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It has been a decade since Newt and the GOP came to power promising sweeping reforms. In that time, many have wondered what might have happened had the revolution been all that we hoped it would be. Assuming we had elected a "revolutionary" president in 1996 (perhaps an Alan Keyes or a Bob Dornan), what might America look like today?

The United States Supreme Court would no longer be the arbiter of the most profound aspects of our lives. Congress would have exercised their constitutional authority to rein in the federal judiciary, thus restoring the balance of powers. Wrongheaded decisions like Lawrence vs. Texas (the right to homosexual sodomy), Carhart vs. Stenberg (the right to infanticide) and Kelo vs. New London (the right to seize private property for commercial use) would never have happened.

All federal agencies would be required to justify their existence at the beginning of each fiscal year. Some would be dismantled entirely, including:

The Internal Revenue Service. My personal tax reform preference is a federal consumption tax, currently known as the Fair Tax (web site). However, in my fantasy, slashes in federal spending would mean that the rate would need to be no more than ten percent. No sense giving government more than the Lord requests. So the IRS would be long gone.

The U.S. Department of Education. This agency, born out of a political payoff from Jimmy Carter to the nation's powerful teachers' unions, should have been dismantled by now. A tidy way to do it would have been to send block grants back to the states each year for use in implementing school choice proposals. At ten percent per year, by the end of one decade the department would have been gone, and the state of American education would have been dramatically improved.

Health and Human Services. The funding for this agency, even after welfare reform, is still staggering -- and largely unconstitutional. With serious reforms, families, churches and other charitable institutions could have picked up the slack for those truly needy in society. (Perhaps by now there would be no such thing as "a job no American will take.")

Other agencies that should have disappeared by now: HUD, OSHA, the EPA, the Commerce and Energy Departments and the Social Security Administration. Does that mean Congress could no longer have introduced legislation in these areas? Of course not, but the agencies themselves have become intrusive bureaucracies impeding the growth of the economy, and in my perfect GOP Revolution they would be gone by now.

With a sufficiently restrained federal court system, amendments to the Constitution might not have been necessary, but just in case, I would include a few:

A Human Life Amendment. This, by definition, would have reaffirmed the Founders vision of the first right -- the right to life -- for every innocent, law-abiding American, from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death.

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