Rock Island Today

As Bill Fawell, a Republican Senate candidate with an independent streak, prepares to take on Democrat Cheri Bustos in the 17th District this November, he has focused his campaign on issues that brand him as a government reformer.

It’s not just the slogan atop his campaign website (“Live the Dream - Take America Back”) that compels this conclusion. Nor is it the fact that he ran for the same seat in 2014 as a write-in Libertarian candidate. He lists as his top priorities if he is elected: term limits, an audit of the Federal Reserve and a move to decentralize all federal agencies, according to his answers to Ballotpedia.org’s February questionnaire to candidates.

Term limits as a priority signals that he’s an outsider. According to a 2010 report from the Congressional Research Service, for the 111th Congress, representatives had been in office an average of 10 years, or five terms, while their senatorial counterparts had served an average of 12 years, or two terms.

Writing in TheHill.com in favor of term limits, U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) says he was dismayed that after returning from military service, he “saw much of our work undone by career politicians in our nation’s capital.”

Even the word “career politician” seems to be a rallying cry for government reformers. Fawell told radio station WVIK he thinks those average length of service limits given in the Congressional Research Service report are about right – for maximums, not averages. He specifically was quoted as saying eight years for a representative and 12 for a senator should be the maximum.

Like Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and others cultivating a firebrand image, Fawell has embraced the idea of auditing the Federal Reserve. In fact, he seems to be OK with replacing the century-old entity altogether.

“If we are to commit to … a partial audit of the Federal Reserve Bank, we have to be prepared to pick up the pieces if the FED’s conduct requires its reformation,” Fawell writes on his campaign website. He suggests the country return to the gold standard, using the pre-Civil War Suffolk Bank as a model.

Less often mentioned is Fawell’s push to decentralize federal agencies. It often goes hand in hand with calls to downsize the federal government, such as former Texas Sen. Ron Paul’s 2011 plan to trim five agencies with the goal of saving $1 trillion. On the chopping block with Paul’s plan were the departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, and Interior.

But Fawell’s decentralized government is more about federalism, returning control of government to the states, than saving money. In the item “Education” on his website, Fawell claims centralized education “lead(s) American education away from the critical thinking skills we learned from the 4 R’s: reading, writing, ‘rithmatic and recital.” He says those skills are foundational to learning itself.

Fawell’s campaign will have to rely heavily on voters looking for outsider solutions to the country’s problems, the candidate says.

“In 2016, more than 80 percent of Americans at one point or another cast votes for either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders,” he told Rock Island Today in October. “That’s an indictment of the entire government system and tells you what people want is real change.”