I believe that the proper role of a Representative is, well, to represent. To me that means that, as your representative, I should assess and understand the full range of views from the entire district, and present all of them in Congress. It also means I should represent what goes on in Congress back to the district, acting as a kind of two-way bridge for information and ideas.
I think it’s a mistake to bring too many pre-defined solutions to the complex problems facing our nation. Instead, I will approach most issues by first outlining a range of defensible, plausible solutions, then reserving judgment until the time for exploration and debate has passed. This is akin to iterative development in engineering, one of the most powerful tools for finding the best practical solutions that satisfy complex constraints.
The primary mechanism for all this is my proposed District Advisory Council.
This is in stark contrast to the typical approach to congressional representation. What I’ve seen, in over fifty years, usually goes like this:
- Carve out some pre-determined “positions” on various complex issues, designed to appeal to “at least 51% of voters”. (That’s a tricky problem! Highly paid consultants and carefully targeted ads come in very handy here.)
- If successful, behave as if all the people who voted for you agree with all of those positions (your “mandate”), and “fight” for them in Congress (usually in line with Party Leadership).
- For the voters who didn’t vote for you (up to 49%), pretend to care, but mostly ignore them.
- Rinse, repeat.
Suffice it to say, I am dissatisfied with the typical approach, and I suspect you are too — because it’s just plain awful.
Oh, one more important commitment: I will serve just one term.
To learn more about how I plan to serve, you can watch my March 11 Launch Video below. I’ll be adding further details (and videos) as I meet with more constituents and develop these ideas further. (There’s that iterative approach again.)
So far, we have:
You can turn off subtitles/captions with the [cc] button on the video controls. There’s also a Transcript button…
To turn subtitles off…
The subtitles settings are either the “captions” button (looks like speech bubble icon), or the “…” after you hit Play. If it already shows “off” just hit “auto” and they should go away (vimeo quirk on mobile).
Transcript…
Hello.
Let me tell you a little bit about how I envision serving our district in Congress.
My main theme is it should be about communication between the district and Congress, representing the district – the whole district.
In order to do this, what I plan to do is to form a [district] advisory council.
Between 20 and 30 people selected (somewhat self-selected) through application and nomination, (there are details of the process on the site) that represent a wide range, pretty much from far to far and off to the side, various groups within the district coming together regularly to meet in civil, but in-depth discussion about the issues facing the district and the country.
My role would be to act as the go between, between Congress and this council.
The Council will bridge the divides within the district and I act as a bridge between the council and the district and Congress.
I believe representative government should be about communicating in both directions, demystifying what’s going on in Washington so that people can understand how things are happening there and why.
I don’t come to the job with a full set of answers because, again, I have an engineering sensibility, and that’s not how you solve problems, by having preconceived solutions to things.
You have to be ready to learn. There are you probably many things you don’t know when you approach a problem. You have some biases and some some ideas, but if you’re not open to understanding the trade-offs, and why people feel one way or another, it’s just headbutting and deadlock.
So, that’s what the idea of this council would be, is to listen to each other. I’ve no illusion that this group of 20, 30 disparate people is going to come to an agreement on many things, they probably won’t agree on much at all, but they will learn to understand why they disagree, and hopefully discover that the people that they disagree with aren’t evil.
Most people are pretty decent. There’re some bad apples out there, but it’s really a pretty small percentage – as they say, only one bad apple. And unfortunately we see a lot of that. And so the people have the impression that there’s just a lot of horrible people. That’s not my experience at all.
So the council is a critical part.
I am going to be forming a pilot version even during the primary. I hope to get, get eight to 10 people together, throughout the district and have at least one meeting in mid-April to late April, and maybe another meeting in May. And then try this out and then see how it plays. And then those people can reach out to their various constituencies within the district.
The the other thing I bring, in terms of how I’m serving, is: There’s a strength in being a non-partisan, which can be put very simply as I will not be whipped.
This to me is the saddest thing in Congress today. When you grow up hearing about the minority whip and the majority whip, you just sort of take it in stride. But if you stop to think about it, it’s pretty sad.
Their job is what they call party discipline, which is a polite way of saying: threatening and bribing people to vote the party line instead of their conscience. It’s really that simple.
There are plenty of representatives who would like to break with their party more than they do, but they can’t afford it. It’s too dangerous. They’re gonna get in trouble.
This is also driven by the fact that most members of Congress want to get reelected over and over. There are a lot of career politicians in Washington, in case you haven’t noticed.
That’s the other thing I bring. I’m not a career politician. I will not run for reelection. I think Congress is better served by representatives who are acting as a kind of sanity check on what’s going on.
I think the experience argument that you need people who understand the workings of Washington and years of experience for that. Well, my question for that is, how’s that working?
I’m not convinced that that’s the overwhelming argument. I think we may be better off almost closer to a jury system where, why do we have a jury system?
Well, because we’re worried about if you have an entrenched group making all the decisions, the important ones, you can have a risk of corruption. Judges do fine for many things. Plenty of cases are settled by a judge, but when it’s really important, somebody’s life is on the line. They have a right to a jury trial, which is interesting.
And so the turnover with fresh eyes and fresh voices, I think, is a good thing. And I would, instead of running again, I would spend part of the time of the two years cultivating and mentoring someone else (someone “elses”) to run the next time. I think that’s probably a better system. In any event, I don’t want to run for more than two years.
So that’s basically what I would bring to Congress in order to be able to represent the full district, is bring those voices together and take that to Congress, and bring back from Congress what’s going on there and try to explain it to everyone.
Thank you.