Republican House subgroup would protect family rights and budgets

Hence the RSC’s just-released Family Policy Agenda, comprising more than 80 specific recommendations, many of them already in bill form, for protecting families from leftist attempts to impose state power and radical nostrums upon family life.

This agenda is remarkably substantive. It also makes for smart politics.

“Whether or not a child is raised in a stable, intact family is the single strongest predictor of their future well-being,” says the agenda’s first paragraph, backed by overwhelming statistical evidence. Alas, “American families are in trouble. … The federal government has created barriers to safe and flexible childcare options, allowed woke ideology to infiltrate education at all levels, and limited the availability of flexible employment arrangements. Parents’ finances are threatened by discriminatory tax and welfare policies. The traditional family is held in open contempt by far-left ideologues, who seek to pit children against their parents and intrude on families’ personal childrearing decisions.”

That’s just a preamble. To combat those ills, the ensuing policy recommendations are copious and specific.

The Empower Parents to Protect Their Kids Act would require elementary and secondary schools accepting federal funding to receive parental consent “before initiating a child’s gender transition,” and the Study Committee suggests also withholding federal money from schools that don’t obtain parental consent “before referring to a child by a different name or pronoun.” Likewise, Congress should keep biological males away from girls’ athletics and private spaces through the “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act,” says the committee.

To protect against using federal funds to force race-centric ideologies such as critical race theory into the classroom, Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT) has introduced the Say No to Indoctrination Act. For parental prerogatives in general, the RSC supports the same Parents’ Bill of Rights that the Republican Commitment to America also embraces. And to protect against the scourge of narcotics, RSC Chairman Jim Banks of Indiana is pushing the Protecting Kids from Candy-Flavored Drugs Act, which would “increase criminal penalties for anyone who manufactures or distributes drugs that are disguised as candy.”

To move away from hot-button cultural issues into economics, the RSC’s agenda offers a plethora of ideas to have the government stop disfavoring nuclear families and instead create more opportunities for them. In healthcare, for example, RSC proposals would favor the portability of insurance, private health savings accounts, and other measures aimed at providing choice and flexibility for working families. In labor laws, the RSC again would provide flexibility from the rigid 40-hour workweek and other regulations that don’t allow parents to mix and match their work schedules.

For child care, the Child Care Choices Act would create “more home-based, family-based, and faith-based childcare options, which often are more affordable. This legislation would effectively also protect religiously based childcare providers from being discriminated against by state and local governments.”

And, because the regulations on so many welfare, Medicaid, food stamp, and similar programs create perverse incentives that provide more money to single parents than to married ones, the RSC pledges to scrub such “marriage penalties” from wherever in federal law they are found.

That’s just a sampling. From student loans to school choice to encouragement of adoption and better prenatal care, the RSC would work to recognize families as “the building-blocks of our nation.” Their approach is wise and humane. The more the public hears about this RSC focus, the more the public will vote for Republicans in November.