In the United States we currently have 435 people in the House of Representatives and 100 people in the Senate. Is it too much to expect that there should be standards for that group of 535 people who go to Washington DC ostensibly to work for the 320 plus millions of Americans?
The reality is that there really are no standards for this group of people who make laws for us, who are supposed to help us when it is needed, protect us, and improve our lives and standard of living. At least that is what I think they should be doing. If they are not doing these things, what are they doing in Washington DC? Why are they there? Why did they want to go there?
Instead, what we have is candidates running for public offices who are not vetted. They run for local, state and federal elected positions. Anyone can run and be elected into this small group of people that are elevated into the important position of being public servants and work for the people they represent. There are no guidelines, no restrictions, no norms or standards for these people who are entrusted to work for the people.
More often than not, we have candidates appearing out of the blue who want to run for office. They have posters printed and posted. They have television and radio ads. They get their names out there and that’s about it. We really know nothing about them because they do not share anything about themselves, why they want to be public servants, what their personal goals and aspirations are, what motivates them to seek public office. We don’t know any of this about any of them until after they take office and then we see what they actually do.
It started long before, but especially since the tea party take over of the Republican Party that happened in 2010 and which has since morphed into the party of Trump and White Supremacy Nationalism, a lot of our elected representatives at all levels of government have been groomed and trained by special interest groups with big budgets to do all this political work. The Koch brothers, with their money, have engineered the conversion of the training of lawyers in particular in some universities to produce a cadre of workers who have been steeped in the libertarian indoctrination that suits the Koch brothers and their objectives. The Koch brothers also, for years, have financed conservative/libertarian “think tanks” that crank out workers who push the libertarian/conservative agenda in all areas of life and affect all Americans. These think tanks have created such organizations as ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, that conveniently is a group dedicated to writing legislation at the state level that further promotes and advances the Koch brothers agenda for what they want to do business-wise and to reduce regulation on their businesses and reduce their taxes and maximize their profits and income in the process. ALEC has made legislating easy for these elected officials they have groomed and helped put into public offices because it has supplanted them doing any legislative work for themselves. They simply take what is offered them from ALEC. Legislation, in states with a heavy Koch political presence is written by ALEC, taken by the elected officials they work with at the local level and made into law. Easy peasy.
There is no way that anyone or any other organization except for maybe Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates could compete with the Koch brothers in creating any kind of a political response to all of the organizing that the Koch brothers have been doing for all these decades and that are now really paying off for them. No one else except for just a few individuals has the vast sums of money that would be needed to finance their own branch of politics devoted exclusively to achieving their own economic and political goals as the Koch brothers have done.
On the local and state levels where there has been outreach and grooming done by Koch brother affiliates it may not be that the groomed candidate has gone through the formal Koch brother institutional “education” process that produces libertarian lawyers. I believe this activity has probably occurred in all 50 states at all levels of political activity. The Koch brothers have the unlimited financial resources to make sure that all the bases are covered. The candidates at local levels of government may simply be people chosen for grooming because they fit a certain malleable profile that would make them good workers for the libertarian agenda and are therefore selected for grooming on that basis. The education and indoctrination can occur later after establishing them in office to complete the process of establishing their loyalties and indoctination.
So, often we have candidates running for election and we know nothing about them except their names and party affiliation. They may provide a pithy statement to voters in the voters pamphlet but are usually completely unvetted by the press or the voters. As a rule, they most certainly do not usually discuss their reasons for running for office, what motivates them or why they want to work for “the people”. And there are no standards, guidelines or expectations.
That is how we end up with people being put into elected offices at all levels of government who say and do things that are appalling, revolting, and that demonstrate unfitness for holding any office. They take positions that attack and scapegoat groups of Americans: LGBTQ, Blacks, Women, Latinos, Immigrants, College Students, Democratic Voters.
Is it too much to ask that the 535 people who represent us in Congress actually represent us, the people, and do what is best for us, the people? Is it too much for us to ask and expect that the people who work for the people as our elected representatives to not bring their animosities, hatred, prejudices, to work with them and try to foist all of those damaged goods onto all of the rest of us? Is it too much to ask that our elected officials stop working for special interests?
Not only do we as Americans need to step up to the plate and accept our responsibilities of properly vetting and insisting on candidates openly and fully disclosing their reasons for running, their political goals and objectives and making themselves available to the voters until the voters themselves are satisfied that they have a fully vetted person before them before they actually vote for that person.
It is also crucially and increasingly important that people running for public office as elected officials know that their service will only be for a short period of time, that they should not expect to make a career out of it and not have the expectation that they will enjoy and profit from an indefinite tenure and nearly permanent incumbency.
We live in a country of 320 plus million people. We should have only the best and the brightest working for us and entrusted to make our lives better. The time of elected representatives going into politics as a career move or because they expect to make a lot of money in it needs to end.
We need to:
1. Vet all candidates for office and make sure they discuss and disclose their political views and goals and if they cannot or will not do that they should be rejected early in the process.
2. No longer accept political domination by groups such as the tea party that works for and are financed so heavily and indoctrinated by special interest money. The tea party and the Koch brothers being prime examples.
3. We have the human resources that would allow for us to continually refresh and replace our politically elected officials on a regular, term-limited basis with vibrant fresh new public servants who should be charged with creating law that is responsible, meets the needs of the people and continually improves or at least maintains a good quality of life for the majority of our citizens.
Is that asking too much?
thoughtprivacyandliberty.com 