Links for Friday, January 12
Conservative plans, Jefferson on property rights, and more
A brief pivot to the conservative world and what it may have in store, plus a look at what property rights meant for the founders, originalistally speaking. And a musical treat.
Links
There’s been a lot said about the Republican / Trumpian agenda for a 2025 administration. I haven’t analyzed the documents yet, but that shouldn’t stop you. The first two links should be considered the source. If there are other sources, I’m not aware of them.
Two notes:
In case of a Haley administration, I expect the recommendations to still be in force.
If you have comments about what’s said or implied by what’s linked below, I’d be glad to hear them.
• Project 2025 Policy Agenda (Heritage Foundation)
This book is the product of more than 400 scholars and policy experts from across the conservative movement and around the country. Contributors include former elected officials, world-renowned economists, and veterans from four presidential Administrations. This is an agenda prepared by and for conservatives who will be ready on Day One of the next Administration to save our country. The Heritage Foundation is once again facilitating this work, but as our dozens of partners and hundreds of authors will attest, this book is the work of the entire conservative movement.
The next conservative President will enter office on January 20, 2025, with a simple choice: greatness or failure. It will be a daunting test, but no more so than every other generation of Americans has faced and passed. The Conservative Promise represents the best effort of the conservative movement in 2023—and the next conservative President’s last opportunity to save our republic.
File under “Hit the ground running.”
• “A Promise to America” (Heritage Foundation)
The Project 2025 web page contains links to chapters of a PDF’ed book that details (it says) the conservative agenda for the next conservative President. It’s not Trumpian per se, though many of its features seem to be. The introductory chapter, “A Promise to America,” presents many of the broad ideas.
For example, under the heading “Promise #2: Dismantle the Administrative State,” this appears:
In recent decades, members of the House and Senate discovered that if they give away that [congressional regulatory] power to the Article II branch of government, they can also deny responsibility for its actions. So today in Washington, most policy is no longer set by Congress at all, but by the Administrative State. Given the choice between being powerful but vulnerable or irrelevant but famous, most Members of Congress have chosen the latter.
Congress passes intentionally vague laws that delegate decision-making over a given issue to a federal agency. That agency’s bureaucrats—not just unelected but seemingly un-fireable—then leap at the chance to fill the vacuum created by Congress’s preening cowardice. The federal government is growing larger and less constitutionally accountable—even to the President—every year.
We’ve heard this before. To what degree do they mean it? If SCOTUS is any indication, perhaps to a dangerous degree.
Peruse the chapter list at the link at the top. The one on the CIA (“7. Intelligence Community”) is also interesting. Do they want to take on the “seven ways from Sunday” people?
File under “Election promises.”
• Intergenerational Justice in the United States Constitution (Constitutional Law Foundation)
I’ve written from time to time about the concept of property, and studied in more deeply than that. At the link is a discussion of what Jefferson thought one generation owed to another.
Jefferson's philosophy that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living at least partially reiterates the biblical/Lockean paradigm of the earth as intergenerational commons, the fruits and benefits of which should be accessible to every member of every generation. f126 He takes the position that no landholder has a natural right to control the land or dispose of it after his or her death. The land is entailed to the larger society; it reverts to the larger society upon the holder's death. Society may choose to pass the land on to beneficiaries or assignees chosen by the original landholder, but there is nothing in natural law which requires this. "By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or moveable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it." f127
The climate implications of this doctrine are many.
File under “You can use it. You don’t get to break it.”