The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" (11 page)

We can admit to each other, and increasingly to the world, that whatever comes of global warming—whether disaster or new and even
more productive weather patterns—will come no matter what you do, say or even accomplish legislatively. You and I both know that the U.S. could turn off all its cars and finances tomorrow, shutter its factories, return to subsistence living and not change the game of overall emissions significantly. China and India are driving that bus, and they are stepping on the gas, not easing off it, as they must to avoid domestic insurrection and famine.

Explain this to voters. Once nominated, where will your environmentalist supporters go? A new bid by ancient Ralph Nader? A third-party, vanity race by Tom Steyer? Of course not. Once nominated, you are all they have, and the Clinton machine is all they will ever have for a generation. They will get over it.

Give them a bone, as defined below, but be blunt: “We are going to develop our own energy, and we will do it massively, and safely, and towards the end of destroying the Islamists’ income flow and our dependence on their energy policy. We will drill and we will frack and we will be an energy exporter.”

Pause.

“And this way lies not just energy independence, but also fiscal renewal and a new federalism of robust strength, for I will insist that Congress impose a robust national severance tax on our vast reserves of oil and natural gas. Henceforth, the common inheritance of all Americans will not go into the bank accounts of Big Oil alone, but will be shared with the American people. Henceforth, the same kind of severance tax employed by states as diverse as Alaska and Ohio will have a federal counterpart. With that tax will come not just gushes of revenue, but a remedy for our massive national debt as well as the fuel for a renewed federalism.

“I propose a significant tax on every barrel of oil produced from US land and water and on every BTU drawn from within US borders. I will leave it to Congress to calculate the initial level of the tax. It must come with an escalator clause that not only keeps up with inflation, but also with the need to guide production towards a price consistent with all environmental concerns. An ‘energy tax’ has long been a goal of climate activists as a means of discouraging unnecessary energy consumption, and they will have their tax.”

“But half of all that revenue will go into one of Al Gore’s most favorite devices, the good old ‘lockbox.’ And Lord knows we could have used one from 2000 to today. Sixteen years of Mount Everest-sized deficits from both Republican and Democratic presidents and Republican and Democratic congresses need liquidation. The debt must actually shrink. Fifty cents of every dollar of severance tax will go to buying back the debt the Chinese hold over our head. This is like the ‘sinking fund’ used by the great English statesman, Pitt the Younger, to dig Great Britain out of a huge hole. It worked then and it will work now. Vast energy development will bring vast new fiscal discipline and security.”

With these paragraphs you will have stunned and splintered the deficit hawks who will hear a melody they have hummed for years. They won’t like the tax, but coupled with your commitment to production and your direction of the revenues to retiring the debt, they will find common ground. You will have again split the GOP as you did with your defense amendment.

Now, the
coup de grace
. You will have pledged half of the new severance tax revenues to the cause of debt reduction. The other half? You will call it a “renewed commitment to federalism as crucial to the ‘Second Founding’ as it was to the First.” But it is actually the framework of a vast new network of patronage, a network your dynasty will need to endure.

Patronage got a bad name when the progressives came to power. Imagine what you and Bill might have accomplished from 1993 through 2000, if you could have made not just the tiny number of 3,000 appointments to your administration, which you were allotted, but two or three times that number or even more instead. Here is how you do that very thing this time around.

Every state in the Union has counties or their equivalents. There
are a total of 3,144 counties in the U.S. Declare that half of the revenues from the severance tax will go to new boards established in every county, free of strings that are available for whatever purpose that county’s leadership desires. Honor in word and deed the cherished American ideal of “local control.”

But in doing so, create a vast network of new appointees for your own political benefit. Here’s the part of the speech, in which you set in motion the making of half of this patronage machine.

“What of the other half of the massive revenues from a severance tax? That will not be for Washington, DC to squander. We have enough money as it is, and must cut, not grow, our budget.

“Rather we will send half of that money back to the states, but not to the often corrupt and always special-interest-dominated state capitols, but rather to each and every county in the U.S., dividing the revenue by population, and establishing in each county a new board charged with spending that money—or saving it—as that local board sees fit. I propose that each board number nine citizens, and that I, as president, will appoint six of the members and the governor of each state appoint three members to terms that are coextensive with our own, so that agendas are genuinely advanced at the local level by people seeking to make a difference, not a name for themselves. My appointees will be women and men who have deep roots in the communities they serve—in a part-time, slightly compensated but hugely important role. They will have discretion over a large pot of money and they must do what their communities need doing, without the oppressive burden of faraway bureaucrats, clueless about conditions in the ground.

“Does Boise, Idaho need a new community college? Does Reno need to expand its airport? Does St. Louis need a massive injection of school funding? Does the Upper Peninsula in Michigan need the latest in technology to expedite cross-border trade with Canada? Do the Keys in Florida need money to assist in protection of its fragile ecosystem?

“Local boards with local membership served by local staff will set these priorities. I and the governors will have it in our political best interests to appoint the best and the brightest—young or old, black, white, brown or red, male or female, gay or straight—but all of them will be men and women of the local community, not of this city’s bloated and entitled permanent class.

“These county boards will work a profound revolution in how our country works, but it will be a very old revolution, a Jeffersonian renewal of the ideal of local control of local matters.

“A severance tax will solve our debt problem and it will help solve our national crisis of declining civic engagement. These new boards, let’s call them what they are, County Community Corps—the new CCCs, building on FDR’s CCC legacy—will energize, inspire, renew and build, build, build a new foundation for the Second Founding.”

They will also, Madame Secretary, empower you to select the guardians of a vast public wealth, free of congressional oversight and wholly empowered to reward friends and punish enemies. You know how this will work. They will be vast engines of patronage, but without the stumblebum mistakes of Solyndra-like pratfalls that come with faraway people making big bets instead of local folks making local “investments” in pools, parks and clinics.

And, again, you will have split the GOP, which has long flown flags demanding what you will propose to give them. Another slice of the Republican pie will be served to you, and the voters of that slice will never leave.

Talk like a conservative, tax like a liberal. And construct an enormous network of indebted appointees. If you appoint wisely, the empty husk of the GOP will truly be a sad thing to behold for you will be able to co-opt their next generation by allocating one or two of these seats to their best and brightest, cutting off talent from their body. More on appointments later. Now to the second sweeping set of legislative proposals.

CHAPTER 11

The New Americans (and the Permanent Realignment)

Here is the summary I provided in Chapter 1 of your fifth overarching general election platform:

“A near compete amnesty for all illegal immigrants coupled with an iron commitment to the immediate construction of a long, double-sided, high fence covering at least half the length of the 2,000-mile, Mexican-American border. The GOP has long failed to understand how to make this dual commitment work, to find the easiest way to hit the sweet spot. To your supporters on the left, assure them that the gate in the fence will be wide. Open it soon after construction is complete. Then close it prior to 2020. Then open it again thereafter. With the majorities you build in your demographic surge, you can put forward the constitutional amendment removing term-limits on the presidency.”

Your abysmal record at State has left you vulnerable on national security, and every outrage by the Islamic State reminds the voters of this, as will the GOP’s continual harping on Benghazi and Ukraine. President Obama’s horrific lassitude and then overreach on immigration has left your party exposed on the entire issue, defenseless to the charge of a simple, complete open-border collapse. The issue threatens to submerge the 2016 race in a frenzy of accusations and charges, all of which are volatile and many of which could sink you. Only your phantom server and the threat of suddenly reappearing emails captured and stored against October 2016 is a greater threat to your campaign than
a repeat of the border chaos that marked the children’s march north of 2014.

You need to sail between immigration’s Scylla and Charybdis, and you can do so, by simply appropriating the policy that ought to have been the GOP’s all along, but wasn’t because of the ineptitude of some and the egos of a few—principally Senator McCain, who while a great American and still a force for great good on national security matters generally, is for the most part a lousy senator, a horrible Republican and perhaps the worst legislation writer of the past quarter century between his unconstitutional campaign finance reform and detainee laws and his two failed attempts at immigration “reform.”

The right policy—both as pure policy and as pure politics—is simple: A long, tall, double-sided fence with a road running between the two sides, stretching along every passable mile of the border and even some that aren’t. Essentially, this means building a mini-interstate 0 along the border, open only to law enforcement. If this country can build the I-0 and all the other interstates, it can build one along the Mexican-American border, with a fence that is high, double-sided and tightly patrolled. It can do so quickly. It can do so, by the way, by spending on public works and actually creating a shovel-ready project that will employ thousands.

The long, strong, high fence should have a lot of gates, and a lot of legal immigrants coming through them, along with trucks and trains. Push border trade as much as Arizona’s new governor Doug Ducey did in his 2014 campaign. Push large numbers of temporary work permits for agricultural workers as well. Farmers from California’s Central Valley to Ohio’s tomato fields will applaud this and most Americans get it.

What they don’t get—what they are afraid of—are the cartels’ gangs and the prospect of wide open borders and streams of children and their coyote handlers pouring over the border as they did throughout 2014. Or terrorists. One terrorist attack—one!—originating from a border-crossing jihadist sinks your campaign, if you do not come out strong for a long, high fence.

The US-Mexican border is 2000 miles long. Simply assert that half is widely regarded as unpassable, but half yields to the determined border jumps so a 1,000-mile fence/road will have to be built, and will be built in year one of the new Clinton era.

Announce as well that as it is being constructed, you will have been given—by the same law appropriating the funds for and mandating the fence construction “notwithstanding any other law,” thus overriding the crazy environmentalist objections to the project—the authority necessary to prepare for the issuance of “purple cards” to the tens of millions of illegals, who already live in the United States. These cards that will allow them to remain here if their conduct remains in good standing, cards that can become “green cards” in ten years—permanent residency—and citizenship in 20 years, if indeed they are deserving.

Here is where the vast, vast majority of American hearts rest: humane, compassionate, careful regularization of immigration, and all of the other hocus pocus—fines, self-deportation, fears of diseases, etc.—vanish when met with calm, reasonable propositions. Frenzied cries of “amnesty” and the shrieks of the dead-enders like Tom Tancredo will help you provided you hit the mean. That means acknowledging that some small percent of the illegal population—5 or 10 percent—are bad people, dangerous people, or simply helpless, expensive people who have to go back to their home countries. How to separate this group, from the hardcore gang members, to the simply-incapable-of-caring-for-themselves-except-via-costly-government subsidies?

Not by a rules-based, quasi-court system as we have now, but by using the county-board model discussed in the previous chapter. Only, you will be appointing full-time, new employees of the federal government to this second set of county-based boards—more patronage—and limiting the applicant pool to former officers of the US military—men and women, who for the most part have experience evaluating people, having spent years writing and processing “fitness reports” on their troops. They are practiced appraisers of men and women. There must be in every county in America, at least a score of retired Army,
Air Force or Marine Corps colonels or Navy captains, for whom evaluations of character are second nature. Hire boards of five—one for sparsely populated counties, many for the densely populated urban areas—and give them one task and one general rule: Issue purple cards to good folks, who want to work and want to stay; deny them to people who are sketchy. Period. End of edict.