Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Want to know how Washington works?

Anne Eppard is a Washington lobbyist. Last year she earned $1.5 million. That’s a lot of money! But what’s truly amazing is that her lobbying fees kept coming in even after she was indicted on seven felony counts alleging among other things that she took $230,000 in payoffs to steer government contracts to special interests.

“Eppard’s experience since her indictment,” writes The Washington Post , “provides a pointed illustration of the realpolitik of the Washington lobbying world: What matters most to clients is not who you are, but who you know, and your ability to get results.”

You see Anne Eppard is a very close friend of Congressman Bud Schuster, the powerful chairman of the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee. You’ll remember that Schuster is a leading pork-​barreler whose committee was caught offering members of Congress an extra $25 million of wasteful spending in their districts in exchange for their votes on last year’s transportation bill.

Relationships like Eppard’s and Schuster’s, which compromise our government and waste our precious tax dollars, don’t spring up overnight. This one has developed over the 25 years while she worked as a staffer for Schuster. Nor do most congressmen go to Congress believing that the federal government is their personal plaything.

But sometimes, especially after almost 30 years in office, that arrogant attitude takes over. So this is how Washington works with the sweetheart deals between lobbyists and career politicians. But of course, that means Washington doesn’t work.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Remember Tiananmen Square?

The student who stood bravely blocking tanks only a satchel of books in his hand. These students’ courage was moving and so was their reverence for American symbols of freedom. They passed out our Declaration of Independence on the square. And out of crude materials they fashioned a beautiful “lady liberty” after our own Statute of Liberty.

This June marks the 10th anniversary of the crackdown on the pro-​democracy students. Chinese leaders rolled tanks over the bodies of young people asking for the simple freedom we must never take for granted. The world owes the U.S. of A. a debt for being a shining beacon of liberty. Our institutions have served as real examples to other people who yearn to be free.

But we owe it to ourselves, and the world, to protect these freedoms.

A recent Fox News poll shows a majority of Americans believe President Clinton traded national secrets to the Chinese for campaign contributions. We know the chief of China’s military intelligence funneled money to the president’s reelection fund. The career politicians’ greedy desire to win reelection at all costs is at work here.

Whether or not Clinton was aware of all the rotten activities, he clearly was concerned with raising the funds to get reelected, and everything else including the security of our country be damned. Our free society is a beacon to the world, but is U.S. policy made in China? The very question is a slap in the face to our heritage.

Thank goodness for the two-​term limit on the president.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Ask the average person if they’ve ever had to live within a budget and the answer is: “Of course.” We all have to and we take pride in being able to stretch a dollar.

But there is one group in our society that doesn’t think they should have to live within a budget. How did you guess? It’s our congressmen.

The Congress has set-​up a spending cap. Why? Well, while the politicians tell you that the budget is balanced, that’s true only when they take all the money being paid in for Social Security. And that leaves a disaster of gigantic proportions just around the corner for millions of retired folks counting on that Social Security money Congress is spending right now.

In order to prevent Congress from spending all the money coming in during these good economic times, and leaving Social Security in bankruptcy, reformers pushed for spending caps. Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska recently complained, “I don’t think we can live under these [spending] caps.” Not surprising because as a career politician for the last 30 years, he’s grown accustomed to spending all the money he feels like. Last year when a budget was passed, out went the spending caps. President Clinton demanded more spending on his pet projects and then Republicans in Congress grabbed more money for their favorite government programs.

So the President and the Congress had a food fight with our money. The interesting thing is that for the most part these are not bad men. But when they’re in Washington term after term spending other people’s money, they change. To them it’s only money ours.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath which says, “Do no harm.” Politicians should really have something like this.

When it comes to the First Amendment, they do. Our Founders took no chances in protecting the ability of citizens to speak out, assemble, petition government and communicate politically. The First Amendment guards our freedom of speech with it’s opening phrase: “Congress shall make no law …”

Our Founders knew that allowing Congress to regulate speech was like letting the fox guard the chicken coop. Congressmen were thought likely to regulate for their own advantage and against their political opponents. Our Founders were right.

It’s no accident that every so-​called campaign finance reform passed by politicians has made it tougher for challengers and easier for them to stay in office. We’ll never get real reform from careerists.

The legislation being considered in Congress would actually make it a crime for independent groups to mention a candidate’s name or show his picture. One congressman said we can’t have both fair elections and the First Amendment.

Outrageous! Safe incumbents wouldn’t know a fair election if it bit them, and yet they’re ready to destroy our rights.

There’s a better way. A recent study in California found that since term limits were passed campaign spending has gone down and been more equal than at any time in the 20-​year period studied. But career politicians aren’t interested in reform, or the facts. If they were, they would support term limits and step down themselves. Until then, maybe they better stick with the Hypocrites Oath.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Our Founders were very wise.

“The natural progress of things,” said Thomas Jefferson, “is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” That’s why they created a system of checks and balances to keep government under control and protect our freedom.

One important check is the citizen initiative. The initiative process which only 23 out of 50 states enjoy allows citizens to gather petitions to require a vote on a law or constitutional amendment. The initiative prevents legislators from monopolizing law-​making power, giving the people ultimate authority. Without the initiative, many states would never have passed campaign reforms or tax cut measures.

Legislators in virtually every state refused to abide by the popular clamor for term limits. Today, 18 states have passed term limits laws, all but one with the initiative process. But some question whether the people can be trusted passing laws directly. If the people can be trusted to elect representatives, why can’t we be trusted to decide issues?

This country’s strength has always been the good sense and the common decency of the average American, not an elite in Washington or the state capitals making decisions for us. Our founders supported a representative form of government not to keep the people out of decision-​making, but because we couldn’t all afford to abandon our jobs and travel to the capitol. The whole purpose was a government where ‘We the People’ rule. That’s why we cannot allow our legislators to hold a monopoly on passing laws.

The initiative process puts the people in charge, and that’s the American way.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Congressmen talk about the mess in Washington as if they are powerless voices in the wilderness, fighting gallantly but helplessly against the bureaucracy and other spendthrift members. Yet when it’s reelection time, they come home beating their chests about how much clout they have in Washington and how their magical seniority gives them nearly carte blanche to deliver gobs of fat pork-​barrel spending. All we have to do is look around to see that our congressmen aren’t as powerful or as innocent as they pretend.

But what about this mysterious seniority? No church group or company or civic club would choose leaders through seniority, but Congress does. Most Americans like the idea of representatives who go to Washington for a short period of time, yet politicians claim they can’t bring home the bacon without climbing the seniority ladder by staying in Washington for 20 years, or longer.

Fortunately, the facts tell a different story. True, the longer someone’s in Congress the more seniority they have, but they don’t send home more federal money. The real numbers show no correlation between the seniority of a state’s congressional delegation and federal spending in the state. What seniority does produce is an entrenched Congress full of special interest influence, and wasteful spending. Few Americans benefit.

No state or district ever gained prosperity through special favors from Washington. Seniority is a costly mirage that only shows up in the taxes taken out of all of our paychecks.

President Truman once said term limits “would help cure seniority and senility two terrible legislative diseases.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Ten years ago the partisan bickering in the California Legislature got so out of control that the legislators couldn’t even pass a state budget. The gridlock closed the government down forcing the state to give IOUs to its workers and companies it did business with.

Today, it’s a new ball game in California. After witnessing their Legislature in chaos, the good people of our nation’s most populous state took matters into their own hands. Using California’s initiative process, citizens placed term limits on the ballot.

Former Speaker Willie Brown raised 5 million dollars from big lobbyists and special interests to run TV ads against the measure, but the voters weren’t fooled. They passed term limits, sending career politicians of both parties packing. The change has been hard to miss term limits have worked wonders.

People from all walks of life are coming to serve in the Legislature, while years ago most who ran were career politicians and staffers. Women and minorities have gained positions of influence previously denied them. Budgets pass on time and the vicious partisan infighting is gone. Now that’s a brand new day for California as it is for 17 other states with limits on their legislators.

Sure, politicians, lobbyists and special interests don’t like it, because they’ve lost power. But the people support term limits even more now than a decade ago.

Shelly Bebitch Jeffe recently said: “One interesting result of term limits has been a Legislature that looks more like California, both demographically and ideologically.” In other words, term limits have given the people of California a legislature that not only looks more like them, it thinks more like them, too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

How would you like to pick a fight with someone who has a million dollars sitting in the bank to wage war against you and big connections with the federal government? Would it create any hardship if you had to quit your job?

Anyone who dares to run for Congress against an incumbent must answer these questions. It’s not just that incumbents have the money to pulverize a challenger with 30-​second character assassination TV ads. It’s more.

All at the taxpayers’ expense, they mail to voters in their district, use radio and television studios in the capitol, and have a big staff working day-​in, day-​out, for the congressman’s reelection. Even these advantages are only the tip of the iceberg.

In 1998, 98.5 percent of incumbents were re-​elected. For those in office more than two terms, the re-​election rate was 100 percent. Not a single old bull was defeated. In fact, more than 1 in 5 congressmen had no opponent at all denying voters even a protest vote. Wonder why politicians don’t listen to you?

Eric O’Keefe in his new book “Who Rules America” points out: “They don’t have to. By discarding rotation in office, we have inherited a Congress free to flout the opinions of the folks back in the district. After all, what are they going to do about it: run against the frank-​cranking, staff-​fattened incumbent? Lotsa luck.”

Professional politicians are monopolizing our political process. In the economy, monopolies cause higher prices and lower quality. Well, they wreck havoc in politics, too. The longer folks stay in Washington, the less competition they face, and the less they listen to us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

There they go again.

Career politicians in Washington are conspiring to grab another pay raise. Little do they seem to care that most of us the folks who pay the bills and the ones they’re supposed to be representing believe Congress is already overpaid, over-​perked and over-pensioned.

The base salary for a member of Congress is $136,700 dollars. That puts their take home pay in the upper 2 percent of all Americans. And while they constantly say that they could make more in the private sector, rarely do they volunteer to leave their cushy jobs.

Still, the dollar figures are not really the issue. What’s more troubling is the sneaky way they try to scam us and take us for granted. It’s not a pay raise we’re told; it’s a COLA: a cost of living adjustment.

How Orwellian!

Now they’ve cooked up a new scheme. California Congressman Bill Thomas suggests they give themselves a per diem, which would mean a cool $20,000 more a year tax-​free . One congressman says, “We won’t tackle a COLA or a per diem in or near an election year, so this must break now.” You see, they’re afraid we natives might get restless around election time.

Who in Congress will stand up to yet another pay grab? The Citizen Legislator Caucus, that’s who! This recently formed group puts the public first and opposes the pay raise. These representatives have term-​limited themselves. They simply aren’t looking to cash in on a career. Hmmmm. Citizen legislators who put our interests first what an idea!

Maybe your congressman should join up.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

The IRS estimates that the average taxpayer who itemizes will spend 22 hours this year completing tax returns. That’s 3 hours more work than last year. The increase is due to the 1,260 changes Congress pushed into the tax code in the past two years.

Mention the IRS and most congressmen will boast about the show hearings they held, finally, on Gestapo-​like abuses by IRS agents. These hearings were great for TV sound-​bites, but what about the pain and suffering we all go through with these confusing tax forms. Especially when the rules keep changing every year.

Now I’m not one to defend the IRS, but they just enforce the tax code, they don’t write it. Congress does that. Remember anyone for Congress ever campaigning on a platform of making the tax code even longer and more complicated? No, candidate after candidate calls for a simpler tax code, but Congress still votes for a more complex one. What’s going on here?

Simple, big tax loopholes are easier to hide in a complex code. Mention changing the tax code and all the lobbyists in Washington open up their fat checkbooks to make campaign contributions. That’s why the tax code is the best fundraising device Congress ever designed. No wonder Congress passed 1,260 changes costing you 3 more hours of precious sleep.

Most congressmen don’t start out putting their career and re-​election fundraising ahead of the public interest, but the longer they’re in Washington, well … When you and I are up half the night filling out our taxes, let’s remember it’s the career politicians in Congress who need to wake up and smell the coffee.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.