To the people of Pennsylvania, your local leaders have a simple message for restoring our democracy:
Get informed!
Get involved!
Vote!
Get informed!
Go to the source of the information – the candidates themselves and if
not the candidates then the traditional reliable news sources that report on the
candidates. Ignore completely the self-serving, distorted and often untruthful
advertisements and leaflets of outside parties, committees and groups about whom
President Washington warned us. They are a danger to our American democracy
because they subvert the truth.
Get involved!
Talk about the candidates and the issues facing our country to your
family, friends, neighbors, co-workers. Support your candidate with money and time.
Display a yard sign to let everyone know how you feel about your candidate. Only in
this way will a candidate be beholden to the people who elected him or her.
Vote!
If you are not registered, get registered. It is easy to do online. You can also request an absentee ballot.
On September 17, 1796, President George Washington signed his Farewell Address to the nation. Among other topics, President Washington warned the American people of the dangers that can weaken our country. One of dangers that he cited was the excesses of political parties.
All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.
However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.
Today, the American people are witnessing on the national stage the slow destruction of our democracy about which President Washington warned. Representatives and Senators of both parties, although elected by the people, leave their Congressional Districts and States believing that they represent their political party as well as the political action committees and special interest groups who supported their campaigns with advertisements that inflated their accomplishments and unfairly distorted and denigrated the record and character of their opponents. It is time for the people of the United States of America to rise up and restore the democracy envisioned by President Washington and the Founding Fathers of our country. There is no better place for this movement to start than Pennsylvania, the birthplace of our nation's democracy. Who better to lead the restoration than the local leaders of Pennsylvania, who understood what it means to govern without partisanship.