Caucus Resolutions Better than Letters to Congressmen

You probably remember the uproar that Henry Paulson's original TARP proposal created in the country. I remember a statement by a recently elected member of Congress that passing the TARP bailout was the hardest vote they had ever faced. The phone lines and e-mail in-boxes of Congress were burning up and bursting. This new Congress member said the letters and calls were running 50-50 - 50% No, and 50% HELL NO! But the majority voted for it anyway. Well, OK, we can excuse them for being scared to death of setting off the next Great Depression. Still, it makes you wonder if letters and phone calls are really taken seriously by our representatives in the political process.

Fortunately there is another way of communicating our wishes to our political representatives. Folks, it is time to start flexing this neglected muscle. In our state, Washington, the Democratic Party is holding legislative district caucuses in about a week. Anyone who has not participated in the process of another party can join in the fun. You don't have to have been to a caucus before or have been elected PCO or anything else to attend. All you need is to be a concerned citizen. By participating in the caucus you will provide input to the selection of candidates and the creation of the party platform those candidates will be expected to follow. The platform proposals and resolutions that come out of the caucus will be seen by the currently serving Democratic politicians as a direct read of the minds of the voting public, their voting public. The resolutions from the caucus are considered to be from the "party faithful" and will carry more weight than letters from the anonymous masses, and they are expected to heed these resolutions by the party rules. Best of all, you only need one other person to second your motion to bring a resolution up for discussion and vote.

Right now most of the Democrats in the US Senate, in particular, don't seem convinced that the American people really want effective financial regulation reform. They don't seem convinced that we are concerned about the self-serving behavior of our Central Bankers in New York. You may have noticed that when we bailed out General Motors the company was downsized and some heads rolled. What about the banks we bailed out? Are they smaller now? Did any CEOs get put out to pasture? No, the "too big to fail" banks are mostly bigger and more powerful now and their lobbyists are standing in the way of any meaningful regulatory reform legislation in the Senate. We need to let the politicians in office now KNOW we are watching and expecting them to do the right thing.