Bipartisan citizen initiatives can work in Congress

If I were to promise inspiring stories of citizens just like you working with Congress in a bipartisan way on big issues, what would you think? Not a chance! Impossible!

Well, here goes. Three real-life examples. You decide.

I recently attended the American Promise Conference in Washington, DC. American Promise is working to enact a 28th amendment to the Constitution that would overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision which gave human constitutional rights to corporations and struck down a century of laws that provided limits on campaign spending. Eight out of 10 Americans agree that our political system is out of control with billions of dollars pouring into campaigns from corporations, unions and the wealthy. Rep. Ted Deutch, D-West Boca, brought three students who’d attended Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and who spoke at the conference and on Capitol Hill.

During the first Lobby Day three citizens from Wyoming, who had led in gathering 15,000 signatures to get this issue on the Wyoming ballot, had a joint meeting with their U.S. Senators, John Barrasso and Mike Enzi and their staff along with U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney and her staff, all Republicans, all in the same room together discussing what to do about the avalanche of money in politics. No protests. No sit-ins. Just a first conversation, no more or less valuable than the protests.

Earlier in June I attended the Citizen’s Climate Lobby conference. I’d been to all nine of their annual conferences and Lobby Days including the first one in 2010 attended by a mere 25 people. This time it had grown to 1,400 participants and 1,200 went to Lobby Day. Thanks to the CCL lobby visits membership on the bipartisan House Climate Solutions Caucus led by Reps. Carlos Curbelo, R-Miami, and Deutch has grown to 42 Republicans and 42 Democrats when three years ago you couldn’t have gotten one Republican to put their name on anything with the word climate in the title.

In July I’ll attend the RESULTS conference in Washington, D.C., where the Sun Sentinel’s editorial page editor Rosemary O’Hara will receive the Cameron Duncan Media Award given each year to a journalist or editor for outstanding work on issues related to poverty. For 34 years RESULTS has played a lead advocacy role in the steep decline in child deaths around the world from 41,000 child deaths a day in the early 1980s to 15,300 daily child deaths today. When President Trump took office the maternal and child health account, which has contributed mightily to that progress, stood at $814.5 million. After the President called for a cut in 2018 of $65 million, or 8 percent, RESULTS volunteers enrolled 142 House Republicans and Democrats in signing a letter to the lead appropriators asking them to reject those cuts. Earlier this year Congress agreed and actually increased funding by 2 percent instead.

Why not join in and make history?

Sam Daley-Harris founded the anti-poverty lobby RESULTS in 1980 and Civic Courage in 2012 and is the author of Reclaiming Our Democracy: Healing the Break between People and Government.