Major Parties, Major Money, Major Corruption
This is a recent extended quote from a person who worked many years in a U.S. Representative’s office:
There can be diminishing rates of return: you don’t necessarily want to respond individually to every single message that comes in. You could spend all of your time doing that, and it won’t make a big difference…
Members are always fundraising. I see it more in terms of quarters — maybe you would have more fundraisers at the end of a quarter, because you report fundraising quarterly. But for House members, the fundraising doesn’t slow down. If you’re in a competitive district — which not too many members of Congress are these days, most get reelected fairly easily — but those who are in tight seats are obligated to do a lot of “call time,” which is getting handed a list of people you need to call and ask for money. People in competitive seats may spend up to 15 hours a week on call time alone, which is pretty miserable.
That’s literally going down the list and saying, “Joe, how you doing?”
It can be that, or it’s, “We’re hosting this lunch event. We’d love for you to join. Please come to my lunch and you can pay $1000 to be there.”
As noted in this episode of This American Life, and this 2016 Last Week Tonight segment, members of Congress usually spend 25% to as much as 75% of their working day raising money. Some of this is fundraisers, where wealthy donors drop thousands of dollars for access. But the big time sink is those calls: sitting in a party office across the street from the actual Congressional offices pressuring past donors and lobbyists for money.
The lobbyists commonly organize the fundraisers, where various established interests literally say what policies they want as they hand over the money. For legal reasons there is rarely an explicit quid pro quo, but it is understood what is expected. This goes both ways: legislators will use their past support to demand contributions, implicitly threatening to stop being helpful if money isn’t forthcoming.
The members are forced to do this by the leadership of the Republican and Democratic parties, who cut them off from shared campaign resources or remove them from desirable committees if they don’t meet their quotas.
This displaces actual legislative activity, including hearings, occupying the time needed for informed votes to be possible. It creates obvious potential for corruption, and gives the wealthiest much more power to shape the information members of Congress get. It is a nonproductive arms race between the major parties that does very little to improve how informed citizens are and is actively detrimental to the quality of our leadership.
My Promise
Sitting in a secret call center shaking people down for money so your party can get more people elected to Congress who will also mostly sit in a secret call center shaking people down for money is not public service.
Representatives to Congress are paid $174,000 per year (with no IRS cut). That is in the 95th percentile: a member of Congress gets more pay than all but one-twentieth of Americans. That money comes out of your paychecks and your profits. Though it is minuscule relative to the overall federal budget, this is a matter of important principle. That pay is for the service of being a legislator: of considering, debating, and improving laws (and, in practice, assisting constituents with the federal bureaucracy, which its complexity, incompetence, and pervasiveness has made necessary). It is not for being a political party’s telemarketer or favorable-policy auctioneer.
As I am not a candidate for the Republicans or Democrats, if elected, I will not be beholden to a major party or caucus. I will not spend my days trying to extract money from honest citizens. I will also not spend my time making “symbolic gestures”, bloviating for C-SPAN cameras, or meeting with lobbyists whose every incentive is to mislead me.
Those hours that Republican and Democrat representatives waste on the phone, I will spend personally listening to and reading your thoughts as my constituents, assisting with your problems, considering your ideas, and educating myself about the bills so (unlike far too many members of Congress) I actually understand their intended and unintended consequences.
I will not delegate all of my communication with constituents to staffers who mostly respond with form emails. I will personally return calls, answer emails, and hear people out even if I disagree with them. Despite ideological differences we may have, I will represent you, by the dictionary definition, more than either Mike Carey or Don Leonard can. I can’t prove I will do this, of course, but unlike either of them, I will be able to do it.
The powerful people in Washington believe that this money has to be raised and politics done this way because they believe that you, the citizen, are too stupid and uninformed to vote for a candidate who hasn’t spent tens of thousands of dollars on histrionic TV ads. They see you as rubes to be manipulated, not thinking beings capable of rejecting the false dichotomy they give you.
I am your chance to prove them wrong.