On June 30th, politico.com published a story about how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi managed to get the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 passed by the House. In my opinion the article titled, Chaos and arm-twisting gives Nancy Pelosi a major win was written to show case Ms. Pelosi's leadership skills and how she managed to get the bill passed by reluctant members of Congress. However, I believe that people should read this article to get an understanding how Washington works.

You hear it all the time from average Americans that they feel like their representatives are actually representing special interest groups and not themselves. In a previous post I stated that the reason for this is that the party leaders are controlling the agenda. And this article illustrates this. The article begins at a White House luau where Nancy Pelosi and her lieutenants were going over lists of representatives that they needed to pressure into voting for the bill. Then it switches to the House cloakroom where Speaker Pelosi hung out in order to intercept House members that she targeted. And back again to the White House luau where President Obama was meeting to convince the fence sitters. Even Al Gore was brought in to continue the pressure. The article mentions scenes where Pelosi's lieutenants would surround a representative to force their vote; many of them choosing to sneak in and out of the House to avoid the harassment.

What I got from the article was the tremendous amount of pressure Pelosi and the Democrats applied in order to get their votes. I'm sure some of it was peer pressure, but I am also sure that it probably took other forms such as the targeted representative's position within the House, or their position on committees, maybe even threats about financial help for their next election, or votes on a pet project. The point is that the party leadership welds a lot of power and most members of congress are probably just going along in order to keep their job.

The idea behind Congress is that each Representative represents their constituents, and each Senator represents their State. But in todays politics, the rank and file members of Congress are just pawns to be used by the party leaders and the special interest groups. Just look at Obama's stimulus plan where members of Congress had 24 hours to read the entire bill and then make a judgment on it. The same thing is happening with other high profile, high dollar Obama bills. They are rushed to a vote before Congress or the people can read and digest just what the bill means. So how can these politicians vote on a bill they haven't read? Simple, the partly leaders tell them what to vote. This is the true example of Nancy Pelosi's leadership, this is the true problem in government.

In my opinion the only way to fix this, and give Democracy back to the people is to demand campaign finance reform. Not the kind of wishy washy reform like the McCain-Feingold bill but real reform such as publicly financed campaigns. Remember the kind that candidate Obama promised he would use until he found out that he was raising more money than anyone else. The current system is corrupt and stacked in favor of political bosses and special interests. We need public financed campaigns and only public financed campaigns.

- Thomas Paine 2

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