It seems silly that we always have to get this out of the way first, but fine, let's get it out of the way. Conservatives didn't get everything they wanted in the first year of the Trump presidency. I suppose as long as we still have a progressive tax code, and a Department of Education, and a spot for CNN on major cable systems, we'll have to say that.
But if you're like most people, you look at an agenda as a list of things you accomplish one at a time. You achieve one and then you move on to the next one. The more of them you can do in a short time, the better, of course. But it takes time and relentless determination to get as many of them done as you can.
Conservatives have been in the policy wilderness for awhile. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were helpful to the economy and to taxpayers, but they were really just slight downward adjustments of the rates in a tax code that otherwise maintained its same structure. It wasn't a comprehensive reform. We also got a ban on partial-birth abortion from Bush. And some of us still think it's a good thing that Saddam Hussein was deposed.
But those are debates for another time. The truth is that these were hardly the gigantic conservative priorities left undone by the Reagan Administration when it ended on January 20, 1989. And since Reagan left the scene, it's been pretty slim pickings for conservatives looking for policy achievements. When we've held the White House, we've either had squishy presidents or reticent Congresses. When we've not held the White House, we've gotten trampled.
So I understood the skepticism of many conservatives when Donald Trump, who hardly has a lifetime's track record as a conservative activist, claimed the Republican nomination. This was a guy who had given money to Democrats - including two named Clinton - and had been all over the map in his adult life with respect to what he believed about public policy. Trump was a businessman and pretty much supported whatever he thought would enrich Donald Trump. I don't mean that as a slam. That's what most people do. But it hardly presents you with the basis for thinking he will govern as a small-government, free-market, Reaganite conservative.
Yet look at the results of Trump's presidency in its first year. A lot of these achievements didn't come until last week, but they're done now, and it's a pretty extraordinary record:
Every American saw a doubling of his or her standard deduction, and everyone got either a rate reduction or - in a few cases - no change in their rate. That means that everyone who doesn't itemize got a tax cut by definition, and most who do itemize also got one.
The corporate tax rate was cut from 35 percent to 21 percent. Conservatives have been calling for this for decades.
The tax on repatriated profits is also essentially gone. Money already earned and parked overseas will now be taxed at a one-time rate of 15.5 percent instead of the old 35 percent rate. Money earned overseas from this point forward can be repatriated tax-free. We're talking about potentially several trillion dollars that can now be brought home. One conservative who's been calling for this for at least a decade is none other than our boss, Herman Cain.
The Keystone XL pipeline was approved after Obama stonewalled it for seven years and finally rejected it.
America finally began the serious exploration of oil shale via fracking, which is helping America grab a dominant new position in global energy markets.
The administration and Congress have been systematically dismantling Obama's regulatory regime. The rate of deregulation has been the fastest since Reagan's first term.
We finally opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling. Conservatives have been trying to make this happen since the 1980s.
Neil Gorsuch may only represent a maintenance of the status quo on the Supreme Court, but President Trump has been very aggressive in appointing constitutionalist judges to lower federal court positions, and Mitch McConnell - who we criticize a lot around here - has played a massive role in getting these nominations confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
The U.S. not only made good - finally - on its promise to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, but when the United Nations predictably condemned the move, our UN ambassador stood up and told the members of the UN to stick it. How long have we waited for something like that to happen?
All of ObamaCare isn't gone yet, and that's an inexcusable failure, but the worst part of it - the individual mandate - is gone. You will no longer be bullied by the IRS into buying health insurance you don't want, and that doesn't provide you with a good enough value to justify what it costs you.
The U.S. withdrew from the Paris accords on "climate change."
Left-wing judges who tried with no basis in law to block Trump's legitimate executive orders, like the travel ban, were ultimately overturned by the Supreme Court.
I may have forgotten one or two, but that's an awfully solid conservative record of achievement for one year, from a president who has a terrible approval rating and was never trusted by many conservatives in the first place based on their suspicion that he is not really one of us.
You know what makes a president who he is? It's not what he says. It's not what he used to believe. It's not what you suspect he secretly believes now. The only thing that matters is what he does. And after decades of virtually no conservative policy achievements, Donald Trump gave us a windfall of them in 2017.
Now tell me the truth: If you thought Trump was terrible, but voted for him anyway figuring he'd be less terrible than Hillary and that was the best we could expect under the circumstances, did you ever in your wildest dreams think we'd get all this in his first year? Because I'm an optimist by nature, and even I didn't expect this.
Now: On to entitlement reform and the repeal of the rest of ObamaCare in 2018! Doesn't success feel good, Republicans? Then give us some more of it.
It seems silly that we always have to get this out of the way first, but fine, let's get it out of the way. Conservatives didn't get everything they wanted in the first year of the Trump presidency. I suppose as long as we still have a progressive tax code, and a Department of Education, and a spot for CNN on major cable systems, we'll have to say that.
But if you're like most people, you look at an agenda as a list of things you accomplish one at a time. You achieve one and then you move on to the next one. The more of them you can do in a short time, the better, of course. But it takes time and relentless determination to get as many of them done as you can.
Conservatives have been in the policy wilderness for awhile. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were helpful to the economy and to taxpayers, but they were really just slight downward adjustments of the rates in a tax code that otherwise maintained its same structure. It wasn't a comprehensive reform. We also got a ban on partial-birth abortion from Bush. And some of us still think it's a good thing that Saddam Hussein was deposed.
