As former Vice President Mike Pence positions himself for a possible presidential race, he is setting a great example of substance of the sort that the public should demand from all White House aspirants.
On Thursday, Pence’s Advancing American Freedom organization launched a “Freedom Agenda” featuring what, by modern standards, is a remarkable amount of depth and specificity. Readers may also be struck by how much its tone sounds Reaganesque, more focused on what the group (and thus Pence) is for than what it opposes.
The agenda is divided into three sections: American culture, American opportunity, and American leadership. Each section is further divided into multiple subsections, each of which (usually) contains multiple specific policy prescriptions.
For example, one of 10 (!) subsections under the “American Opportunity” rubric is this: “Give American families the opportunity to achieve the American dream by having the freedom to pursue the best education options for their children.” That subsection, in turn, features four bullet points, one of which is further subdivided into three subpoints.
Thus we learn, among other things, that Pence (or his organization) will “support universal school choice. Fund education scholarship accounts which parents and children can use for the school of their choice and/or accredited and supplemental learning outside of the classroom.” And students should be allowed to “attend the public school of their choice and [be] provid[ed with] credit for learning outside of the classroom.” And for vocational education and training, among several ideas, Pence says that “public resources that target workforce development should be made more flexible by creating relocation vouchers so Americans can easily relocate to places of greater opportunity.”
Now I’ve never heard of a relocation voucher before, but it sounds like a terrific idea. And this idea, like many in the Freedom Agenda, calls to mind the creative, can-do approach of the late Republican vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp. Kemp was famous for his crusading determination to leverage a nimble and streamlined government, without bureaucratic straitjackets and complicated mandates, to facilitate opportunities for people from all walks of life. Pence, like Kemp, is big on encouraging private initiative rather than creating public dependency.
Most conservatives will applaud just about the entire agenda. Here, Pence calls for making the Trump/Pence tax cuts permanent rather than expiring in 2025. There, he calls for “drastically” streamlining the federal permitting process so that large infrastructure projects can be completed far more quickly. Elsewhere, he wants to “pass a law to require the elimination of at least two regulations for every new federal regulation.”
The agenda is bullish on domestic energy production, eager to modernize patenting to promote entrepreneurship and fight intellectual property theft, supportive of expanded health savings accounts, and specific about procedural changes needed to get federal spending under control.
Pence embraces cultural issues, too, with paeans to religious liberty, tough sentencing for violent criminals, and strict border controls, along with opposition to tommyrot such as critical race theory, speech codes, and transgender participation in women’s sports.
Finally, the “American Leadership” section opposes wokeness in the military, demands a Navy buildup back to 350 ships, and outlines a veritable cornucopia of ways to counter the malignant designs of China, Russia, and Iran.
In 21 years in elective office and more than a decade before that in other forms of public engagement with public policy, Pence has always been forthright and prescriptive about his beliefs. To borrow a phrase from columnist George Will from 34 years ago, Pence’s “substance-to-blather ratio” always has been remarkably high and admirable. His Freedom Agenda makes him the very model of a man serious about his public duty.
