RUTHFULLY YOURS

From the drama over Donald Trump’s cabinet you’d think the only position in government is Secretary of State. Yet Mr. Trump will need advice elsewhere, not least in taming the regulatory state. Newt Gingrich said he won’t serve in a Trump cabinet but would like to contribute. How about tapping the former House Speaker to lead a Gingrich Commission to modernize and shrink the federal government?

The models for this project would be the Hoover Commissions of the 1940s and early 1950s. President Harry Truman appointed former President Herbert Hoover to look for ways to streamline government in 1947, and Dwight Eisenhower did it again in 1953, and about 70% of the proposals were adopted in the two Administrations. Congress combined several agencies into what is now the General Services Administration, which reduced paperwork and federal procurement costs.

There’s also the 1980s Grace Commission, which made nearly 2,500 recommendations on everything from farm-credit rules to Pentagon hardware. The Grace Commission accomplished less than its predecessors thanks to a Democratic Congress, but it provoked a public debate about the role of government.

A Gingrich Commission would have an opening for greater progress with a GOP White House and Congress. There’s always a chance that the effervescent Mr. Gingrich would careen off course by proposing a military base on the moon. But he talks all the time about updating government for the 21st century, and he published a book on “winning the future” that covers everything from education to balancing the federal budget. This would be a chance to do it.

The feds over the decades have piled program atop program regardless of results, and a commission could highlight failures and duplications. Unlike previous eras, much of the work has already been done by think tanks or other commissions. The commission could work fairly rapidly, perhaps in a few months.

For example: Speaker Paul Ryan’s “Better Way” agenda has identified some 80 welfare programs run by 13 federal agencies, and inevitably many overlap in benefits and eligibility. That seems ripe for a closer look. President-elect Trump has singled out civil-service reform as a priority, and Paul Light of New York University has suggested ideas on these pages that the Gingrich Commission could review.

Over the next year Congress and the new Administration will be preoccupied with daily squalls and the rough and tumble of passing legislation. There’s no time for research. A Gingrich Commission could do that work and serve up ideas to plug into the budget over the next two years and beyond. Government is at its lowest standing with Americans in decades, so even progressives should support an effort that might improve its functioning and lay the basis for more public confidence.

The day before Thanksgiving in New York, I bumped into a Trump adviser who actually knows what is going on inside Trump Tower, as opposed to rumors inhabiting the media such as this Tuesday headline: “Trump’s Team Frays Over Romney.” The message I got was different: “It’s going to be fine. It’s going to be just fine.”

In the seven days since Thanksgiving, President-elect Trump has named the respected schools reformer Betsy DeVos from Michigan as Secretary of Education. Rep. Tom Price of Georgia, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and a committed reformer of ObamaCare, is Secretary of Health and Human Services. Elaine Chao, who was George W. Bush’s reformist Labor Secretary for eight years, is the new Secretary of Transportation.

Two businessmen will enter the cabinet. Former Goldman Sachs banker Steven Mnuchin is Treasury Secretary and Wilbur Ross, an investor in distressed industries, will be Commerce Secretary.

Going deeper into the policy weeds, Mr. Trump selected Indiana Medicaid reformer Seema Verma to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. The main Supreme Court adviser visiting Trump Tower has been Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society.

Bob Woodson, one of this generation’s smartest and most productive black conservatives, has been in to discuss with Mr. Trump how to make good on his campaign promise to champion the inner cities.

If instead of these individuals, the visitors to Trump Tower had been the alt-right activists of so many progressive night sweats, it would have been reported across the New York Times’ front page and on CNN round the clock, as if Godzilla and Mothra were trundling up Fifth Avenue.

Instead, the Trump transition has been talking to and appointing some of the most accomplished and serious individuals in Republican and conservative politics. Donald Trump isn’t pulling rabbits out of a hat. Somebody at team Trump has a first-rate Rolodex.

More #winning:

From the earliest days of his campaign, Donald J. Trump made keeping manufacturing jobs in the United States his signature economic issue, and the decision by Carrier, the big air-conditioner company, to move over 2,000 of them from Indiana to Mexico was a tailor-made talking point for him on the stump.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump and Mike Pence, Indiana’s governor and the vice president-elect, plan to appear at Carrier’s Indianapolis factory to announce a deal with the company to keep roughly 1,000 jobs in the state, according to officials with the transition team as well as Carrier.

Mr. Trump will be hard-pressed to alter the economic forces that have hammered the Rust Belt for decades, but forcing Carrier and its parent company, United Technologies, to reverse course is a powerful tactical strike that will hearten his followers even before he takes office.

“I’m ready for him to come,” said Robin Maynard, a 24-year veteran of Carrier who builds high-efficiency furnaces and earns almost $24 an hour as a team leader. “Now I can put my daughter through college without having to look for another job.”

This was one of those campaign promises the How Not to Do It Left assured us would be impossible to keep. But the Circumlocution Office failed. Leave it to the New York Times to put a “progressive” spin on the decision, and compare Trump, favorably if indirectly, to Bernie Sanders:

It also signals that Mr. Trump is a different kind of Republican, willing to take on Big Business, at least in individual cases.

And just as only a confirmed anti-Communist like Richard Nixon could go to China, so only a businessman like Mr. Trump could take on corporate America without being called a Bernie Sanders-style socialist. If Barack Obama had tried the same maneuver, he’d probably have drawn criticism for intervening in the free market.

The Muslim terrorist group Islamic State has claimed responsibility for U.S. green card holder Abdul Razak Ali Artan’s brutal car-and-machete attack at Ohio State University.

On Monday morning 18-year-old Artan drove his car through a crowd of pedestrians at OSU’s Columbus campus. He exited the vehicle and then began hacking away at people with his knife. A police officer at the scene shot and killed him. Media reports indicated 12 people were injured in the attack but none suffered life-threatening injuries. Columbus Police Chief Kim Jacobs promptly said “I think we have to consider that it is” a terrorist attack.

Sure enough, on Tuesday Islamic State claimed responsibility for the terrorist assault. The group’s Amaq News Agency stated the OSU attack was perpetrated by a “soldier of the Islamic State.”

Artan did in fact follow the express directives of Islamic State. In September 2014 the group issued this order to its followers:

So O muwahhid, do not let this battle pass you by wherever you may be. You must strike the soldiers, patrons, and troops of the tawaghit. Strike their police, security, and intelligence members, as well as their treacherous agents. Destroy their beds. Embitter their lives for them and busy them with themselves. If you can kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French — or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be….If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him….

On Facebook, Artan referenced jihadist mastermind Anwar al-Awlaki and wrote: “I am sick and tired of seeing my fellow Muslim brothers and sisters being killed and tortured EVERYWHERE. … I can’t take it anymore. America! Stop interfering with other countries … [if] you want us Muslims to stop carrying lone wolf attacks.”

As soon as details about Artan began trickling out it was obvious to anyone not wearing politically correct blinders that the attack was an act of Islamic terrorism. KARE11.com reported “Artan was a Somali refugee and Ohio State student who left his homeland with his family in 2007. They lived in Pakistan before coming to the U.S., where Artan became a permanent resident in 2014.”

Somalia and Pakistan are “two epicenters of the global jihad,” writes Robert Spencer. If President-elect Donald Trump’s proposal to place a temporary moratorium on immigration from jihadist-friendly countries had been in effect “Monday’s jihad attack at Ohio State University would never have happened,” he adds.

Under President Obama, Somali refugee resettlement has surged by an astounding 250 percent. As Jim Stinson writes at LifeZette:

Somalia is an overwhelmingly Muslim nation. Over 99 percent of Somalians are Muslim, according to Pennsylvania State University. Mass Muslim migration to Western nations in recent years has generated major concerns about cultural assimilation, vetting procedures, and, ultimately, instances of radicalization and violence.

Thanksgiving Day elicited several calls for “unity” and “healing,” following a divisive and bitterly fought presidential election. Several pundits referenced Abraham Lincoln’s wish “to heal the wounds of the nation,” which he articulated in the speech instituting Thanksgiving Day in 1863. Donald Trump said in his Thanksgiving address, “It’s my prayer that on this Thanksgiving, we begin to heal our divisions and move forward as one country, strengthened by shared purpose and very, very common resolve.”

Nice sentiments all, and one hopes they are merely feel-good rhetoric typical of holidays. For as comforting as they are for some, they reflect a misunderstanding of our political order and the foundational ideas behind the Constitution. Except in times of war or other national crises, “national unity” and “healing divisions” frightened the Founders, for “unity” historically has been the precondition of tyranny.

The Founders knew that the thirteen Colonies were diverse in their interests, religions, regions, folkways, and cultures. Modern diversicrats have long peddled the notion that Revolutionary era Americans were all “white males” unified and defined by the same interests and beliefs. Such superficial racial categories were politically important mainly when the issue was race-based slavery. But the peoples who created the United States were otherwise not so shallow and simplistic. They realized that confessional, regional, economic, and class divisions were more significant and potentially dangerous, for they are often zero-sum in their pursuit and practice, and can lead to fragmentation and violence. The Civil War was the gruesome proof that this fear was justified.

Moreover, the diversity of “interests and passions” could never be eradicated, for it reflected a flawed human nature vulnerable to ambition, greed, and the desire for power. James Madison called the political instruments of this diversity “factions,” which were “sown in the nature of man.” Hence the “checks and balances” and “divided powers” of the Constitution were the solution to the danger of a faction becoming too powerful and inciting political disorder and threats to freedom. In addition to the mixed federal government, federalism, which acknowledged the sovereign powers of the states that created the federal government, would be another check on factionalism. Clashing interests and concerns would be adjudicated by state governments, which would be more familiar with local conditions and interests, and thus better placed to create policies more suited to them.

Most important, the thirteen sovereign state governments would be a check on the aggrandizement of power by any combination of factions whether elite or populist. Given the variety of state interests, Madison writes, this diversity would grant a “greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties, against the event of any party being able to outnumber and oppress the rest.” This diversity would also impose “greater obstacles opposed to the concert and accomplishment of the secret wishes of an unjust and interested majority.” Hence such attempts to acquire a critical mass of power “will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other states” because of “the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of [the nation].” Thus liberty will be preserved, and diversity protected by creating in the states numerous diverse alternatives for citizens who find any particular state hostile to their interests or beliefs.