Bill Wilson
2007-08-27 07:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

BALTIMORE -

V oter dissatisfaction with the United States Congress was already dropping like a rock before the revelation that Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif., had been charged with assault and battery for allegedly shoving a female airline attendant when his luggage didn’t come out fast enough.

Sadly, Filner’s fury is only the latest manifestation of a growing Congressional contempt for the citizens it represents. And while it may not be as egregious an example as the $90,000 in cash federal agents found last year in the freezer of recently indicted Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., or the far-reaching abuses unearthed during the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, it is nonetheless symbolic of the same “do as I say, not as I do” mentality sending Congressional approval ratings to an all-time low.

Thankfully, however, there appears to be a limit to the contempt a system can dish out to its subjects before it begins to receive the same in return.

We’re beginning to see the backlash now, as the summer months have brought with them a fresh batch of political scandals — most notably the saga of powerful Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, whose home was raided in July as part of an FBI investigation into yet another bribery scam.

According to the results of a Gallup poll conducted from Aug. 16-19, only 18 percent of Americans currently approve of the job Congress is doing — the lowest rating since Gallup began tracking Congressional approval in 1974 during the Watergate scandal.

Even President Bush’s anemic job approval rating — which sits at 32 percent — looks robust compared with Congress’ abysmal support among the public.

Simply put, Americans do not trust their government.

Cash in the freezer. FBI raids. Shoving airline attendants. Honestly, who are we dealing with? The Mafia or a democratically-elected government?

Even as it passed a so-called “landmark” ethics reform bill this summer, Congress still refused to address the heart of the “trust issue.” Rather than insist on real transparency in the way it spends taxpayer dollars, as Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., and others insisted that it do, Congress instead preserved the eminently corruptible practice of “earmarking,” or anonymously attaching secret pork barrel spending items and legislative pet projects onto larger bills.

Not surprisingly, the passage of this massively mediocre reform bill did nothing to halt the precipitous decline in public trust.

Fortunately, the one silver lining in this cloud of taxpayer waste is that the time is finally ripe for long-overdue reforms.

With the public all but unanimous in its disdain for the status quo in Washington, D.C., it’s time for voters to take the next step and rally around a positive platform that will end once and for all the special interest stranglehold and resulting scandal factory engulfing our nation’s capital.

By endorsing term limits for legislators and demanding that Congressional leaders impose the same draconian restrictions on their own conduct that they impose every day on the conduct of citizens, businesses and local municipalities in their districts, perhaps the playing field can truly be leveled and America’s confidence in the fairness of its government can truly be restored.

Now more than at any point in its history, our country needs a steady rotation of principled, taxpayer-conscious citizen-legislators bound by a transparent, loophole-free code of conduct.

Now more than ever, we need term-limited government leaders who recognize the simple, unalterable truths that their money is our money, their openness is our freedom and their responsibility is our future.

Given the universal acknowledgment of how miserably the current system of graft and patronage has failed on each one of these accounts, it would seem now that whether or not we finally get the government we deserve depends only on how loudly we insist on it.

Bill Wilson is president of Americans for Limited Government, a non-partisan advocacy organization dedicated to restoring Constitutional principles and restrictions on government power.