Real Homeland Security

November 4, 2001

by Bruce Walker

Recently, I wrote an article making the case for moving Washington to America. There is nothing which prevents the President, the House of Representatives, or - for that matter - the Senate or Supreme Court from setting up operations in the geographical and philosophical center of America.

Soon after this article appeared, the liberal media began referring to President Bush’s time in Crawford, Texas as a "vacation" (as though serious work could only be done in the jaded atmosphere of Washington, D.C.) The President can be President wherever he wants in America.

The House of Representatives, whose members will soon be coming from brand new Congressional Districts, can determine its own rules of operations and nothing prevents its members from meeting, debating, and voting on measures electronically. The long winding speeches on C-Span given before largely empty House chambers is good evidence of the silliness of conducting "debate" in Congress.

What about House Committees? How could they meet without the Capital Offices? Who needs these committees anyway? Congress should certainly be a pool of experience in different areas of life, but this ought to come not from artificial devices like committees, but rather from the elected officials themselves.

Dr. Bill Frist, Senator from Tennessee, actually knows and cares about medical care. Coach Tom Osborne, Congressman from Nebraska, has much more experience helping young men become responsible and educated citizens than some House staffer. Frank Lucas, Congressman from Oklahoma, has a family farm with 100 years of experience in actually growing wheat and raising cattle - why not ask him, and not staffers - about the state of agriculture in America? Mary Bono’s father was a surgeon and her mother was a chemist - I wonder if she might have some personal understanding of pharmaceutical companies?

The point is that if our Representatives do not know much about real life, but only Beltway politics, then we ought to elect other people. If they are competent, then they should rely on their commonsense and not artificial "committees" which mask the real actions of Congress. If they next expertise, why not seek that from people who live in their districts? Indeed, why not have Representatives live, work, and listen to those people who actually elected them?

Spreading the federal government - at least the House of Representatives and the President’s Cabinet - to different parts of the nation would also make us much safer. What if we President Bush and his staff worked out of Wichita or Des Moines or Omaha? Pretty easy to protect those areas.

If 435 Congressional offices throughout the nation were the places in which the House of Representatives did business, then no Anthrax scare of other massive attack will do much damage at all. These are not particularly difficult changes, especially because no statutory changes would be required to implement them.

In time, even the Senate could elect to meet in each state capital (perhaps in consultation with the Governor and those state legislators who used to choose Senate members) to receive input from state governments. State capitals are not invulnerable, but each already has a security system in place, and this could be augmented by federal security as well. The whole legislative and executive branches of government would be safe.

Except for the Supreme Court, this is how the judicial system operates anyway. Federal judges do not all live in Washington, D.C. and conduct trials or issue opinions from the capital. They live in federal judicial districts and conduct their work from there as well.

This dispersal of federal policy-makers could not insure perfect safety, but it could insure a much higher level of survivability than currently exists. Moreover, it would restore a cultural and physical stability to America that has not existed since the days when Robert E. Lee outfoxed Yankee generals in Virginia and Maryland, while the real decisions of the war were being made in the heartland, by Grant moving down the Mississippi or by Sherman marching to the sea.

It would bring government physically back to the people and throw a curve ball to all the liberals who live and breath the refined air of the Potomac. It would also throw bin Laden, Hussein and all the other America-haters a multi-tiered problem.

Today, these creeps can claim that the "Real America" might side with them, that Zionist puppet masters really control America. There is a Real America all right, and it is much tougher than they think. Move Washington - the national government - throughout the fruited plains of our vast continental nation and win two victories at once: one against the Daschles and the other against the bin Ladens.

Why not?

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Bruce Walker has been a dyed in the wool conservative since, as a sixth grader, he campaigned door to door for Barry Goldwater. Bruce has had almost two hundred published articles have appeared in the Oklahoma Bar Journal, Law & Order, Legal Secretary Today, The Single Parent, Enter Stage Right, Citizen's View, The American Partisan, Port of Call, and several other professional and political periodicals.

Send the author an E mail at Walker@ConservativeTruth.org.

For more of Bruce's articles, visit his archives.