One Democrat has an idea for winning: a new ‘Contract with America’
Democrats have no new ideas. For years, the radical left has been in a raw push to seize permanent power through the climate change canard that justifies nearly unlimited theft and graft, “trans rights” to give the Democrats the power of 1984’s Big Brother, massive illegal immigration to change the electorate, and lawfare meant both to destroy political opposition and to amend the Constitution without the bother of ratification. The left ran openly on those issues in 2024 and lost. Now, it is trying to camouflage them.
Jill Lawrence, a longtime left-wing opinion columnist now at The Bulwark, has written that it is Time for Democrats to Pitch Their Own ‘Contract with America’. Lawrence is referring to “The Contract for America,” a series of laws that Republican Newt Gingrich proposed in 1994 when he was Speaker of the House. It was meant to revolutionize government.
Gingrich proposed imposing term limits on federal politicians, auditing the government for waste, fraud, and abuse, giving the President a line-item veto in budget bills to balance the federal budget, and giving Congress control of the regulatory bureaucracies. This original Contract for America was immensely popular. It led to a Republican wave election in the 1994 midterms.
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On a historical note, both term limits and the line-item veto were struck down by the Supreme Court, the audits were nullified, and the attempt to rein in the regulatory bureaucracy proved mostly ineffective. That said, Gingrich’s ideas never died. And indeed, most of those ideas have animated Trump’s campaign.
Enter Jill Lawrence at The Bulwark. She applauds Corey Booker’s Spartacus-thon in the Senate and the astroturf rallies being held “across America,” but, as she asks, “So what?” What Democrats truly need, she says, is something different:
To that prescription, I’d add a political strategy to make sure Democrats are in position to make things happen on the legislative front, in the House and maybe even the Senate, after the midterms. They need an agenda with a name, something like their own version of Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Contract with America that, unlike last year’s “wildly unpopular” Project 2025, actually appeals to voters.
(As an aside, the allegedly “wildly unpopular” Project 2025 wasn’t unpopular with American voters; it was unpopular only with the chattering classes, whether Democrats, RINOS, or Never Trumpers.)
Read down further in the article, and your irony meter will soon be pegged. Lawrence does nothing more than take the entire Democrat plank of 2024, euphemistically reword it, and then brand it a “Contract with America.” There is not a single new idea in her whole long list, except that she has updated it with calls to target Trump and Musk for renewed lawfare. Here are just two representative examples:
■ Conduct investigations and oversight. Look into all possible violations of laws and the Constitution. Examine the destruction of the civil service and what looks like rampant corruption, such as programs altered to make Musk companies eligible for money, agencies investigating Musk companies gutted, people investigating them fired, and Trump turning the White House lawn into a Tesla showroom, as NBC put it.
■ Impeach Trump. House Democrats have already done that twice, and they may be exhausted (as are we all), but a third impeachment cannot be avoided. I hope someone is keeping a running list of impeachable offenses, no matter how many there may be. If voters step up the way they should in November 2026 and the House flips to the Democrats, they will need it.
Like the Bourbons before them, Democrats have learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the 2024 election. They are intent on taking power and changing the rules and the culture so that they never lose power again. That is one hell of a Democrat Contract with America and one that everyone should reject.