Rep. Ken Buck tells of "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV that corruption in Washington has reached a fever pitch and must be reversed.
"We have to make sure that we reduce the kind of corruption that we have in D.C.," Buck, author of "Drain the Swamp: How Washington Corruption is Worse than You Think," said Wednesday to guest host Bill Tucker.
"I think the fact that you have to pay money to be on certain committees and to be a chair of a committee and in leadership, I think the fact that you have dues to the NRCC — Democrats have them for the DCCC — is just not a good thing.
"It puts pressure on people to raise money from special interests. Those special interests expect something in return, not a good process."
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Buck — a Colorado Republican who serves on the House Judiciary and Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Committees — has asked the Ethics Committee to ban paying or fundraising as a criteria for committee assignments and chairmanships.
"I talk about how bad it is in the book and what some of the solutions are. We need a balanced budget amendment, we need to term limit folks in Congress and the Senate," Buck told Tucker.
"We also need to deal with some of these issues that are inside Congress and we need pressure from the outside to get Congress to reform itself."
To achieve a meaningful balanced budget, "you need to force the Budget Committee to actually find ways to cut and a lot of it's going to end up with mandatory spending," Buck said.
"We can start with discretionary spending now and look at the Department of Defense at some point. Nobody in Washington, D.C. wants our Department of Defense to be underfunded.
"But they have to use the funds they have more wisely. We also need to make sure that we are cutting programs and sending them back to the states, programs like education and transportation."
Reasonable term limits are also a top priority, according to Buck.
"I don't think you can term limit someone to one term in the House or two terms in the House. But I think if someone serves 10 or 12 years in the House …" he said.
"Reasonable term limits is part of the answer, but we also need other things. We need to have that balanced budget amendment, we need to make sure we're reforming the ethics rules in Congress.
"It's really up to the American people to help with these kinds of reforms. This is not something that's going to happen within the swamp. People are comfortable there."
"Drain the Swamp: How Washington Corruption is Worse than You Think," written with Bill Blankschaen, is published by Regnery.
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