From what I’ve heard from people who know him personally, Elton Gallegly is a nice guy. He’s friendly, personable, and kind. One man I talked to told me how his daughter and son-in-law, on their honeymoon in Cancun, were marooned in a tropical hurricane, unable to return home until Gallegly intervened with the Mexican authorities and had the young couple air lifted out of the stricken area. Needless to say, the family was grateful.
We are used to colorful sagas of corruption and venality and sexual misconduct coming out of Washington, ferreted out by a determined muckraking press to stoke a sensation loving public. We forget there are quiet, low key, ordinary members of Congress like Elton Gallegly, members who don’t make noise and don’t make news and who even members of their own party forget are there. These Congressmen like Gallegly are forgotten, that is, until it’s time for an important vote. Then the party whips turn them out with instructions on which way they are to vote. They vote, and then sink back into obscurity until they get turned out to vote again.
My brother was, for the better part of the twenty-one years that Elton Gallegly has been a member of the House of Representatives, the Congressional Assistant to a Congressman from Iowa, Jim Leach. Leach, a Republican, lost his seat in the upheaval of 2006, but prior to that time he was something of a mover and shaker in Congress, chairing committees and writing legislation. So I asked my brother what he thought of Elton Gallegly. The response was, “Elton who?” I repeated the name and my brother said he thought he remembered hearing it before, but he couldn’t place its owner.
In contrast, when I mentioned the Representative from the neighboring 23rd CD, Lois Capps, my brother immediately responded, “Oh yes, she won her husband’s seat after he died, didn’t she? She’s very well thought of.” This about a member of the other party. And so it goes. There are a lot of members in the House of Representatives, and a lot of them have been there for years and years and years, going back election after election, keeping a low profile for Congressional session after session. It’s how Washington works. It’s why Washington doesn’t work.
Members of the party faithful like Elton Gallegly (and this applies equally to the drones of both parties) do not serve their constituents. They serve their parties. And their parties serve them, supplying the campaign funds every two years, good times and bad, while the voters in their gerrymandered districts, or some of them, stumble out to the polls every couple of years to pull the levers or mark the ballots or touch the computer screens to vote for the members of their party, members whose names they dimly remember thanks to the yard signs and bumper stickers and TV spots that party funds have purchased.
Harmless, all this friendly cronyism? Hardly. Elton Gallegly is a partisan poster boy for all that’s wrong with politics-driven government. He voted with the Republican Party for the disastrous Bush policies 94.7% of the time. Does that mean that he thought for himself over 5% of the time? It does not. The other 5.3% percent of the time Gallegly didn’t even bother to show up to vote. So he’s 100% for voting according to the dictates of his party. This means he voted for all war funding bills, but against any assistance to returning veterans. He voted yes for increasing phone taps on U.S. citizens for intelligence surveillance without court orders and no on banning torture. He voted no for disaster relief after Hurricane Katrina, no on children’s health care, no on increasing the minimum wage, and no on repealing tax cuts to oil companies.
Elton Gallegly’s only efforts at campaigning are to point to his years of experience. His experience, however, does not consist of listening to his constituents and doing his best to further legislation that is in their best interests. His experience consists only of doing what he is told, voting the way his party directs him to vote. It is this kind of blind partisanship that has brought America close to ruin. It is time not only to throw the bums out, but also to throw out the mindless nice guys who are nothing more than party hacks. It is time to elect tough, practical, intelligent candidates who will work to solve the problems we face no matter which party suggests a viable solution. It is time to elect representatives who represent their districts, not their political party
