When the will of the people is silenced by the clatter of money, it should set of an alarm

Lisa McCormick is talking about a study by some Harvard guys. who looked at 25 years of what happens after a bunch of people get shot dead in this country. You’d think the politicians would make it harder to get a gun, right? That’s what you’d think.

But the study says no. The politicians, mostly Republicans, see the blood on the floor, and their big idea is to make it easier to get a gun.

They pass more laws to let you carry it, buy it, stick it in your belt.

After the kids got killed in Parkland, Florida’s big move was to figure out how to get more guns into the schools by arming the teachers. The math on this is insane.

The GOP introduced 50 percent more of these bills. They passed 120 percent more of these insane ideas into laws. It’s like seeing a house on fire and deciding to pour a gallon of gasoline on it because the guy who sells gasoline gave you a campaign contribution.

McCormick is an ordinary woman from New Jersey who’s been yelling about this stuff for years; she gets it. She’s not surprised. She says the whole thing is rigged.

You can have 60 people out of 100 in this country wanting something, but if one guy with a checkbook wants the opposite, the guy with the checkbook wins every time.

The politicians feel the money, but they don’t feel the people.

Then she starts in on the Supreme Court, which just made it harder to nail a politician for taking a bribe. They said there’s a difference between a straight-up deal and a “thank you” gift after the fact.

When a mayor in Indiana got $13,000 from a truck company after they got a million-dollar city contract, the high court declared that’s not necessarily a crime.

It’s all lawyered up, but on the street, you know that you’d call it a bribe.

"We need leaders that are employed by the people of NJ, not millionaires," said Senator Any Kim, in a social media post taking a jab at Jack Cittarelli's lieutenant governor running mate, but the notion applies across the board.

McCormick tells us that things are worse than you think: "It's 89 seconds to midnight, but our political system is broken. Americans must rise to the responsibility of citizenship!"

She says some people in politics are pushing for disclosure laws. They want to just make the contractors admit they’re buying politicians, or have the politicians tell us who paid them off.

Just tell people who’s paying. She laughs at that.

"You don’t stop a robbery by making the thief wear a name tag," said McCormick. "You stop it by making robbery illegal and throwing them in jail."

She wants to outlaw the whole stinking system. You might imagine this is a popular idea. Wrong again. McCormick is the only person in New Jersey who has publicly said we should "outlaw bribery," and she is often discounted or disparaged as a gadfly, a perennial candidate, or a loser.

But who is the loser when voters reject the one person on the ballot who is making sense?

McCormick’s talking about another study, from Princeton and Northwestern, that said we’re not really a democracy anymore. We’re an oligarchy.

The rich guys run the show. That’s how you end up with governors from Goldman Sachs and a reality TV star in the White House. The money talks so loud that nobody can hear the voters anymore.

So that’s the diagnosis. The patient is sick, and the disease is money. And in the twisted logic of this town, a classroom of dead children doesn’t mean you tighten the gun laws. It means you loosen them, because that’s what the guys who write the checks want.

And what they want, they get. It’s that simple. McCormick’s prescription for this is as simple and straightforward as the rest of her platform.

She says you ought to get out and vote, and if there are no good candidates, then you ought to run for office. She says you must make sure there are valid choices, and volunteer or contribute to help make everyone else know who they are.

The Greeks have a word for this kind of people power. They call it 'democracy.'