Daily Kos Community,
I would like to write today to thank you for your comments yesterday to my initial post. Your suggestions were appreciated and trust me when I tell you that I will take all of them into account. In the days ahead, I will be posting my policy positions on a wide range of issues. Today, I would like to present my position on corruption and talk a bit about how I think Democrats should deal with the issue. If you missed my post yesterday, where I introduced myself and talked about my campaign, you can read it at http://www.dailykos.com/...
There is no question that under Republican leadership our government has become a center for unethical practices. Furthermore, there is no question that the person I am running against, Pat Tiberi, contributed to and benefited from this system. This has all been at the cost of the public's trust in government and has lead to an ineffective government that cares not about the people, but special interests. My only special interest in this campaign will be the people and their ability to access the American Dream. In short, my back room deal is not with corporations and lobbyists, but with the citizens of Ohio's Twelfth District.
In order to clean up Congress and restore trust between the people and their government, I support the Honest Leadership & Open Government Act proposed by the national Democratic Party. This act would double the cool off period between when government officials could leave their jobs and become a lobbyist. In addition, this bill would toughen disclosure laws, ban lobbyist gifts and travel, require disclosure of outside job negotiations, and restore openness in the bidding process for government contracts.
I support this policy proposal because Congresspeople are representatives of the citizens in their district. Our ethics laws should require that Congresspeople's actions are open, so that they can be held accoutnable by those who elect them. It is my belief that the above proposal addresses the problems with the current culture of corruption and rightfully restores the power back to the people.
Further, I think that in discussing Republican corruption Democrats need to talk about the Medicare prescription drug plan. In my opinion, there is no greater example of Republican corruption and greed than this plan. First, Republicans knew that it would cost more than 400 billion dollars over the next decade to fund this plan, however, Republicans stopped the chief Medicare analyst from sharing the actual dollar amount with Congress. Even by withholding this information, the vote was still so close that Republicans had to keep voting open for an astonishing three hours during predawn hours. Norman Ornstein, constitutional scholar, called it "the ugliest and most outrageous breach of standards in the modern history of the House." Furthermore, in order to secure the deciding votes that they needed, Republicans turned to bribery in order to change votes, threatening members of their party with a reduction in donations for their respective campaigns.
In addition to the methods used to secure the votes, the bill was a corrupt special interests give away package. It included billions of dollars in subsidies to large corporations and forced senior citizens from government funded assistance into bureaucratic hell. The bill and its provisions were so complex that millions of senior citizens were left without necessary medicine so that Republicans could line their pockets with special interest cash.
I think Jonathan Chait of the Los Angeles Times sums it up best when he writes, "The beautiful thing about the drug-benefit fiasco is that every one of the GOP's tawdriest habits were on full display. The phony numbers, the sucking up to corporate lobbyists, the dictatorial management of the House, the fanatical partisanship -- all these are the hallmarks of the modern Republican style." The bottom line is that people know that Republicans are corrupt; this provides an example that people can relate to on a personal level. It is up to Democrats now to use this example and take back our country.