We, the American voters and future voters, watching the final stage of our slide into dictatorial rule-by-billionaires, will not wait for the next election. Here and now, we intervene with the President, all Members of Congress, and all potential candidates for Congress. We challenge the bad habits of all three branches of our federal Government that degrade our democracy and threaten the future of humankind. The problem did not start on January 20, 2025: The quality of our politics has been declining for decades; We offer here a new blueprint for governing.
Our first instinct is to attack the President, given his cruel and outrageous actions disrupting the lives and livelihoods of billions of people all across America and throughout the world. Our path to reform, however, begins with self-examination; we have to face up to the undeniable fact that We, The People, ever since July 4th, 1776, have committed an ongoing and historic mistake, a sin of omission that is the ultimate cause of our crisis: Our failure to demand and obtain an established process for holding our politicians accountable in public.
They get away with political murder, day-after-day, with no end in sight. The need is especially urgent now that our billionaires control the outcome of every important election, and our officeholders act like their slaves.
The Declaration of Independence laid out the basic requirement of democracy: Our original revolutionaries expressed it well – they said that Government must act only with the “CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED”. But We, the People, have never established a way to express that consent. Elections in America have never produced a genuine expression of consent; our first elections more than 200 years ago allowed only white male property owners to vote, and now that the Supreme Court has given billionaires the power to control election results, we are further from fair elections than we’ve ever been.
Worse yet, the Constitution grants all federal law-making powers to Congress, but we have no way to hold our illegitimately elected Congress Members accountable, no way to force them to provide direct responses to challenging questions the citizens need to ask in a public setting. Most Congress Members employ diversionary tactics and routinely ignore the general welfare; instead, they act to enhance the private interests of their money-soaked campaign contributors, all in order to maximize their prospects for clinging to the power of public office.
The current Speaker of the House advises his Members to not hold Town Hall meetings, and such events that do happen are tightly manipulated and controlled; they fail to provide a process that allows the people to effectively hold the politician publicly accountable.
The best way we, THE GOVERNED, can begin to express our CONSENT is by demanding a congressionally established public broadcast process for holding every Congress Member accountable in regular monthly broadcast, one-on-one conversations between each Congress Member and a constituent citizen who is at least twelve years of age and chosen by lottery from among all names volunteered. The chosen citizen would have the option to appoint a proxy – a friend, a teacher, a journalist, a scholar, a podcaster, anyone from anywhere, whoever would best express that citizen’s views. Imagine the quality of such public dialogue and the political education and reform it would provide.
Holding these conversations every month for every congressional district would be the best way to produce evidence of CONSENSUS among the people on issues of public policy. Those points of CONSENSUS, in turn, would provide our Congress Members with the most authentic expression of the CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED.
Further, in order to find out what’s happening day-to-day and decide how best to challenge our Congress Members, we need a law that allows us to hear and read every communication, oral and written, between a Congress Member (or the Member’s staff) and a paid lobbyist – this will fulfill our RIGHT TO RECEIVE INFORMATION, the right that an earlier and wiser Supreme Court recognized as the heart of the First Amendment:. For every single speaker or single writer, thousands of listeners or thousands of readers need to get the message.
The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision says that the billionaires’ money equals “speech”. Okay then, We the People have the right to (1) hear their actual speech, their pitch to our Congress Members and staff, and what our Congress Members and staff say in response, and (2) read all their back-and-forth written communications, so that we can protect ourselves against the corruption and greed that now rules the roost. The text of every such communication, oral and written, should be posted daily on the internet. Body microphones would be required for every Congress Member and staff member.
As President Eisenhower warned us in 1961: only an “alert and informed citizenry” can protect us against the Military-Industrial Complex and other evils.
Further, in order to ensure that the President is fulfilling the constitutional duty to “take care that the Laws be faithfully executed”, Congress should pass a proposed amendment to the Constitution that would impose a duty on Congress to summon the President to appear in public before a select committee that would include an equal number of Members of both houses; The President should be required to testify under oath for a minimum of eight hours per month. That would be the best way to hold the President accountable in public.
And finally, to help fix our justice system, Congress should challenge the wisdom of allowing a single judge to issue a binding decision on any question of fact or law: It is a common affliction among homo sapiens to harbor many different forms of personal bias. A modest estimate of any litigant’s chance of appearing before a judge who is prejudiced against their cause is at least one in three.
Justice would be better served if the awesome power of judicial decision-making at the trial-court level were exercised by three judges instead of one. The deliberation among the three would offer the best prospect for fair, just and unbiased decisions, and bring us ever closer to genuine Due Process of Law. It would also reduce the number of appeals to higher courts. This change, in turn, would be a challenge to the states to require three-judge panels in state courts, and act as a reminder to all present sitting judges to examine their own biases.
These reforms offer realistic prospects for establishing a genuine democracy, so starting today we will confront every potential 2026 candidate for Congress (House and Senate) to take a stand on these proposed changes to our current, disgraceful system of governing.
Please help spread the word by (1) confronting every present Member of Congress and every potential congressional candidate on these demands, (2) insisting upon immediate, genuine, unfiltered Town Hall meetings open to everyone equally, and (3) directing attention to this website: www.Voters-Intervene.org. Thank you.
Voters Intervene 