Ditch a line-item power of the purse, filibuster/cloture, a REINS act, and term-limit and balanced-budget amendments. Use constitutional powers fully and build a good major party.
January 27, 2026
The founding generations had the benefit of: a despotic colonizing government whose people's specific actions had shown in detail what to outlaw; urgency, since despotism could make the difference between life and death; and local-government prototypes that were showing what could work.
Our current generations, including our current founder-grade leaders such as Thomas Massie, Rand Paul, and Ron DeSantis, have a despotic government and have rising urgency, but need to understand what can't work and what will work.
Fails: power of the purse, filibuster, REINS act, term limits, balanced budgets
Legislatively allocating budget line-items is grabbing executive power, which is unconstitutional. Constitutionally, a legislative power of the purse can only be an overall-total limit.
In practice, legislators have created an endless open season for allocating budget line-items. This enables, fosters, and guarantees logrolling. Legislators spend their time acting like executives but being unaccountable.
If legislators would instead be held by executives to simply pass an overall limit on the next period's spending, legislators would be put on the spot each time to justify raising spending or even keeping it constant. Also, once that single decision was out of the way, legislators would be put on the spot having to spend their time either passing or repealing rules and sanctions, and being accountable.
Filibuster/cloture rules unconstitutionally treat a current senate's rules as supreme over rules that the Constitution makes explicit. Each senator has one vote, and these votes must of course carry equal weight. Also, tie votes will of course occur, and vice presidents must have power to vote to break these ties.
In practice, simple-majority voting in senates would enable fast, extensive change, which is always best for freedom soon enough. If the change is for the better from the start, it quickly works well and gets even more popular, and this makes it lasting. If the change is for the worse initially, making it fast and extensive makes it quickly provoke pushback that brings change for the better soon enough.
A REINS act would further solidify administrative-state defiance of the Constitution. Unelected bureaucrats would be further entrenched as receiving unconstitutional delegated power to pass rules and sanctions. Progressive politicians currently take no actions to formally invalidate these unconstitutional laws; under a REINS Act, Progressive politicians would rubber-stamp these unconstitutional laws. Progressive politicians are and would remain insulated from being removed en masse, because both major parties have rules and cronies that provide substantial advantages to Progressives.
A term-limits amendment would quickly take away any constitutionalists, including our few founder-grade leaders. Under the Republican Party's current rules, cronies would always be able to pay to create name recognition and smear constitutionalists, and use these strategies to install their chosen Progressives. These Progressives could be returning incumbents, new people who have been trained by cronies in smaller-jurisdiction farm teams, or new people who are selected to match cronies' specifications.
A balanced-budget amendment would lead to balancing budgets by increasing or maintaining revenues. This would cement into place the overwhelming proportions of our national government and state and local governments that are unconstitutional.
Solutions: constitutional powers, a good major party
Fortunately, an oath-upholding, Constitution-protecting president has strong power to severely limit governments.
Further, a president can do this using exceedingly-few personnel and given exceedingly-little legislative cooperation. The powerful executive actions and recommendations listed below, for example, each would be helpful and are constitutional, as explained in my article Action Items to Faithfully Execute the Constitution.
Our root problem is systemic: we don't have at least one major party that's self-limited the same way that governments are designed to be self-limited under the Constitution.
The Constitution is designed to make it so that ultimate control is in the hands of the people. Enacting analogous rules in at least one major party would make it so that ultimate control is in the hands of the party's grassroots.
As Argentina's Javier Milei is showing politically (although not structurally using party rules), a good party can be built the most quickly by a single good president.
A good president can be elected by general-election voters. In practice, a good president will almost certainly need to run as an independent, bypassing the crony-enabling parties' primaries. Then instead of being pushed on us by cronies and their captive Fox-News-watching elderly Iowan Republican caucus voters, the president will be vetted and chosen by general-election voters all across the land.
Voters are more than ready. Founder-grade leaders need to drop schemes that can't work, and focus their energies on taking the actions that are needed to constitutionally severely-limit governments.