Leave the Swamp

Proximity is power. Washington, more than the federal government, is the principal problem with our nation today. If the federal government were spread around America, then suddenly Washington, New York, and California would be much less interested in an omnipresent and omnipotent federal government and would begin to view states as proper repositories for most government power. That alone would solve most of our nation's problems. While moving all of the federal government around America might require legislation, there is one thing that President Trump could do tomorrow: move to Flyover Country and govern from there. This, of course, drives the leftist media nuts. Recall the short vacations President Bush took to Crawford, Texas and how they hated him for that. Bush was telling them that America is more than the Beltway and that it can be governed just as well from Mississippi or Utah or Nebraska as from the Swamp on the Potomac.

Trump might recall that "Drain the Swamp" was one of the most effective campaign slogans when he campaigned in Flyover Country. He now has a taste for just how jaded, how corrupt and how absurd Washington has become over the last half-century. Trump ought to change the slogan from "Drain the Swamp" to "Leave the Swamp." By moving the presidency a thousand miles or so away from Washington into firmly conservative Flyover Country, Trump can tweak the left into madness so obvious that Americans will be appalled, and he can appeal to folks in Missouri and New Mexico and Florida and other places with key Senate races – places he will need if he hopes to win a second term. President Trump, by telling voters in these swing states he wants to live where they live – and Trump, ideally, could move from state to state every three or four months – can begin to create a narrative that he is for real America, whereas the Democrats (and establishment Republicans) are for the surreal pseudo-America of Washington. He might also move all the federal agencies he can to different parts of the nation as well, and he might begin to call for a radical geographical dispersion of federal power, ideally involving the odious federal circuit court for the District of Columbia, with a National Court of Appeals – filled, of course, with conservative jurists. Trump could also suggest that the Supreme Court meet much of the time away from Washington and hold sessions in the cities of Flyover Country. Nothing would prevent Chief Justice Roberts, with a conservative majority of the Supreme Court backing him, from doing just that. If the Supreme Court met in Des Moines, Iowa and Fairbanks, Alaska and Knoxville, Tennessee, then that would probably hasten the retirement of the older leftist justices on that court and would dissuade the left from relying on the federal bench too much. Speaker Ryan, if he is politically savvy, could have the House of Representatives leave Washington as well, holding sessions at different places around the nation. Legislative staffers would have to travel as well and stay, for several months, in Tupelo, Mississippi or Pocatello, Idaho or Springfield, Missouri. The leftist establishment national media, which do not believe that there is an America outside the Beltway and the Left Coast, would find themselves separated from cozy sources, forced to rub shoulders with hardworking Americans, and exposed to all those imagined yahoos "bitterly clinging to their guns and religion" and living amidst all those "deplorables" Hillary suggested might be one quarter of the nation – the one quarter never seen, never heard, and never noticed by the Washington Establishment. What would Democrats and RINOs say to such a plan to decentralize dramatically the federal government? Well, they simply couldn't say too much. Arguing that Washington, D.C. is necessary is like arguing that smallpox is good. The vast majority of senators and congressmen, Democrats and Republicans, come from Flyover Country, and these members of Congress could hardly argue against relocating highly paid federal jobs from Washington to their own regions and states. Nor could these members of Congress credibly argue that gaining the perspective of these parts of Flyover Country by having federal agencies and congressional sessions located there would somehow endanger the nation. It is both a sensible change and a winning political argument. President Trump, looking for a way to keep the Leftist Establishment off balance and looking also for a way to reconnect to those voters who elected him, ought to begin the call right now to "Leave the Swamp" and return the federal government to the people.