Who Does Your Representative Really Represent?

Have you ever considered who your elected federal Congressional District Representative actually represents? Or, perhaps more specifically, whose interests?

Isn't it either the House Speaker's or Minority Leader's?

Yes, you and several thousand other voters elect a Congressional Representative. And, under the Constitution, with a short, two-year term, s/he's supposed to be super-sensitive to your desires and wishes, right?

But that isn't what happens in our modern world of permanent federal legislative careers, is it?

Once stepping foot in the the District of Columbia, our elected Representatives are quickly introduced to the realities of their new job and career path. If they don't play ball with their party's 'leadership' in the House, get ready for: a lousy office, small administrative budget, no help authoring or passing legislation, awful committee assignments and, if they are really bad girls or boys, having the national and state party machinery actively recruit and run a competing candidate in the next primary. Or sit passively by and let the newly-elected Rep lose the next general election.

Right now, Frisco Nan and John Boehner hold more sway over your elected Representative than you and your fellow district voters do.

Your elected Representative's own careerist goals quickly displace her/his sensitivity to voter agendas. With both party's Representatives playing this game, voters always lose.

That's why term limits, reduction or elimination of Congressional pensions and benefits, and a check on salaries are needed to make Congress cease to be a career.

It should be a revolving door for passionately interested citizens with effective ideas on solving topical problems. Not a lushly-padded stepping stone to a federal career in which nobody ever has to listen to voters again.