.
While the president of the United States of America is still considered leader of the free world, and therefore in a position to influence just about everything that crosses his path, there are two other politicians with almost as much national power, yet unlike the president are in positions that more than 99.9 percent of U.S. voters never get a chance to vote on – the House speaker and Senate majority leader.
The people in these two positions can stop any and all legislation from even being discussed, as no vote nor committee assignment happens without their approval. They are elected by their fellow politicians not to make the country an even better place to live and work, nor find a way to work in a bipartisan manner – you know, like real leaders – but to ensure their party wins. Period.
That’s what government has come to in today’s political environment, when getting key spots on popular cable news talk shows and managing the message is more important than actually passing legislation.
Democrat Nancy Pelosi is speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. She has represented California’s 12th Congressional District, which is considered 100 percent urban, since 1987. The district today encompasses most of San Francisco, which is a great place to visit but not exactly a moderate kind of town, and the smallest district by area outside of New York City only has 779,824 residents. Since the United States has 328,200,000 residents, as per the 2019 census, that means only 0.0023 percent of Americans had a choice in electing the most powerful person in the House.
While today he serves in a power-sharing agreement in the 50-50 divided Senate with Chuck Shumer (D-N.Y.), until earlier this year Republican Mitch McConnell was majority leader of the Senate. Since 1985, he has represented the 4,468,000 residents of mostly rural Kentucky, which is where my grandmother’s family hails from but not exactly a progressive kind of place. Again using the above population estimate, only 0.0136 percent of America had a choice in electing the most powerful person in the Senate.
The Constitution does not spell out the political roles of the House speaker nor Senate majority leader, and over the decades we have allowed them to accumulate way too much power. If the people in those roles can stop our local delegation from bringing bills to the floor of interest to their constituents, and they can, then voters deserve a chance to pick who they are.
Once upon a time, most candidates elected to office still realized they also represented the people who didn’t vote for them, and as a result didn’t completely ignore their wishes while at the Capitol. Unfortunately, that has become a quaint notion from another era.
The best things we can do to take back some of that power are term limits, which will stop career politicians from even getting started, and allowing “We the People” to vote on these two leadership positions.
– Publisher & Editor David Brown