Politics

There are several patterns and outcomes that are fairly common in the realm of political science. Similarly, there are some subjects and points of study that are more common than others. Just a few that come to mind include the ethics of congressional staff, whether third party candidates could or should be a viable option and the demarcation that could or should exist between federal and state authority. For each of these three major examples, there will be an example given of such a thing and an analysis of the overall paradigm and question. While there are some ideas and concepts that make a lot of sense to the common voter, the people in Washington seem to be less than inclined to listen.

Analysis

One member of Congress that has been accused of ethics violations would be Charles Rangel, the former Democrat member of the House of Representatives. It would seem that he was most certainly guilty as he was convicted of a total of eleven different ethics violations. These violations ran the gamut but mostly related to fundraising violations and his personal finances. An example of the latter would be his failure to pay taxes on rental property that he owned. He had a villa in the Dominican Republic that he did not pay taxes for renting out. Beyond that, he held campaign and party functions in his rent-controlled apartments in Harlem, New York. Of the eleven charges that he was convicted for violating, the verdict was unanimous on ten of them. That trial was chaired by fellow Democrat Zoe Lofgren. Rangel is no longer in office. In terms of how much this does or does not impact the trust in Congress for the author of this response, it is tempting to say that it is “typical” or “pervasive” that members of Congress do such things. Indeed, that is not the case as most Congress members, from what is really known, do not break the law. Even so, some members of Congress (current or former) seem to break (or bend) the law without being prosecuted. One example that many would cite is Hillary Clinton.... To be fair, there are plenty of Republicans that are charged with similar crimes, if not worse. The current eruption of sexual harassment and assault charges is a good example. Both Republicans and Democrats are being ensnared by such accusations. Just a few names of candidates or current elected officials include Al Franken, John Conyers, Roy Moore (Senate candidate) and a few others. As was explained by Representative Charlie McCaul in light of what happened with Rangel, there is a hope of many that there is a new era of increased transparency, honestly and compliance. The current uproar going on in Congress, the media the corporate world would seem to be a bad thing. It is bad that people are being victimized. However, a new era of accountability is hopefully on the way. If it happens the right way, the devious and degenerates that would deign to run for Congress will go back into their rat holes (Kane, 2010).
The next primary topic of conversation to be covered in this report would be why no third-party candidate has not been successful to date. There is probably a rather long list of reasons, but there are some that stand out more than others. Before getting to that, some third-party candidates have actually done fairly well. In other cases, independent candidates have don well. For example, Lisa Murkowski lost the GOP primary for a prior election. However, she won as a write-in in the general. Something very similar happened with Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman in 2006. Lamont won the primary but Lieberman prevailed in the general election. In the 1990’s, third-party candidate Ross Perot actually did quite well, even if Bill Clinton took home the victory without a majority (Healy, 2006).

In any event, one major reason that third party candidates don’t do well is that the voters tend to stick with the two major parties. For many people, voting on a third-party is a waste and one should probably just stay home rather than vote for a third party. There are those that do “protest votes”. They presumably know that the…