It’s easy to forget in the heat of the moment that most of us have more in common that separating us. Here are a few issues that nearly everyone agrees on, except for a few well funded and organized interest groups. These are great issues to get involved in because you get to work both sides of the aisle and you can walk away feeling good about what you’ve accomplished.
Right to Repair
You should be able to fix the car, phone, computer, tractor, house, and everthing inside of it, right? If you can’t fix it, you should be able to take it to a repair shop, right? Big tech, bit ag, auto manufacturers and other consumer product companies would politely like you to not be allowed to fix your own stuff. They’d also like to make it so that you have to go to their repair centers and not be able to use the local mechanic, phone repair store, or computer store. Right to Repair is simply this: making sure that people can fix the stuff they own.
Where to Start
Louis Rossman has a great YouTube channel where he covers right to repair issues, and his journey learning to do grass-roots lobbying.
Here’s Louis explaining what Right to Repair is:
Small Business
The backbone of the economy is small business, but small business has a problem: it’s small and not very well understood by the political class. I’ve been involved for four years in grass roots lobbying for small business issues, and it’s been great. Sometimes the issues are big. Sometimes the issues are small.
Where to Start
The NFIB is a grass roots organization that represts small business to all levels of governement. It’s not a right-wing, or left-wing organization (although some of the members are very right or very left). The issues that NFIB chapters work on are often dictated by what is going on locally because often local and state law has more impact than Federal law.
Since I’ve been involved, I’ve got to meet with the VP of the US, Senators, US Reps, State Legislators, Agency Commissioners and it’s vhow I view politics. A voter that shows up in Washington is worth 1000 lobbyists. A few highlights: we stopped Trump’s big-business tax cut and forced Trump to get a tax cut that applied to all businesses. We got the law changed in Indiana so businesses could hire ex-offenders without being penalized by their insurance carriers. We also were highly involved in getting PPP and COVID stimulus checks deployed quickly when the lockdown hit.