America's Political Class: In Business for Themselves?
by Holden Watch
The American people correctly see members of the political class to be in business for themselves. An informed electorate is bad for business, so national politicians will keep us in the dark as long as they can get away with it.
It doesn't usually start that way for most politicians, though for some it surely does. For most of the rest of them, though, time is their - and our - enemy. It's time that turns them against the citizens they represent by encouraging them to focus on themselves. Public service becomes self-service.
Washington D.C. is not like anywhere else in the world, and, certainly, like nowhere else in America. It's a swamp. It sucks people in. It doesn't matter how smart, altruistic or committed they are when they arrive there, the longer anyone stays in the swamp, the more they lose touch with reality. It happens to those who aren't elected politicians, too - media, consultants, lobbyists, staff members, everyone is susceptible and almost no one is immune.
This phenomenon is the most compelling case for term limits.
Sadly, the swamp-dwellers are not going to drain the swamp. They become powerful, happy and prosperous there.
Draining the swamp is a job for voters. Without an applicable law, so is term-limiting their politicians.
At the end of his current term, Tim Holden will have been in Washington for eighteen years. He has been slopping at the public trough his entire adult life, first in Schuylkill County, then in Harrisburg, and, now, in Washington. Holden is in the swamp up to his eyeballs, but, despite his tenure in a seniority-driven system, he has established no legislative record, assumed no significant role in his party or in Congress and returned nothing to the district that any rooky politician could not.
Holden has taken on the worst of Washington and returned none of the benefits the district expected when they sent him there.
Though Holden has claimed bringing home the bacon to be his highest responsibility as a member of Congress, we believe good, responsible governance to be his highest calling. Holden voted for the huge, failed stimulus bill, the about-to-fail auto industry bailouts and for a budget resolution that assumes trillion dollar deficits for at least a decade. That's trillion with a "T," folks.
Every federal dollar Tim Holden boasts about returning to the district is borrowed from the Chinese and other foreign investors, and it will be repaid - if it is possible to repay such massive debt - by future generations of Americans, many yet to be born, Americans who will hope to find jobs when they mature. But for every one of them who are fortunate enough to find jobs, Tim Holden and his colleagues in Congress have already determined how the first five to seven months, perhaps more, of their annual earnings will be spent.
Think of that for a moment. Ponder it. Many millions of unborn Americans have already been burdened with immense debt by the people in Washington today.
Tim Holden is still in Washington. We don't think he deserves to go back.
A simple cost/benefit analysis argues against returning him. We can't afford Tim Holden.
Neither can our kids, our grandkids or their offspring.