One of my favorite Senators, Michael Bennet (Colorado), has an absolutely phenomenal proposal to reform Washington. I wholeheartedly endorse it. Here’s a link. We have so many challenges to face as a country. Yet, as an institution, the legislative branch has lost the faith of the American people. We need to take strong action to prove to the American people that it can function and serve us once again.

The highlights:

Salaries, Spending, and Perk
Freeze congressional member pay until there are 4 quarters of job growth
Freeze congressional office budgets until there are 4 quarters of job growth
End the health care subsidy for Members of Congress until health care reform passes and eliminates discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, doesn’t cut guaranteed Medicare benefits, increases coverage, and is fully paid for
Require full payment for the seat and disclose of those traveling with a Member of Congress on a charter jet

Lobbying Reform
Put a lifetime ban on Members of Congress becoming lobbyists
Ban congressional staff from lobbying their former boss for 6 years
Ban former committee staff from lobbying their former boss or any member of the committee who was active during their time on staff for 6 years
Ban lobbyists from joining congressional staff or committee staff for 6 years
Create stricter rules for lobbyist registration
Institute penalties for failing to register as a lobbyist

Earmark Reform
Ban earmarks to private, for-profit companies and institutions.
Make earmarks transparent
Members of Congress must report all earmark requests they receive and all earmarks requests made
Earmarks.gov should list all earmarks requests, sortable by member of Congress
Hold Members of Congress accountable on earmark requests
All earmark requests above $1 million should go before the Appropriations Committee
Hold earmarks recipients accountable
Each year, a certain percent of all earmarks will be audited to ensure that taxpayer money is being spent wisely. These reports should be made public on earmkarks.gov

Reform the Floor
Eliminate anonymous holds
Require holds to be bipartisan. If not, the hold expires in 2 days. Even bi-partisan holds expire in 30 days.
Reform the filibuster in the Senate
After 3rd failed cloture vote, the minority must find a member of the opposite party or the threshold raises to 45 votes.
After the 3rd cloture vote, if the majority finds support from three members of the minority, it raises to 45 votes.
End the filibuster for motion to proceed
Require 41 Senators to show up to vote in order to block cloture, or else it’s invoked

Campaign Finance Reform
Support the Schumer/Van Hollen campaign finance bill, which would require Chief Executive Officers to stand by their ads, quick disclosure and sunshine rules, restrictions on foreign corporations and TARP recipients, and codifying coordination rules.
Support a constitutional amendment allowing Congress to regulate contributions and expenditures.

Evan Bayh, senator from Indiana, recently announced he would not seek reelection. Apparently this has freed him to now say what he thinks and potentially become an extraordinary senator in his remaining 11 months. I suspect if he continues to not demonize and instead speak out with common sense against the obstructionist and harmful policies that plague our government he will be celebrated.

This is a link to an editorial where Sen. Bayh talks about the corrosive impact of excessive partisanship and campaign finances along with obstructionist Senate traditions that have been abused. I highly recommend you give it a read.

Among the key points that I wholeheartedly agree:

- Congressman should make a far larger effort to spend time together instead of just demonizing each other. We should demand this from those asking for our votes as well.
- Inch towards comprehensive campaign finance reform (I’ve mentioned in the past)
- Modifying the filibuster to prevent it’s rampant abuse to obstruct the basics of government

The challenges we face today are great. However if those steering the ship are not even having civil, constructive discussions it is difficult to even begin the work needed to get our country back on track.

Why can’t we get anything done? Well extreme partisanship is certainly one of the reasons. News that a “hold” has been placed on 70 of the President’s nominees is certainly disappointing.

Even more so when you note that the same Senator issued this in a press release in 2005:

As a U.S. Senator, I believe that the review of judicial nominations is one of the most important responsibilities of the Senate, and I firmly believe that each of the President’s nominees should be afforded a straight up-or-down vote. I do not think that any of us want to operate in an environment where federal judicial nominees must receive 60 votes in order to be confirmed. To that end I firmly support changing the Senate rules to require that a simple majority be necessary to confirm all judicial nominees, thus ending the continuous filibuster of them.

The best part is that the Senator is apparently holding out for billions *more* in pork for Alabama. He took a play out of his Nebraska colleague’s playbook and then seemed to multiply the dollar amounts by a few factors. Wow.

Say what you will, but this speaks volumes for their belief in their American people’s ability to get punched in the face and take it.

if you have an hour. This is definitely worth watching. Highly recommended. It’s from Lawrence Lessig, of whom, I’m a big fan. You can watch some of his other stuff here.

One of the most common gripes about our government is that it’s not efficient. It costs too much to do things that are not done well. One of the main focuses of my policy platform is a focus on legislative responsibility. Specifically this means spending less money and actually improving the service we get by holding these programs accountable. Like the private sector you must achieve your metrics *and* stay on budget. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s how almost every major company from P&G, GE, to Google is run. Mandating that all government programs declare specific success metrics, whether customer satisfaction scores, revenue goals, etc and then reporting quarterly on how they are tracking to this goal, with all of this publicly available on the Internet, will shine a light on what’s working (and what’s not).

An example I’ve used is the IRS. What if they were held accountable based on how painless the process was for customers (us, the taxpayers), and how accurate the results were (fewest errors and money left on the table that should have been collected)? It never made sense to me that employers and financial institutions already send a copy of our tax statements to the government, yet we have to re-enter all this information. Why couldn’t all of this information automatically be filled into a form when I log in? Then based on the information I entered last year (number of dependents claimed, etc), why can’t I be presented with a few questions and then be offered the opportunity to just accept the return as is or make a few minor changes? Well, today the NYTimes asks the same question. As taxpayers, it should be kind of insane to us that TurboTax and the like can all make simple web interfaces asking user-friendly questions, but somehow the IRS can’t do this? This should be unacceptable. Automating this process would allow the IRS to focus their employees on finding tax-cheats and off-shore hideouts, etc (which bring in *more* revenue) and the rest of us would all be a lot more sane since the tax process would be a lot simpler.

To boot, this article also makes a great point. What if we rethought our systems from federal to state level and allowed a company to re-architect it from the ground up? Having a state-of-the-art IT backend to the federal and state governments would be a tremendous competitive advantage for speed and better service for companies. As we wake up to the reality that the US is indeed competing with every other country in the world to house companies, these things will increasingly matter more.

We’ve been engaged in the same pointless “debates” for years. Less government– cut it all! Slash, slash, slash! There are never concrete plans as to how to practically do this. Well, if we’re serious about controlling spending, we should be focused on improving the value we get from every government dollar we spend today. We can drive down costs on what’s working (while making it better) and stop funding the programs that are failing miserably by hiding in the corner. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and it’s time we bring our government spending out into the public eye, objectives, results, and costs all.