How To Vote The Bums Out

Many of you have seen the piece making the rounds on the internet the past several months that sometimes has the self-explanatory title "Vote The Bums Out." I know this because many of you have sent the piece to me. It is amusing that several in our group like the idea of the piece (i.e.; voting out all 435 Members of the House plus one third of the Senate in 2010) so much that they claim to have written it themselves or @ least boast that a close relative like "my baby brother" wrote it.

Now with Congress regularly polling in the 20% approval range for several years the thought of exercising our term limits right every two years is appealing. The problem is that we do not vote for the lowly rated Congress but rather individual Members whose constituents think are doing a fine job - so most constituents say just throw out the rest of them but leave mine alone. Incumbents get reelected well over 90% of the time - a rate just below Saddam Hussein's.

The practical problem in effecting such a plan lies in the details. We have members of our group who are Republicans, Democrats, many with no party affiliation, & one who wishes there were no parties @ all.

Lets start with an incumbent Republican & a Republican voter. In order to vote the incumbent out of office the Republican voter will have to vote for someone other than the incumbent in a Primary. If the incumbent wins the Primary the Republican voter will have to vote for a Democrat in order to most effectively vote the incumbent Republican out of office. Of course the same steps apply with an incumbent Democrat & a Democrat voter. This process is not going to be very appealing to either lifelong Republicans or Democrats. Anyone who does follow this process will vote for many people they don't like in order to vote the bums out.

A better way is to find & vote for candidates in the primary stage that deserve & have earned your vote for your vision of our country.

The great SC senator Jim DeMint has said that he would rather have 30 senators like himself than 70 like Specter. Now with only 30 you will lose every vote that comes to the Senate floor but as things keep getting worse & it becomes obvious who is to blame your 30 will become 31 & grow from there so you eventually have some substance in place. We did not get President Reagan until we went through Carter & Ford (who beat Reagan in 1976). Without them I don't know if we would have gotten Reagan who slowed the Socialist movement by over 20 years - in between we once again had no good candidates who could get elected.

In summary, I personally am for the idea of voting the bums out as described above but with the tweaking of voting for incumbents who are graded "A" or "B" by the National Taxpayers Union. This handful of politicians have done nothing wrong fiscally & deserve to have a long look @ their records rather than just throwing them out of office simply because they are incumbents. Just keep voting against any incumbent who does not have a grade of "B" or higher from NTU. It will take a while to get the desired result but the deck is stacked against us anyway for the simple reason that we are outnumbered right now as proven by the 2009 Presidential race. If the statists can keep their ground game organization going wealth creating people will never have another candidate of their choice win an election because the numbers are just not there & in fact get worse every day as more people become dependent on government handouts as we slide to the last stage of "Death Of Democracy."

This may seem like a message of despair but as one of my lifelong mentors Professor Milton Friedman said "we have to keep trying because it is just too important not to."