Is the GOP Ready to Govern?

If Republicans retake the House in November, we know that they will attempt cut taxes, cut spending and repeal healthcare reform. But will they also be able to develop a positive legislative agenda that answers the everyday concerns of citizens?

If Republicans retake the House in November, we know that they will attempt to cut spending and cut taxes.  They will attempt to repeal healthcare reform.

But will conservatives develop a positive legislative agenda that answers the everyday concerns of citizens?

In a 1982 essay from early in the Reagan Revolution, Antonin Scalia took up the same question, offering a friendly criticism of movement conservatism that bears repeating.  In "The Two Faces of Federalism," he wrote:

To be sure, decision at a lower level of government tends to maximize overall satisfaction, by permitting diversity instead of submerging large regional majorities beneath a narrow national vote.  But that is a practical rather than a transcendental concern, to be laid beside other practical concerns such as the need for national rather than local enforcement of certain prescriptions.  It justifies a predisposition towards state and local control -- but not, I think, the degree of generalized hostility towards national law which has become a common feature of conservative thought.

The future Supreme Court justice argued that conservatives, so frequently on the losing end of federal legislation, had unfortunately turned a tactical opposition to federal power "into a philosophy," and this "anti-federalist philosophy on the part of conservatives seems... simply wrong."  Scalia lamented that "when conservatives take charge, the most they hope to do is to keep anything from happening.  I understand that in some of the offices of the current administration there are signs on the wall that read, 'Don't just stand there; undo something.'  That seems to me an inadequate approach."

It was an inadequate approach then, and it remains so today.

Scalia understood the "unfortunate tendency of conservatives to regard the federal government, at least in its purely domestic activities, as something to be resisted, or better yet (when conservatives are in power) undone, rather than as a legitimate and useful instrument of policy."  He resisted this "ultimately self-defeating" attitude at the height of the Reagan Revolution.

Should Reagan's heirs find themselves in a position of power next year, it should be resisted again.