The next president needs to eliminate the federal government’s administrative state, entrepreneur and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said Monday at The Heritage Foundation’s Policy Fest at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
“We don’t want to replace a left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state,” Ramaswamy said. “We want to dismantle that nanny state altogether.”
The result, he said, would be “a modern revival of 1776.”
Ramaswamy’s remarks kicked off Heritage’s Policy Fest on the first day of the RNC, which will run Monday through Thursday, when Donald Trump is scheduled to accept the party’s nomination for president a third time just days after an attempt on his life.
“Our enemy is not the Democrats,” Ramaswamy said. “Our enemy is an ideology. And our task ahead is, how do we defeat that poisonous ideology while still viewing our fellow citizens as … our neighbors, who deserve to be liberated from that ideology?”
Being a Republican in 2024 means upholding the ideals of the Founders, he said:
We’re not going to be reactionaries defining ourselves in response to what the other side puts up. We’re going to define ourselves based on the ideals this country was founded on, ideals like free speech, that you get to speak your mind openly, as long as I get to in return. Ideals like merit, that you do get ahead in this country, not on the color of your skin but on the content of your character and your contributions. That we, the people, create a government that is accountable to us, not the other way around, that the people who we elect to run the government ought to be the ones who actually run the government, not a shadow government sitting in the deep state that runs the show today.
America has a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to use the Supreme Court’s June 28 overturning of the Chevron doctrine to dismantle the deep state, he said. The Chevron doctrine required courts to defer to the legal interpretations of unelected bureaucrats in the administrative state rather than to Congress.
“What we need is a president armed with a policy agenda to go in there and actually get the job done,” Ramaswamy said. “And if we do, that’s a modern revival of 1776, itself a modern Declaration of Independence that we first fought [for] 250 years ago.”
Eliminating the bureaucracy will “revive our constitutional republic,” he said.
“This is not a left-wing idea or a right-wing idea, but the idea that we the people create a government that is accountable to us, that the people who we elect to run the government ought to be the ones who actually run the government.”
