What We Want in a Presidential CandidateSpeech given to Family Research Council, October 19, 2007

The media have already designated the frontrunners for the Republican nomination for President and are working overtime to force Republicans to line up behind one of them right now. The Republican National Convention won't take place until next September. Most Republicans are still shopping. We've listened to the presidential debates organized by the networks, but they have ignored or not adequately covered many of the issues we care about. Here are some of the statements we would like to hear from a candidate to be worthy of our backing.
Respect for Traditional Marriage. It's not enough for our candidate to say "I oppose same-sex marriage." Even John Kerry said that. It's not enough to say "I support a marriage amendment." The President doesn't have a role in adopting constitutional amendments.
We want to know how our candidate, if he becomes President, will use the power of his office to protect traditional marriage between a man and a woman. We want him to promise to use his executive power to fully enforce the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which the GAO says covers 1,138 federal laws affecting the rights of husbands and wives, including many regulations in the income tax code and in the Social Security system.
We want our candidate to promise to sign legislation that would prohibit federal judges from ordering same-sex marriage, or domestic partner benefits like those that accrue to married couples, either by pretending that this is required by the Fourteenth Amendment or by declaring DOMA unconstitutional.
Respect for Life. It's definitely not enough for a candidate to say "I'm pro-life." It's not sufficient to say he believes Roe v. Wade should be overturned because the President has no power to do that. We want to know what the candidate will do as President to advance protection for unborn babies.
We want him to promise to veto the Freedom of Choice Act, for which the feminists, led by Senator Barbara Boxer, have just started an all-out campaign. The Freedom of Choice Act would prohibit government, at any level, from interfering with our efforts to protect human life. The Freedom of Choice Act would wipe out every single pro-life bill we've passed in the last 34 years, including parental notice, parental consent, the woman's right to know law, waiting periods, fetal homicide, abortion-funding restrictions, and partial-birth abortion bans. We must have certain knowledge that our candidate would veto any such law.
We want sure knowledge that our candidate would veto any bill that would allow or fund embryonic stem cell research. We must be assured that he will sign a bill to prohibit human cloning through somatic cell nuclear transfer or other means.
We want our candidate to pledge to support retention of the same, identical pro-life plank that has been in the Republican Party Platform through the last six Republican National Conventions. That plank proclaims that "the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed."
Protection for Parents' Rights. We want our presidential candidate to protect parents' rights in public schools by repudiating the offensive and impudent Ninth Circuit Court decision in Fields v. Palmdale, which ruled that parents' fundamental right to control the upbringing of their children "does not extend beyond the threshold of the school door."
Since the federal government gives about $60 billion a year to public schools, we want our candidate to promise to sign school appropriation bills only if they contain language to protect parents' rights to protect their children against such things as nosy questionnaires about sex, drugs and suicide; mental health screening; forcing schoolchildren to be put on psychotropic drugs; courses that promote Islam or homosexuality; bilingual education; classroom materials that parents consider pornographic; giving birth control to 6th grade girls without parents' knowledge or consent; and sex education and sexual orientation courses even if they are masquerading as "diversity" courses.
Opposition to Supremacist Judges. It's not enough for our candidate to say he will appoint strict constructionist judges.
We want our President to appoint only judges and justices who will promise to enforce the Constitution as it is written. We want our President to appoint only judges and justices who publicly reject the liberal notion that our Constitution is "evolving," or that decisions can be based on "emerging awareness" about morals.
Our presidential candidate must promise to appoint judges who will stand up against the organized campaign to banish the acknowledgment of God from every public school, building and park, turning the United States into a secular or even atheist nation. We want our presidential candidate to endorse and promise to sign legislation, such as the "We the People" bill (H.R. 300), to withdraw power from federal judges to ban the Pledge of Allegiance and the Ten Commandments from public schools and places.
We want our candidate to repeat the best thing President George W. Bush ever said: "We will not stand for judges who undermine democracy by legislating from the bench and try to remake the culture of America by court order."
Protection of American Sovereignty. We want our President to be a leader in protecting American sovereignty. We want him to reject United Nations treaties because they are always an invasion of our sovereignty. They all set up a monitoring commission to dictate U.S. domestic law, and most of them set up a tribunal of foreign judges to decide disputes and enforce their rulings.
For example, we want our candidate to publicly oppose the United Nations Treaty on the Rights of the Child, which would dictate new rights of the child such as access to any media of the child's choice despite his parents' objections. We want our presidential candidate to oppose the United Nations Treaty on Women (known as CEDAW) which would make abortion a treaty right, and allow foreigners to revise our textbooks to comport with feminist ideology.
We want our presidential candidate to oppose the United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty, which would make all American use of the oceans, and the minerals at the bottom of the seas, subject to the International Seabed Authority in Jamaica and to the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea in Germany. We want our presidential candidate to come right out and say: Ronald Reagan was right in opposing the treaty, and George W. Bush is wrong in cooperating with Democratic Senator Joe Biden in trying to get the Senate to ratify it.
In all these UN treaty tribunals, the United States has only one vote out of about 150 countries, the same vote as Communist Cuba. Based on past experience, we can assume they will regularly rule against us. Every United Nations treaty is a major loss of U.S. sovereignty.
We want our candidate for President to promise that the Security and Prosperity Partnership will not be a stepping-stone to a North American Union modeled on the European Union. When Fox News asked President Bush about this at his Canadian news conference in August, he refused to deny that his Security and Prosperity Partnership is the prelude to a North American Union. We expect the presidential candidate we support to announce that Bush will never allow the United States to be economically integrated with Mexico and Canada, and will never allow the free movement of labor across open borders.
We want our candidate to support English as our official language. English is the primary factor that makes us what our national motto promises: e pluribus unum, out of many, one people. We must reject divisive talk about multiculturalism and diversity. We want to assimilate our legal immigrants into the American way of life, our laws, our language, and our culture.
We want our presidential candidate to promise to rescind Bill Clinton's Executive Order 13166 that requires anyone who receives federal funds (such as doctors and hospitals) to provide all services in foreign languages.
We want to know whether or not our presidential candidate favors foreign countries or foreign corporations owning our highways, our ports, or other infrastructure.
We want our presidential candidate to pledge to veto any bill that reduces the precious constitutional right of small inventors to ownership of their inventions. The right of inventors to own their own inventions was established as a constitutional "right" even before the more famous rights were added by constitutional amendments. Our original and unique constitutional system of assuring the property right of inventors is the reason why 95% of the world's great inventions are American, and the reason why we have achieved such economic prosperity. This constitutional right must be preserved.
Stop Illegal Aliens from Entering Our Country. We want our candidate for President to announce that he considers it a presidential duty to prevent illegal entry into our country. We want him to be forthright in praising the American people for successfully demanding that the U.S. Senate defeat the Bush-Kennedy Amnesty bill earlier this year.
We want our candidate to promise that he will never try to bamboozle us with a similar so-called "comprehensive" immigration bill or a so-called "DREAM Act," that includes amnesty for the millions of illegal aliens now in our country. We want our candidate to reject any bill that would bring into our country hundreds of thousands more aliens who are falsely called "guest workers," most of whom have never been to high school and will take jobs from our own millions of high-school dropouts who desperately need entry-level low-paid jobs to start building their lives.
We want our presidential candidate to keep the lid on the multinationals' attempt to bring in thousands more foreigners on H-1B visas, who take jobs from our college graduates, especially our engineers and computer specialists. We want to hear our candidate's plan for getting the "guest workers" already here to leave our country when their visas expire.
We want our candidate to tell us how he will lift the tax burden that Americans suffer today in providing the net value of $20,000 a year to every illegal alien household. (That figure is provided by the Heritage Foundation.)
We want our candidate to tell us exactly what he will do to prevent the entry of the 85% of illegal drugs that come over our southern border.
We want our candidate to promise to enforce the law against employers hiring illegal aliens. The illegals and foreigners on visas are paid less than Americans, and so they depress American wages. The law of supply and demand works. The greater the supply of labor, the lower the wage.
We want our candidate to reject George W. Bush's plan called "totalization" which would put illegal aliens into our Social Security system.
We want our candidate to build the 854-mile fence that the Secure Fence Law requires. We want our candidate to pardon Border Guards Ignatio Ramos and Jose Compean who are unjustly imprisoned for intercepting a professional Mexican drug smuggler.
We want our candidate to stop the entry of Mexican trucks on our highways and roads. Even Bill Clinton, bless him, kept out the Mexican trucks.
Protection of American Jobs. The Republican presidential debate in economically depressed Michigan showed that the top-tier Republican candidates are out of touch with the voters on economic issues. It was so disappointing that most of the Republican candidates offered nothing about the economy that touches the lives of middle-class Americans. They are an enormous bloc of voters who joined with social conservatives to elect and re-elect Ronald Reagan.
Let's be frank: the Values Voters who put the social issues at the top of their agenda are the largest bloc in the Republican Party, but they are not a majority. Reagan was elected with a coalition of social conservatives and working-class Americans who need good jobs and hope to live the American dream.
On economics, most Republican presidential candidates just give us tired old platitudes. They talked about cutting spending. But most Americans don't believe they will do that because Republicans did not cut spending when they had control of both Congress and the White House. The candidates talked about the line-item veto. But that is irrelevant because it's unconstitutional.
The candidates repeated the slogan "free trade." They had better wake up and face reality. The Wall Street Journal-NBC poll reported that Republican voters, by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, now believe that free trade is bad for the U.S. economy because it costs jobs. Grassroots Republicans reached this conclusion because so many of their friends have lost good manufacturing jobs and had to take jobs at a third the pay, and because the wives have to go to work to pay for the groceries and the mortgage.
We want to hear the plan of our presidential candidate for dealing with the way foreign countries discriminate against U.S. producers and products by subsidies and tax-rebates.
The leading Republican presidential candidates in the Michigan debate just said that we must be more competitive with foreign producers. That's absurd. There is no way we can be competitive with Chinese factory workers who are paid 30 cents an hour with no benefits.
One candidate suggested that better U.S. technology will enable us to compete. That's also absurd. The Chinese are stealing our technology and our inventions and still work their people at 30 cents an hour. Some suggested that better education, with more math and science, will make us competitive. That's absurd, too. Our college graduates cannot compete with Asian engineers and computer techies who work for $10,000 a year.
The top-tier Republican presidential candidates showed little or no compassion for the three million Americans who have lost their jobs to globalism. It's no wonder that polls now show that Americans believe Democrats are better at dealing with the economy than Republicans.
Our candidate for President must reject the trade deals that are unfair to American workers. We want our President to protect us from the hostility of the World Trade Organization, another treaty that has been detrimental to Americans.
The World Trade Organization has ruled against the United States in 40 out of 47 cases. Why is anybody surprised? Why do we put up with the globalists who put our country into trade agreements and world organizations dominated by foreigners who hate and envy us, and who rule against us every chance they get?
The latest outrage of the World Trade Organization is to rule that we must repeal our law against internet gambling because it violates free trade in "recreational services." If we do not comply with this ruling, the World Trade Organization will assess billions of dollars in damages against us. There is no appeal from a World Trade Organization ruling, or from the decision of any United Nations tribunal.
We want to hear whether or not our presidential candidate supports the "global economy" - which forces Americans to compete against pitifully low wages, slave labor, and discriminatory practices imposed by foreign countries and foreign tribunals.
We want leadership to make sure that our economy produces good jobs that enable guys to buy a home and a car, support their families, live the American dream, and confidently expect their children to have an even better life.
We're listening to the candidates and we're waiting to hear them address the issues we care about.
Scholars Explain Bush's SPP Those who seek to understand what's behind the chatter about Bush's Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) as a possible prelude to a North American Union (NAU), similar to the European Union (EU), should read the 35-page White Paper published recently by the prestigious Hudson Institute called "Negotiating North America: The Security and Prosperity Partnership." This Washington, DC think tank is blunt and detailed in describing where SPP is heading.
Here's how Hudson defines SPP's goal: "The SPP process is the vehicle for the discussion of future arrangements for economic integration to create a single market for goods and services in North America." The key words are "economic integration" (a phrase used again and again) into a North American "single market" (another phrase used repeatedly).
"Integration" with Mexico and Canada is exactly what North American Union means, but there's a big problem with this goal. "We the people" of the United States were never asked if we want to be "integrated" with Mexico and Canada, two countries of enormously different laws, culture, concept of government's role, economic system, and standard of living.
Here's how Hudson describes SPP's process: "The most important feature of the SPP design is that it is neither intended to produce a treaty nor an executive agreement like the NAFTA that would require congressional ratification or the passage of implementing legislation in the United States. The SPP was designed to function within existing administrative authority of the executive branch."
Hudson explains further: "The design of the SPP is innovative, eschewing the more traditional diplomatic and trade negotiation models in favor of talks among civil service professionals and subject matter experts with each government. This design places the negotiation fully within the authority of the executive branch in the United States."
Indeed, SPP is very "innovative." The arrogance of SPP's "design" to give the executive branch full "authority" to "enforce and execute" whatever is decided by a three-nation agreement of "civil service professionals," as though it were "law," is exceeded only by its unconstitutionality.
The Hudson White Paper admits the problem that SPP completely lacks "transparency and accountability." Hudson freely admits "the exclusion of Congress from the process"; constituents who contact their Congressmen discover that Members know practically nothing about SPP. Hudson states that, under SPP, one of the U.S. challenges is "managing Congress." Is Congress now to be "managed," either by executive-branch "authority" or by "dozens of regulators, rule makers, and officials working with their counterparts" from Mexico and Canada?
The Hudson White Paper reminds us that the 2005 Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) document called "Building a North American Community" bragged that its recommendations are "explicitly linked" to SPP. The CFR document called for establishing a "common perimeter" around North America by 2010.
Hudson praises the CFR document for "raising public expectations" about what SPP can accomplish. Hudson explains that, while immigration is not an explicit SPP agenda item, "mobility across the border is central to the idea of an integrated North American economic space." "Harmonization" with other countries is another frequently used word. One of SPP's Signature Initiatives is "Liberalizing Rules of Origin."
The Hudson Paper reveals SPP's cozy collaboration with "some interest groups and not others." Translated, that means collaboration with multinational corporations, but not with small business or citizen groups.
After the heads of state of the United States, Mexico and Canada met in Waco in March 2005 and announced the creation of SPP by press release, the North American Competitiveness Council emerged as "a private sector forum for business input" to SPP working groups. But, according to Hudson, it wasn't merely "private" because it was "given official sanction."
After the three amigos met in Cancun in 2006, Bush provided taxpayer funding for a think tank called the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) to meet secretly and produce a report called "The Future of North America." That document's favorite catchphrase is "North American labor mobility," which is a euphemism for admitting unlimited cheap labor from Mexico.
The Hudson White Paper states that "SPP combines an agenda with a political commitment." That's exactly why those who want to protect American sovereignty don't like SPP.
Among the people who take SPP seriously are Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) who introduced H.Con.Res. 40 opposing a North American Union and a NAFTA Superhighway, similar resolutions introduced into the state legislatures of 14 states, and Rep. Duncan Hunter's (R-CA) amendment to prohibit the use of federal funds for SPP working groups, which passed the House by the remarkable bipartisan vote of 362 to 63 on July 24, 2007.
The Hudson White Paper suggests that it might be "necessary" for SPP to change its name and acronym. It is unlikely that a change of name will silence the American people who are outraged by the SPP's goals and process.