“An old pro told me that originality does not consist of saying what has never been said before; it consists of saying what you have to say that you know to be the truth.”— Harvey Penick
Hugh Hewitt tells me about a “dirty little trick” he’s very pleased with in promoting his timely and just-published new book, The Fourth Way. He had his publisher ship 300-plus copies of it to last week’s GOP retreat in Philadelphia to get them into hands of House members and senators, as it’s his “conservative playbook for a lasting GOP majority.”
What better way to get your ideas into the hands of a tenuous and somewhat fractured GOP congressional majority? The gambit worked, as members have already started approaching him on air and offline about the conservative radio host’s new work.
Like the late golf instructor Penick’s Little Red Book (with its 175 pages), Hewitt’s 176-page little red book contains an agenda that departs—sometimes radically—from the typical Republican orthodoxy of the last 16 years. He spends a considerable amount of pages dedicated to a small-cost stimulus that he believes will yield to Republicans far better outcomes, economic and political, than President Obama’s $800 billion stimulus program. Hewitt calls it “federalism on steroids.” It’s based on California’s proposition 10, which created the Children and Families Commissions, entities independent of the county governments and authorized to spend a portion of sin tax revenues on projects.
In painstaking detail, Hewitt proposes taking $100 a resident, and divvying out nearly $32 billion to create 3,144 county-level nine-person boards across America, with five of the nine chosen picked by President Donald Trump, two by House speaker Paul Ryan, and two by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. (For those of you doing the math at home, yes, that’s 28,296 appointments by those three men. To Hewitt, patronage is A-OK.)
The commissions would last for five years. They’d come up with local infrastructure plans and have to spend 20 percent of whatever they were allocated by the federal government in six months. The rest of it would be used for other worthy projects, and/or to endow their creations (pools, health clinics for the poor, hockey rinks, centers for children with special needs, etc.) to continue on in perpetuity.
Hewitt structures this as a win for Trump, who would be remembered for Works Progress Administration-like projects, and for Republicans, who often suffer from an image problem of being callous. (This makes them look … humanitarian.) And it’s just the first third of Hewitt’s “Tangible Trump Trophy”, or “T3” proposal: the idea being that Trump would get the physical infrastructure with plaques on buildings, playing into the Trump the Builder persona.
The second third of the T3 pie is perhaps a bit more achievable. Again, Hewitt finds a way to defy the congressional status quo and attempt to tilt it to give an advantage to the slim GOP majority: $50 million, per House member and senator, to use to shore up not-for-profits—what Hewitt calls “little platoons of virtue”—in their districts. Here’s the twist: only those who vote for the bill get the money.
Naturally, the Justin Amashes and Thomas Massies would vote no, and could pay a political price. And that’s the point: a way to help purge what Hewitt calls the “absurd ideological extremism of the Wall Street Journal Republicans with their love of Hayek and their disconnect from Main Street and the ordinary blue-collar worker.” Hewitt tells me over a Diet Coke that “I think you oughtta punish ideologues, the Freedom Caucus people. I’m a party guy. I’m like Disraeli. And as Disraeli says, political theory 101, ‘nothing happens without a party.’ You can’t run a parliamentary body without a party. And people who want to be pure as the driven snow are not helping.”
It’s clever. Whether it’s legal, or whether Ryan and McConnell would consider it practical, is quite another matter. Would the Freedom Caucus revolt? Or would they cave?
I ask Hewitt: Would Republicans really go for this? “They’d all love it. Because giving away money is an aphrodisiac.” And to those who might chastise the $50 million payout for supporters of the bill as an earmark, well … Hewitt admits it’s an earmark.
“A giant earmark. A meta earmark. You don’t have to persuade anybody. Logrolling has been around for as long as Congress has been around, and earmarking came out of logrolling, and you had to disguise it. This would be transparently, and 100 percent obviously pet-projecty. And that’s, by the way, how it used to be … By being nakedly, obviously porky, it works. Like the old days.”
So, “federalism on steroids,” but to Make Counties Great Again. Except by avoiding the mistake the Obama stimulus made: funneling the money through the feds, through the states, through the counties, and lastly, the cities, each taking their cut. Rush the money to a GOP/Trump patronage board, and watch the Tangible Trump Trophies pile up. (The last third of the T3 idea would let Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao manage a $25 billion infrastructure bank for airports and water ports.)
It’s hard to imagine Senate Democrats giving Republicans the eight votes they’d need to pass Hewitt’s proposal. Letting Trump, Ryan, and McConnell pick the participants of the “Trump boards” in deep blue states, even if voting for it gives them a $50 million slush fund, has to be a non-starter for the Senate’s Democrats. Hewitt worries that if you let the Democrats in on the Trump boards, they’ll spend the money on “union halls” or other liberal bugaboos like Planned Parenthood.
“I’m just trying to nudge them [congressional Republicans],” Hewitt tells me. “They need to give Trump something, and so my principles are: make sure whatever you give him isn’t controlled by him, that it isn’t controlled by Washington, don’t give it to the governors—you’ll end up with Democrats running it—give it to people you appoint … Make sure it’s spent immediately on concrete … So my principles are tangible buildings, things that get done, give Trump credit, and keep the price tag low. So, I am trying to sell one-tenth of what Obama got, with a hundred times the results.”
Hewitt sees his plan as a choice between trying to ameliorate the animosity between Trump and Republicans in Congress and staving off a disastrous, very public exercise of Trump cannibalizing the GOP.
In the rare time where the GOP controls both chambers of Congress and the White House, it’s “party first”, but for the country’s benefit, Hewitt argues.
“So, you gotta sell congressmen on, ‘this isn’t much, it’s a tenth of what we gave Obama.’ So we’re not blowing it up … the old, fiscal conservative, Tea Party people, it’s $85 billion, it’s not that much money—it is a lot of money, but it’s not that much money—and we do need harbors and ports, and he campaigned on it. You gotta give Trump what he campaigned on: a fence, and some infrastructure. And if they fight him on that, he will chew them up. And he’ll run primaries against them.”
In other words, give Trump his wins, and see if you can convince him on the other aspects of the Hewitt plan. And if Hewitt’s plan for the Trump infrastructure boards weren’t ambitious enough, throw in a 350-ship navy, immigration reform, filling the district courts with originalists who we’ll pay more to retain, serious (but not overly ambitious) tax reform, and, lastly, entitlement reform.
The kicker? All in one fell swoop.
“Give [Trump] his T3, and his wall, and the Democrats get immigration reform, Republicans get entitlement reform, and the hawks get defense. Everybody wins,” Hewitt told me, excitedly. “Deficit goes up a little bit in the short term, goes down long term. It oughta be one—GO BIG! Do it all. One big package. They’re not going to do it that way of course, but they should.”
Can a GOP-led Congress which has been deficit hawkish, hostile to earmarks, and kicked around wholesale tax reform stop being themselves and go along with the Hewitt plan? In that same vein, will Trump go along on immigration reform and entitlement reform, despite his campaign pledges to the contrary? And if all of that were to happen, would eight Senate Democrats join in to pass one of the biggest stone soup legislative packages in recent history?
Grandiose plan aside, Hewitt shares with me three perhaps more practical principles: “I do want to nudge them towards local, keep the price tag down; don’t fight with him; and maybe lure him into immigration reform.”
Penick, in his Little Red Book, warned his students not to take all of his advice at once, at the risk of throwing off their game. With the number of issues confronting the new Congress and administration, Hewitt would be pleased if they absorbed it all.
