A Member Of Congress Explains Why The Corruption In Congress Is Much Worse Than You Think
By Michael Snyder
TheEconomicCollapseBlog.com
March 11th, 2018
U.S. Representative Ken Buck was elected to Congress in 2014, and he recently authored a book that is shaking Washington to the core. The following is what USA Today had to say about it…
And the second-term Republican is unlikely to make many more with Tuesday’s publication of his tell-all book, Drain the Swamp: How Washington is Worse Than You Think, co-authored with Bill Blankschaen.
In it, Buck says lawmakers are mostly “fat and happy alligators who feel pretty darn comfortable in the swamp.” He casts Republican leaders as “playground bullies” who go to great lengths, including yanking subcommittee chairmanships and canceling lawmakers’ overseas trips, to punish dissenters. And he decries a “pay-to-play” system in which plum committee assignments and leadership slots are tied to lawmakers’ fundraising skills instead of their policy expertise.
One of the things that Buck has revealed that upset me the most is the fact that committee chairs are essentially for sale in Washington. Here is a brief excerpt from Buck’s book…
Here’s how it works for Republicans. If you want to serve on a committee, you have to raise money for the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC). The amount varies depending on the committee and role. For example, to serve on a B or C level committee, a GOP House freshman member must raise $220,000 every two years … Veteran members on A committees must raise more than twice that amount – $450,000 … If you become the chair of a B committee – congratulations – you’re now expected to raise $875,000 a year for the NRCC. Chairing an A committee means you must raise $1.2 million.
In order to raise such large amounts of money, members of Congress are expected to spend approximately four hours a day on the telephone raising money. This is something that I wrote an extended article about last week.
I have already pledged that I am not going to participate in that system and that I am not going to make those calls.
I believe that members of Congress should be spending their time in Washington doing what they were elected to do, and if you want to see this current system dismantled I hope that you will stand with us.
The Rest…HERE
