Dialing for Dollars

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What do you think your member of Congress does all day?

Study legislation?

Meet with constituents?

Work with other members of Congress to solve problems?

They do.

But our political system demands something else from them:

It is called “dialing for dollars.”

Members of Congress have described spending hours each day in party fundraising facilities near the Capitol, sitting in cubicles and calling potential donors asking for campaign contributions.

A model schedule presented to newly elected members of Congress recommended:

By comparison, the same schedule allotted only two hours for committee work, floor votes and constituent meetings.

Former members have described fundraising demands reaching 20 to 30 hours a week.

Think about that.

We elect someone to Congress to represent hundreds of thousands of citizens — and then place them in a political system that can require them to spend a substantial portion of their working lives asking a comparatively small number of people for money.

And then we expect those relationships not to matter.

THIS IS THE SYSTEM WE BUILT.

The tragedy isn’t simply the time being wasted.

It’s what that time could have been used for.

• Understanding healthcare.
• Studying the national debt.
• Improving education.
• Working with members of the other party.
• Meeting with constituents.
• Reading legislation.

Instead, hours can be spent doing something that has almost nothing to do with the job citizens elected them to perform:

That’s not good for Republicans.

It’s not good for Democrats.

And it certainly isn’t good for the American people.

Public financing offers us the opportunity to change that.

Stop making our representatives spend their time begging private interests for money.