As the midterm election’s vote-counting process trudges along at a pace more fitting of a Third World hellhole, voters can be forgiven for looking ahead and wondering, What next?

Indeed, what next? If Republicans do gain control of the House of Representatives, as seems inevitable, what sort of change can we expect to see when the 118th Congress gets to work on January 3?

Much-needed oversight and investigation from the various committees will certainly be part of it, but what about policy? What sorts of legislation might we see coming out of a newly — if narrowly — conservative Congress that we didn’t see when Nancy Pelosi held the speaker’s gavel and James Clyburn was whipping up votes?

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts has some ideas.

Roberts, the conservative think tank’s seventh president, recently introduced a list of priorities for the new Congress in a 24-page document that outlines the biggest challenges facing our nation.

“We needed to identify what we thought were the seven most pressing issues facing America,” Roberts told Fox News. “It’s both gratifying but also troubling that that’s where the mood of the country is. I say troubling because, while I am an optimist and I’m hopeful about the American future, we have some real problems when it comes to fiscal sanity, which doesn’t exist even in Republican administrations as we know from the last one.” Here are Heritage’s seven areas of focus:

• Empower parents to make education choices 
• Secure America’s borders and reduce crime 
• Ensure free and fair elections 
• Reverse the growth of regulations, spending, and inflation 
• Counter the threat of Communist China 
• Hold Big Tech accountable
  
• Protect unborn life and family formation

These prescriptions aren’t new. A quick spin through The Patriot Post’s archives from the past year will yield one analysis after another around each of these topics.

“Heritage’s place in this fight,” says Roberts, “is primarily in the arena of ideas, public policy, and government accountability. As conservatives, our weapons are not the fleeting trends of the moment, but the proven, permanent fundamentals of human flourishing: faith, family, freedom, and nation.”

Here, to take one example from the document, is how Heritage lays out the case for combatting Big Tech:

Big Tech often acts as an enemy of the people, actively undermining free speech and free and fair elections, using algorithms to manipulate users, exposing minors to dangerous and pornographic content, and leaving users’ private data vulnerable to cyber criminals and state actors. Tech giants and social media companies censor content with which they disagree, including objective fact-based opinions and reporting, collude with authoritarian governments like China, and side with woke elites to disproportionately silence conservatives.

The Heritage enterprise will put power back in the hands of the American people by holding Big Tech accountable, using antitrust and other laws and proposing new measures to end their abuses.

Heritage then dives more deeply into the specific areas of Big Tech malfeasance and lists specific activities for reforming the industry’s worst practices, from its censorship to its predation on children to its exploitation of collected data to its excessive online surveillance.

Heritage is also intent on getting the word out. On election night, the organization rolled out a $1.5 million ad campaign built around its self-styled description as “America’s outpost in Washington.” The ads can be found in Reagan National Airport, there to greet a slate of newly minted conservative lawmakers and staffers.

The issues of parental rights, Rule of Law, democratic accountability, individual liberty, national security, equal opportunity for all, and life itself may all seem distinct, but, as Roberts notes, “in the context of woke totalitarianism’s escalating culture war, they blend into a single fight.”

“The stakes are high,” concludes Roberts, “and the battle lines are drawn. But neither are daunting — or unfamiliar. For they are the same today as they were at Bunker Hill and Gettysburg, at the Bulge and at Brandenburg Gate, at Independence Hall and on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. 

"History is once again calling America — the last, best hope of Earth — to defy the privileged and powerful and defend our Revolution, our Constitution, and our Heritage." 

Good for Heritage. And count us in.