Robertson and 011ie North—received a great deal of attenand other forms of support from their superiors...

...work, of course) to solicit a small contribution for the Clinton (To those who feel such concerns overstate the case, I will re-election campaign...

...and logging in new war chest that could outspend the Republican campaign by voters...

...The number of staffers in the House jumped from 5,280 in 1972 to 6,939 in 1976 to 7,920 in 1986...

...Small wonder that by the end of the 1980s it was easier to lose an election in Mexico or be voted off the Politburo than to lose a re-election bid to the U.S...

...Simple...

...government that flow to a President and Congress By changing labor laws to force more workers into com- working in concert are not limited to building their pulsory unionism and to allow all union dues to be legally political coalition...

...It is not just cranky libertarians who see the IRS, the ther changes could transform government workers 0 Federal Elections Commission (FEC), and other regulatory into a pro-administration party...

...for the negotiation and maintenance of the individual mem- And while conservatives have built impressive think bers' contracts...

...one's enemies...

...The powers of the State can be brought to bear on a factor or ten—or more...

...e have seen how tenaciously congressmen cling W to power...

...But however seductive the idea of punishing George Bush for his apostasy, any vision of conservatism as the ultimate winner in a two-steps-forward, one-step-back Leninist march, is a flawed one...

...First, they surrounded themselves with political bodyguards—staffers, researchers, and, legal or not, campaign aides...

...If the going gets tough in getting cloture or winning confirmation of Hillary's friends to the Supreme Court, he might wish to add two senators from Puerto Rico...

...only 10 percent of union members demanded their money A Clinton White House would enact legislation, long back—it would cost organized labor $580 million dollars advocated in the Congress, to allow people—not necessarily each year...

...tion efforts of Mr...

...Look for five, ten, dozens of spectacles such as the persecution of 011ie North and now Caspar Weinberger...