I finally got to be one of the people in a political poll!

I got to do one of those political phone surveys the other day when I was at my mom’s house. My mom answered the phone, but she’s pretty apolitical and didn’t care to take the time to do it. But man, was I happy to take the call. All these opinions and finally someone to share them with!

One of the first questions, and one I’m fairly certain you have to answer correctly in order to continue to the rest of the questions (since most of them concerned satisfaction with one’s current congressional representative), was “Do you know who represents you and your district in the House of Representatives?” Yes, indeed, I do: Lynn Westmoreland. I had incidentally been poking around his website just a week earlier, so I had tons of opinions to share. When I talked about this to my mom after the phone call was over and told her about this question and my suspicions that the phone call would have been over much more quickly if I’d been wrong, my mom’s response was, “Who IS our congressman?” Yeah, I was definitely the right person to take the call.

The major themes of the survey were: 1) how satisfied are you with your representative? 2) what would you have them do differently? And 3) what issues are the most important for you in deciding who to vote for?

I’m fairly satisfied with Westmoreland. I know that any representative, especially a Republican, is going to do everything in his or her power to make himself appear fiscally conservative, but in looking around his website, his positions on issues, and his voting record, I am seeing that this is truly a priority for him. And I think that’s the most important thing the person representing me in Congress can do. Conservative positions on things like abortion, gun control, separation of church and state, and other social issues are all fine and good, but it’s going to be rare to never that he has the opportunity to affect change in these areas. As far as I’m concerned, the primary responsibility of congress is to be the steward of my tax dollars. Westmoreland seems to have a similar opinion of what his job is. And so when asked about what I was most satisfied with about my representative, I cited his fiscal responsibility.

What would I have him do differently? Well, the same thing I would have all the members of Congress do, Republican and Democrat alike: fix the tax system and solve the problem of poor border security. My reason for visiting Westmoreland’s website in the first place was to find out if he was a cosponsor for the Fair Tax bill (H.R. 25) and start writing him irritating letters on a weekly basis until he was if I found out he wasn’t already a cosponsor. But the Fair Tax and getting it pushed through is one of his biggest priorities, and that makes Kristen happy. But he and the rest of the supporters of HR 25 need to get really loud and annoying and refuse to shut up about it until they get it out of the finance committees in the House and the Senate and it gets a fair chance to be voted on. That’s my pseudo-complaint number one. And my pseudo-complaint number two is the same thing about border security and illegal immigration: you know the border needs to be closed down until we can get security under control, so make that happen! Worry about what to do with the people who are already here later.

And that leads me to a digression that actually reconnects these two big issues for me. I think that the Fair Tax, in addition to being a fantastic solution to the horrible tax system and excellent way to improve our economy, is actually a really good solution to what to do about the illegal immigrants who are already here. One of the major problems most people cite about illegal workers is that they are not paying their fair share of taxes. Well, enter the Fair Tax, where EVERYONE pays taxes, since taxes are paid on purchases instead of withheld from paychecks (or paychecks from the legal workers, anyway). If they switch over to the Fair Tax, I say let the illegal workers stay the heck here. There will be good incentive to become legal citizens since it’s the legal citizens that get the prebate every month to cover tax on spending up to poverty level. If they want to go through the process to become legal citizens, good for them. If they don’t, let them stay anyway if they want to. It’s just more people paying taxes, and probably all of them paying just a little less.

They guy doing the survey was, I think, pretty entertained by me. As he prepared to run down a list of issue categories for me to choose the one I think is most important in my decisions on who to vote for and my satisfaction with my representatives, he was like, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I already know which one of these you’re going to pick, but let me go down the list anyway.” Yep, sure enough, taxes and spending is my number one issue.

Near the end of the survey, I was asked to describe my political orientation, and ended up, through several multiple choice questions, describing myself as a moderate Republican. I would call myself Libertarian if not for the moral void in several of their positions on social issues. I’m fairly moderate on social issues (the only social issue I’d consider myself extremely conservative about is abortion), but I’m a hardcore Reagan Conservative capitalist when it comes the economic issues. I’m not super happy with how the Republicans in Congress on the whole are doing right now, but I’m still happier with them than I am with the Dems. And so far I haven’t seen a Republican do something like start crying because someone was being nominated to the Supreme Court who might take away a woman’s right to kill her own baby. Yeah.