Last week, I gave my first five resolutions for the new Congress. In short, they were:
10) Reel in executive power and presidential orders.
9) Defund and repeal Obamacare.
8) Restore the 10th Amendment and a real balance of power between the federal and state governments.
7) Restore federal fiscal sanity and finally lower our national debt.
6) Our country needs the FairTax.
Here are the remaining five resolutions for the new Congress and my justification for each.
5) Quit playing semantics and patty-cake with Islamic extremism, and defend America in the war on terror before it's too late (again).
What president in his right mind releases five Yemeni terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks? The Islamic State group, al-Qaida, Boko Haram and a dozen other radical Islamic groups have gained far too much ground under our weak and spineless White House administration. No president is perfect. But compared with Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and even George W. Bush, President Obama's foreign policy -- namely, ignore or negotiate with our enemies -- is lackadaisical, and it's only causing extremist expansion and empowerment. His policy of appeasement has only emboldened our enemies, especially in the case with radical Muslims.
No matter how Islamic extremism metastasizes and how many times its adherents attack Western civilization, the Oval Office still minimizes Islamic culpability by calling the global war on terror an "overseas contingency operation" and its players "violent extremists" but not "Muslim extremists."
I'm exhausted by Washington's ignorance, avoidance and passivity toward our enemies, especially when it risks the lives of millions of Americans. If we continue to stick our heads in the sand, a metropolis here may be the next Paris.
4) Secure our borders; stop amnesty; and preserve a path for only legal immigration.
Now, more than ever, we must protect our borders and sovereignty by providing genuine solutions to the dangers of American boundary fluidity. Do I have to repeat the dangers of Islamic extremists, who encroach every border, port and computer? With estimates showing that by 2060, America will add 167 million people (37 million immigrants today will multiply into 105 million then), it is imperative for us to do more to solve this crisis. Now is the time to beat the doors of change and save the boundaries and future of America.
The White House has failed most miserably to produce a viable solution to the crisis of illegal immigration. Amnesty is not the answer. And immigration laws aren't effective if we continue to dodge or ignore them. Furthermore, globalization efforts have only confused security matters, further endangering our borders, as well as our national identity -- our sovereignty.
Only Congress has the constitutional power to deal with immigration policy, and it can start by enforcing the laws that have already been created.
3) Defend our Bill of Rights, especially the Second Amendment.
In his book, "The American Boomerang," Nick Adams explained the following, in the chapter titled "Armed": "Americans face a vicious criticism of their right to keep and bear arms as enshrined in the Second Amendment of their magnificent Constitution. Outsiders, destitute of liberty and armed by their socialistic masters with collectivist and politically correct proclivities from a young age, point accusingly at the gun culture of this country as evidence of their own moral and cultural superiority over the American. But they are wrong."
Adam added: "The American is cognizant that the first act of every totalitarian regime of the last century was the disarmament of the regular citizenry. An unarmed population will lose any contest between it and the government. As the saying goes, 'The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against the tyranny of government.'"
It is no surprise that when creating our nation upon the Constitution, our Founding Fathers also included as prominent the need for a free people to bear arms in the Second Amendment: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
2) Return our government to the constitutional republic that our founders created.
We're living in a time when our nation is turning over almost every principle and tenet laid down by our country's founders. From the East Coast to the "Left Coast," America seems to be moving further and further from its founders' vision and government.
I'm tired of watching our country being torn to shreds by those who think the answer is more government debt and control. I'm tired of being in bondage to a tax system that robs U.S. citizens as the king of England did before the Revolution. I'm tired of watching our sovereignty being sold by loans and loose borders.
The Founding Fathers believed our Constitution to be an instrument for its people to restrain the government. Yet Washington politicians use it to shackle American citizens and unloose their recklessness. They trample that founding document by their actions, bypassing its mandates, spinning its words to justify their choices, abandoning a balance of power and accommodating their own desires, partisan politics and runaway spending.
Washington's constitutional rebellion and insanity must stop!
1) Fight to elect a real commander in chief in 2016 who can restore America and its standing in the world.
Obama's glaring and greatest weakness has been his inability to make hard decisions in crises and to lead opposing forces (for example, Democrats and Republicans) through them. His leadership -- or lack thereof -- has cost America on every front. It has further divided Washington and our nation, and it has jeopardized our standing with the entire global community and even our allies, leaving us in a much more unstable place in our world.
Leading by unilateral decisions and swaying to political expediency are not the leadership qualities America needs now or ever again. Obama's leadership and character flaws have come full circle to haunt him and -- most tragically -- us. We'll never know the exact price that we've paid, because we will never know the good that the right leader in the White House could have done over the past six years in stabilizing our country and world.
Will America learn from Obama's leadership flaws, inabilities and mistakes? That answer will only be known if we are strong enough not to appoint anyone like him in 2016.