  The effect of restricting the plaquette ($1\times 1$ Wilson loop) to be
greater than a certain cutoff is studied. The action considered is the standard
Wilson action with the addition of the plaquette restriction, which does not
affect the continuum limit. A deconfining phase transition occurs as the cutoff
is raised, even in the strong coupling limit. Abelian-projected monopoles in
the maximal abelian gauge are strongly suppressed by the action restriction.
Analysis of the steeply declining monopole loop distribution function indicates
that for cutoffs $c > 0.5$, large monopole loops which are any finite fraction
of the lattice size do not exist in the infinite lattice limit. This would seem
to imply the theory lacks confinement, which is consistent with a fixed point
behavior seen in the normalized fourth cumulant of the Polyakov loop.
