Newsletter - April 2024

My first two good government principles, free and fair elections and providing voters essential information, focus on electing legislators that reflect our views and meet our expectations.

My third principle, commitment to problem solving, focuses on how we'd like our elected legislators to do their job. Too often politics gets in the way of producing meaningful legislation designed to address difficult problems. Remember the failure to pass the "grand bargain" in 2011, which would've shored up Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and greatly reduced our federal deficit. Or immigration reform, an issue that presidents from both parties have also failed to address, despite its growing importance to voters.

The recent bipartisan legislation on foreign aid, although a very messy and lengthy process, is a positive example of members of Congress working together to produce meaningful legislation. A big contributor to this successful outcome was respect for each other's priorities shown by members on both sides of the aisle. More on "respect" next month!

One of the recommendations that resonated with me from this article on pragmatic problem solving is to "begin with agreeing on the problem, not the policy outcome you desire." Too often, our elected representatives are more interested in promoting their agenda than addressing the problem at hand.

Effective problem solving requires defining the problem to be solved, followed by a good faith effort to solve that problem. As voters, we need to demand such a commitment from our elected officials and need to applaud and recognize those in Congress like the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus that has stated their commitment to advancing common-sense solutions to key issues facing our nation.

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It has been a busy and productive last several weeks for Speak Up for Good Government.

I was able to facilitate an introduction between Braver Angels and Voice of the People. Both organizations are doing outstanding work, and I believe there are opportunities for synergies between the two organizations.

Over at the Center for Electoral Quality and Integrity, we launched a website , which includes functionality for election officials, election experts, and voters to review and provide online feedback to our Operations System map.

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This month's social media posts:

• Information about the Problem Solvers Caucus

• An article from PolitiFact that investigates whether the current Congress is the least productive

• Bipartisan agreement on a comprehensive data privacy framework

• An opinion piece on pragmatic problem solving

Thanks for reading and sharing this newsletter with others. Have a great month!

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