The GOP Is Sounding Like Apollo 13

“Houston, we have a problem.” How else can the Republicans interpret the spurt of declarations from their leading senators wondering for what the party stands. “What do we stand for?” is the way Senator Rick Scott puts it. Senator Cruz sees in the midterm fiasco “a lesson for Republicans” — a failure to “actually stand for something.” Senator Rubio laments the lack of “a clear understanding of the political & policy direction for the GOP.”Talk about a main bus B undervolt. Senator Hawley says his party “is dead” and needs to start anew. The message from so many top Republican senators sounds like Apollo 13. It doesn’t mean our heroes won’t get home safely. It’s going to take, though, some work. These gripes can be chalked up to post-election posturing, but a debate about first principles is, in our view, long overdue and has come none too soon.We would start in 1952. That is the last time a Republican — General Eisenhower — stood for president on a platform that called for a restoration of gold convertibility of the dollar. It minced no words on this head. It declared that the party stood for monetary policies designed “to use our influence for a world economy, of such stability as will permit the realization of our aim of a dollar on a fully-convertible gold basis.”No sooner was Ike elected, though, than a debate erupted — which could be glimpsed in competing commentary by the Wall Street Journal and its sister publication, Barron’s. The latter acknowledged that the platform marked “a deep and legitimate yearning” of Americans “for a return to hard money.” Yet it was “the part of honesty to point out that much more is required than payment of lip service to a golden phrase.”The restoration of gold convertibility, it argued, had to be preceded by righting the economy — balancing the budget, say, establishing the independence of the Federal Reserve, and the establishment of “international arrangements.” The gold standard, it remarked, “was not a game of solitaire.” Barron’s column was followed the day after by the Wall Street Journal, which had a decidedly different point of view.The Journal saw all this as what we once — in an editorial headlined “The Last Call” — characterized as “shilly-shallying.” The Journal, on its way to becoming the country’s largest broadsheet, worried that “this country’s return to a gold convertible currency must await the restoration of both a sound domestic economy and a stable world economy.” Quoth the Journal: “When, if ever, will all the world have a stable economy?”The Journal suggested that Barron’s had it backwards. There is “ample reason,” it argued, “to believe that the return of the United States to a gold-convertible currency would exert a more powerful influence on the side of a stable world economy than anything else we could do.” Tragically, Eisenhower abandoned his own platform, and we began the long march away from the Bretton Woods Agreements.Which brings us to the current debate. We first reprised all this in the midst of Mitt Romney’s run for the presidency. It failed, in our view, because he didn’t believe his own platform, which had called for a monetary commission to be established to explore a metallic standard for money. Today, though, the opportunity exists for a new generation of Republican senators to pick up this issue and cobble it into the GOP platform for 2024.We focus on the senators because Mr. Romney’s default in 2012 was followed by a burst of activity in the House. It passed a monetary reform bill that called for, among other things, an audit of the Fed and the establishment of a monetary commission, the classic step toward reform. It was one of the first pieces of legislation Speaker Paul Ryan moved to the Senate. And it was in the senate that it died.So if Senators Scott, Cruz, and Rubio, not to mention the other solons, want to find out what’s causing the blasted “main Bus B undervolt,” so to speak, the place to look is in the mirror. Already a push is gathering for Congress to abandon any debt ceiling. The idea is to throw it to the wind in the lame duck session. If the GOP doesn’t stand for honest money, how is it going to be able to stand for anything else?

The GOP Is Sounding Like Apollo 13

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