Bobby Jindal steps up: A ‘supercommittee of governors’

Rightfully declaring certain recent Republican challengers to be “the stupid party,” Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) steps up and claims that anyone thinking of running for president in 2016 now, when there is work to do, is crazy. And then he takes the first steps himself. And it is so good to have him. Jindal belongs to that rank of able and optimistic intellectuals that left conservatism with the passing of William F. Buckley Jr., leaving a bitter wake. He bristles with new thinking and the abilities to see it through. And with Jindal, you also get Rick Perry and Ted Cruz without the Texas talk. His is a new vision of America, so fresh and new it is hard to grasp its full potential. He appears potentially like one of those leaders the world has seen through millennia, who appears out of nowhere and leads a benign horde to a new awakening, as if deposited there by a force of nature.
 
Today, he calls on Republican governors to call a meeting with President Obama. It has been a theme of this column for several years: a council of governors — a "supercommittee of governors" — to do the work that Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles tried to do, to do the work that the Tea Party tried to do, to do the work that Mark Sanford and Rick Perry tried to do when they personally challenged federal spending in the states early on. To raise the status of governors and therefore states and regions, and to give form to a vision of responsible and necessary change to fit the contours of the rising century.
 

The old forms — the courts, the Congress, the presidency and the astonishing no-fault State Department with clear nihilist, anti-Western and anti-Semitic subliminal themes (see Benghazi; see Israeli writer Caroline Glick’s stunning account of her recent trip to England: “Bye bye London”) — are worn out, worn through, used up. They were originally intended to deal with a north/south country made up of three cities, a vast plantation and a forest. Today we are a different people. Like the Super Bowl this year, we have become east/west, linking Asia to Europe through a world of mature regions in between. The broken realm will not fix itself; it will continue its passage to mayhem until it breaks. It needs a new approach to begin again.

“Medicaid operates under a 1960s model of medicine, with inflexible, one-size-fits-all benefits and little consumer engagement and responsibility,” says Jindal. He asks the president to meet with him and other Republican governors. But other issues arise today that need attention. Wyoming and Michigan bring challenges to the NDAA. The “South Carolina Freedom of Healthcare Protection Act” is enacted by the SC General Assembly.

These are new issues. This is a new America. The Louisiana governor should take the initiative in this. Bring his governors (and former governors) to meet with the president and keep them together to consider the fate of our republic in the rising century.

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