The Gazette Opinion StaffOpinion Page Editor, The Gazette |
|
Email the author
Let’s appoint some independents
We’re learning to vote in blocs in this presidential election year, when we could be voting for new ideas.
My relatives call me a Democrat because I have new ideas, which I consider to be amusing. The late Frank Nye, associate editor and political writer at The Gazette, registered as an independent so that folks who checked his voting status would find that he was nonpartisan.
In my previous life, I was an independent journalist. I wrote a political public opinion column this time of year called, “What’s What Out on the Acres.”
My point is that we don’t listen to new ideas. We categorize ideas as being either a Democrat idea or a Republican idea, which causes me to think that we should involve independents more in the political process. If you’re fed up with both the Democrats and the Republicans, you can still be heard if we had an independent voice in government.
How about nonpartisan commissions and offices in the Congress and state legislature? Why not appoint independents to legislative and congressional committees? Nye was never able to have an impact on legislative developments because he was a registered independent. Wait, didn’t he have the great idea to switch the state legislature from area representation to representation by popularity? That shows that independently minded folks have great ideas. They should be heard.
Next time when we organize government, let’s appoint some independents. Too often party bosses require appointees to vote party lines when they could be independent thinkers.
Al Swegle
Cedar Rapids
-u20042.png?1366232523)
Oklahoma tornado death toll currently 24, not 51, medical examiner says
Iowa City debates whether police officers belong in schools
Southeast Cedar Rapids shooting under investigation
Linn County casino campaign cost $3.43 million, final figures reveal
Severe storms blow through Eastern Iowa
Interactive: Shelter from the storm
Interesting idea, but the elected partisans are the ones who get to “appoint” folks. Why on earth would they undermine their own influence by choosing people who might not reliably hew to the ruling party’s ideology?
There’s a reason political parties were anathema to many of the founding fathers. Our system–a corporate controlled duopoly–is a sham.
Yes, and for the last several election cycles the two parties might as well have had the official names of “Awful” and “Much Worse”.
Our Founding Fathers may have disliked political parties, but they set up a winner take all based on geographically defined districts that made our current two party system inevitable. That representation is based on where people live rather that what their interests might be also made inevitable the concentration of power in the propertied class. That last was intentional.Just look at who had the right to vote in 1790 versus who did not
It took nearly two centuries to extend the right to vote to all citizens. And it looks like Republicans are serious in their loyalty to original intent and are trying to take the vote away from us along with everything else.