ACCOUNTABILITY

30 + years ago I considered starting an organization called The Conscience of the Congress Committee. My vision was a group that would record and monitor the promises candidates make during their campaigns, and then compare those promises to their actions, speeches, and votes after being elected.

If there was a major discrepancy between what they’d said before the election and what they’d done after, we’d call them out and let voters know they’d been taken.

We’d hold politicians accountable.

It’s still important. It’s still not being done. And we see the disastrous results all around us.

Politicians lie to us. They promise “Medicare For All,” but refuse to tell us where the 32 trillion dollars will come from to pay for it other than “tax the rich.” The truth doesn’t actually matter to them or they would admit that even if they took every dollar the rich makes, it still wouldn’t pay their Medicare-for-all bill.

And NO ONE who promotes this policy is telling us the truth about how Medicare UNDER-reimburses health care providers. They refuse to consider how many doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and technicians would move to other professions, or serve only private patients who could pay cash, once they took a huge hit to their incomes. They also won’t admit that under their plan the enrollment in medical students would dry up faster than a draught in California.

Politicians hide from us. Yes, they hide the evidence of their wrong doing, special perks, and personal exemptions to protect themselves from their own constituents and from the very laws they subject the rest of us to.

They exempt themselves from subpoenas, the Freedom of Information Act, protection for whistleblowers, and various other rules.

They skirt around Obamacare by claiming they qualify to buy insurance from the Small Business Health Options Program — designed to help small businesses with fewer that 50 employees supply health insurance — even though employ thousands of staffers.

And unlike the rest of us who have to work and save for our retirements, Members of Congress receive 80% of their salary for life after only 5 years in Congress.

Worst of all, we know Congress has spent millions of our tax dollars to pay off the victims of sexual assault thanks to legislation signed by Bill Clinton. But they won’t tell us how much they’ve paid or who the guilty members are. Our money, our Representatives but we are kept in the dark. Shameful!

Politicians spin to us. You have probably heard more than you ever cared to during the Kavanaugh hearings. High school drinking parties. Yearbook antics. Teenage flatulence. You’ve also heard allegations of sexual assault assumed to be true despite not one (repeat, not one) hint of evidence or corroboration. It’s the new Rule-of-Leftist-Law that now in America truth is determined by gender and the accused must prove innocence rather than the accuser proving guilt.

It doesn’t matter that Brett Kavanaugh had been endorsed by scores of legal scholars — liberal and conservative. It doesn’t matter he’d received the highest possible scores from the American Bar Association and other professional and academic legal groups. Or that dozens of women who have worked with him, for him, and around him have attested to his unassailable character and exemplary treatment of women. Or that he’s written over 300 rulings as a judge that have been praised by other jurists and legal scholars for there mastery of legal knowledge and perception. Or that he’s delivered more than 1 million pages of documents to the Senate at their request — more pages than ALL the other nominated judges to the Supreme Court COMBINED!

So where do you start in holding politicians accountable who habitually lie, hide, and spin? I’m not sure, but we better damn well start. Because they’ll say whatever they have to in order to gain and keep power. And if we’re not paying careful attention, they’ll get it and keep it at a very dear cost none of us will be able to pay.