Making a list

 

By Bill Kraus

1. A move to fix the recall provision so this expensive, divisive, extreme procedure no longer takes the place of the next election where bad ideas and their proponents can and should get their just rewards.

2. A place on the short agenda for dispassionate redistricting after the 2020 census so more of us get to cast a meaningful vote for state and federal legislators in November.

3. A competent manager, preferably one with Republican credentials, to put wheels under the new health care act. FDR found John Winant to make the almost equally confounding social security law work 80 years ago.

4. A Legislature composed of people whose objective is to give us a government that works instead of an arena for watching competing ideologies duke it out.

5. An end to six elections per year.

6. A place on the permanent short agenda for the place and kinds of guns in our country.

7. A complete, understandable report by those who spend the money we give them in fees and taxes that tells us exactly where that money is going. An itemized list would be nice if it isn’t too much trouble.

8. Election campaigns that draw attention to the competing candidates and what they hope to accomplish instead of to those candidates’ opponents and what they did.

9. A disclosure process that identifies the contributors to third-party campaigners’ organizations as clearly as the contributors to candidates’ organizations are identified.

10. A workable, economic idea for a general communication system or device that all of us use and respect to restore or replace “I saw it in the paper.”

11. More schmoozing. Less shouting.

12. More respect for the role of government in this society, the difficult job of governing, and for its worthy practitioners by those of us who elected those practitioners and by those we elected as well.

13. An occasional admission by the adherents of all sides of all causes that government is where the conundrums end up, where decisions are close calls not black and white, where no one gets their way.

14. Oh, yes, somehow in the frenzy of 2011 the idea that not having lawyers, possible adherents, and others with agendas that need judicial review fund the campaigns of Supreme Court justices got trashed. If it can’t be put back together again, then how about an appointed judiciary?

15. And a Merry Christmas to all.

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