Transparency in Electing Congressional Representatives

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The law of attraction is about choosing a goal and working toward it.  I believe one of the best ways of working toward a goal that involves other people is to voice your opinion about the goal and suggest ways of achieving it.  It is for this reason that I sometimes comment on areas such as politics.


With the many complex political issues we face today in the United States, it is far too difficult to determine whether or not our congressional representatives follow through on their promises. There are often many legitimate-sounding reasons when they fall short, including opposition from the opposing party. A lot of time is spent bashing the opposing party rather than discussing the issue at hand. To complicate the matter, the decisions and laws the representatives of one party put in place often require at least a few years before they take full effect. By that time the opposite party is in the majority and their excuse is that they are just trying to compensate for a poor decision made by the other party years ago. Furthermore the truth about whether or not the promises were fulfilled is skewed by the media and the public in accordance with their party bias.


There are two major items that we are confronted with and the first item cannot be determined until we resolve the second:

1) The citizens of this nation may or may not be making poor decisions in as far as electing representatives and resolving the various political issues the nation faces
2) The representatives we elect may or may not be following through on the promises they make to the citizens

The trouble with not knowing whether or not you are making the correct decisions to resolve political issues is that you cannot learn from your mistakes. The reason we do not know if we are making correct decisions is that when we tell our representative what direction we want to go in, the representative often does not follow through 100%. On the one hand, since the issues are so complex and since they need to cooperate with people on the opposing party, it could be argued that no issue of this nature could be followed through 100%. On the other hand we have no idea what the actual follow-through rate is, it could be 50% or lower. At any rate this uncertainty keeps us from learning from our mistakes.

It would appear that if we could get a handle on the second item, the first item should resolve itself through iterations of electing the wrong representatives and making the wrong decisions, paying for the wrong decisions, and realizing there are faster, cheaper, safer, etc. alternatives to the decisions we made in the past. If I were asked for a suggestion on the topic, I would probably suggest that a national unbiased analyst panel be put together to assess each of the representatives we have in congress to determine if and to what degree they follow through on the promises they make when campaigning for office. Said panel could be funded by a voluntary contribution, perhaps added at the bottom of our tax returns, similar to the line items for political party contributions. This would be a contribution I, myself, would gladly make in order to make it much easier to resolve the many issues our country and world face. Maybe those that contribute to the panel could suggest the representatives they would like to be reviewed. This could be helpful especially in the beginning when selecting which representatives to review first.

If, by chance, no one contributes to the analyst panel and we remain in the dark as to whether or not and to what degree our representatives follow through on their promises, then we, as a nation, have elected to take an uninformed approach to resolving the issues at hand. In doing so we will continue to make mistakes we cannot learn from while spending money we do not have. If we do choose to not contribute to such a panel or take any action at all toward improving the process of selecting representatives, at least it was a choice we made, and at some point in the future we may learn from our mistake.

In our present situation I do not think that all hope is lost. Instead I look at the possibility of our nation working together on a resolution as a great opportunity. I’m sure my suggestion is one of may possible resolutions available to us and eventually we will get it right, the only question is, “How much time will it take for us to get there?”

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