'Tis the season for zombies, ghouls and ghosts, our little ones swaddled as oversized pumpkins and our adolescents as chilling horrors. Soon, all that gothic shuffling and calls for candy through mummy-wrapped mouths will come to a close for most of America.
But not in Washington, D.C., home to the nation's capital and ground zero for a zombie-lawmaker outbreak. There it's zombie season year-round.
It's a frightening proposition outsiders have long suspected: shuffling aimlessly through the halls of Congress, these lawmakers consume sound reforms and brains alike. There is no cure for the infected and the nation's sole recourse is the daunting exercise of replacing the diseased and insuring that we do not send to the Capitol a new or recycled crop of the undead.
Enough with the Halloween kitsch. But the sad truth, the unvarnished reality that only reformers are willing to tell you, is that it's tough to differentiate between the animated corpses of the screen and many of the men and women elected to represent us: both have simple and perverse agendas that rely on others as currency. A duped voter or an abdominal aperitif, it's all the same to these users.
In fact, a majority of voters actually prefer the blood-hungry creatures of The Walking Dead and Zombieland to the current Congress. One poll earlier this month found that a plurality of registered voters prefer real zombies over the pseudo variety haunting Washington today. (Even mother-in-laws and the DMV also outpolled Congress.)
We need fundamental change in Washington. Like the definition of insanity, we cannot keep making the same mistakes on whom we elect and expect different results. Far too many of today's legislators, like those that preceded them in years past, are there not to restore America's greatness but to satisfy a spotlight compulsion. We deserve better.
The best indicator of future behavior is past performance. In voting, a simple truth is borne of this truth: if you want someone to fix a problem, choose a problem-solver willing to topple tables.
For ten years in the Georgia General Assembly, I strove to be a problem-solving conservative reformer. After decades of Democratic rule in the Peach State, after all, there was much work to be done: tightening a lax immigration regime; reorganizing taxes; expanding school choice; protecting the sanctity of life; working towards free-market health care solutions; protecting the Second Amendment; working for criminal justice reform; and defending the helpless victims of human trafficking.
It was a daunting agenda, but it was the program on which I was elected. The U.S. House could use much of the same and it's the principal reason I'm running today.
Now is the time to boot our zombie-lawmakers, to find worthy replacements who will solve problems rather than create them. Now is the time to end the era of aimless congressional grunting and move towards one of progress.