Freshman senator Ron Johnson stressed the need for more “citizen
legislators” like himself at a press breakfast hosted by The
American Spectator and Americans for Tax Reform this
morning. Johnson explained that the lack of decisionmakers with
experience outside of politics has been the aspect of business on
the Hill that has surprised him the most since he rode the Tea
Party wave into office.
Explaining that most Congressional staffers are “fine young
people” just a few years out of school, Johnson wished that they
could understand the “wonder and power of the free market
system.”
“You don’t really understand how powerful the free market system
is until you lose an order by just a fraction of a percentage,”
Johnson said. “Until you lose a customer because you missed a
delivery by a day, or six hours. That teaches you something. Living
a life teaches you something; having a family teaches you
something.”
Johnson is as close to a pure citizen-statesman as can be found
in the U.S. Congress. He ran a plastics company in Oshkosh and
never thought of doing anything else until he attended a Tea Party
event in Madison in late 2009. Johnson recounted that he didn’t
even discuss the possibility of running for office against the
incumbent Democrat Russ Feingold until January of 2010. Even then,
he wasn’t sold on the idea until the legislative battle over
Obamacare, during which he heard Barack Obama “demonize” doctors by
suggesting that they perform unnecessary procedures for their own
profit.
Johnson has a special respect for doctors and their work. His
daughter was born with a heart condition that would have proved
fatal had she not undergone two cutting-edge — and expensive —
procedures. Today his daughter is herself a nurse, studying to
become a nurse practitioner. On hearing Obama criticize the high
payments doctors command, Johnson made the decision to run. With
the help of the Tea Party and the advantage of taking Feingold “by
surprise,” he found himself elected to the U.S. Senate a few months
later.
Since then, Johnson has approached his role with a businessman’s
attitude. He’s prioritized regulatory reform by opposing many of
the Obama administration’s new rules and supporting measures like
the REINS Act, intended to permanently slow down the pace of
regulation. He wants to keep taxes low to free up “job creators” in
the private sector. And his vision for real health care reform
centers around the need to “reconnect the consumer of the product
and the payment of the product” to keep spending down and quality
up — just as happened when he introduced consumer-driven health
care plans for his own employees (the plans included health savings
accounts and high deductibles).
Coming straight from the private sector allows Johnson to admit
he doesn’t have all the answers. “You face the expectation that
you’ll be an expert on everything, and you simply can’t be,” he
shrugged when asked if he’d had a hard time learning about policy
issues as a new senator. “A billion-dollar business is huge. There
are things going on within a billion-dollar business that, trust
me, the CEO has no idea about. So you get here without ever being
involved in politics and deal with a $3.6
trillion entity, and there’s an awful lot of things
you don’t understand in great detail.”
To reform regulations and rein in spending, Johnson wants to see
more private citizens follow his path and become active in
politics. Not that he thinks it will be easy — he praised the
enthusiasm of Tea Partiers who sacrifice the time and effort to get
involved with government at all levels, and warned that others
would have to make similar sacrifices in order to change the
direction of U.S. politics. He couldn’t help but note that he “had
a good life in Oshkosh” that he had to leave behind to come to
D.C.
