{"id":3508,"date":"2016-11-21T13:45:05","date_gmt":"2016-11-21T18:45:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/?p=3508"},"modified":"2016-11-21T13:45:05","modified_gmt":"2016-11-21T18:45:05","slug":"dialing-for-dollars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/dialing-for-dollars\/","title":{"rendered":"Dialing for Dollars"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"dialing-for-dollars\"<\/a>I agree with the conventional wisdom that congressmen spend entirely too much of their time raising money. Like many viewers, I cringed at John Oliver\u2019s dialing-for-dollars expos\u00e9<\/a> featuring former Democratic Congressional Committee chairman Steve Israel\u2014who described how our nation\u2019s legislators act like telemarketers, sitting in squalid cubicles not far from the Capitol to call strangers and read a scripted pitch for money.<\/p>\n

Representative Israel (D-N.Y.) was great at raising money, but he leaves Congress next month. He\u2019d rather spend his time writing a novel<\/a> and doing things other than begging strangers for money.<\/p>\n

A few weeks after Oliver\u2019s segment aired, CBS\u2019s 60 Minutes<\/i> did its own piece<\/a> on this topic. Its star was Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.), whom nobody would mistake for Steve Israel. Jolly is a conservative who opposes Obamacare and is anti-abortion. But like Israel, he hates being forced to raise money. He has introduced legislation<\/a>\u00a0to ban dialing-for-dollars.<\/p>\n

But as unseemly as dialing-for-dollars is, it\u2019s profoundly mistaken to imagine that reforming campaign finance would \u201cfix\u201d Congress, as a member of the Federal Elections Commission recently claimed….(Read more at the American Conservative<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I agree with the conventional wisdom that congressmen spend entirely too much of their time raising money. Like many viewers, I cringed at John Oliver\u2019s dialing-for-dollars expos\u00e9 featuring former Democratic Congressional Committee chairman Steve Israel\u2014who described how our nation\u2019s legislators act like telemarketers, sitting in squalid cubicles not far from the Capitol to call strangers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[160],"tags":[206],"class_list":["post-3508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress","tag-american-conservative"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pBCzY-UA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3508"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3508\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3510,"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3508\/revisions\/3510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}