The Patriot Post® · The GOP's 'America First' Contract

By Douglas Andrews ·
https://patriotpost.us/articles/88078-the-gops-america-first-contract-2022-05-03

If ever an election cycle could be won without so much as lifting a finger, this would be it. Republicans haven’t necessarily done anything right — anything, that is, aside from standing back while Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats commit electoral suicide — nor have they done anything wrong. But merely pointing out the other side’s idiocies isn’t a roadmap for governance.

No doubt sensing this, Arizona Congressman Andy Biggs, who chairs the influential House Freedom Caucus, penned an op-ed last month calling for a return to Donald Trump’s “America First” policies by way of a plan similar to Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America.”

These are big shoes to fill. After all, Trump introduced the America First agenda during his 2016 campaign and is still the unrivaled leader of the Republican Party. And Gingrich rode his 1994 manifesto to a gain of 54 House seats and eight Senate seats, and he snatched the speaker’s gavel on behalf of Republicans after 40 long years in the desert. As Biggs put it:

American voters are poised to clean Biden’s Democrat henchmen out of the United States House of Representatives in November’s elections because they believe that Joe Biden is doing a dreadful job. At the same time, Americans want to see action on the part of incoming Republicans. It isn’t enough for Republicans to remind voters that Democrats have lost their conscience. Republicans must have an affirmative, positive platform that can be implemented. The plan must advance positive policy while rolling back Biden’s initiatives that have harmed us so badly. We need an America First Plan, a new contract with America.

Biggs is certainly working for the sale. First, he floated the idea, and now he’s pitching the solution: a four-page “America First Contract” with eight areas of focus:

  • Reduce Inflation and Strengthen the Economy
  • Secure our Border
  • Restore Transparency and Parental Choice in Education
  • Reduce Violent Crime and Preserve the Rule of Law
  • Restore Election Integrity
  • Break Up Big Tech
  • Put America First in Foreign, Energy, and Trade Policies
  • Reinstate Good Government Practices

“We need to have a really positive outlook, positive platform,” said Biggs in an interview. “I wanted to be very different from saying, ‘We’re not as bad as those guys,’ and saying, ‘We have a positive way to resolve any issues that are coming.’ That was the genesis for this idea.”

At the end of the contract, Biggs sends a shot across the Democrats’ bow with a list of oversight and investigative items. “I call upon current Republican leadership in the House to immediately form working groups to collect and preserve evidence,” he writes, in areas of Democrat malfeasance ranging from the denial of due process to J6 defendants, to inappropriate relationships of the Biden family with China and other foreign governments, to Joe Biden’s refusal to secure our border, to the origins of COVID-19.

It’s an ambitious agenda, and one that we suspect will resonate with Republican voters.

Now all Biggs and his colleagues need to do is win a midterm election.