Watson blasts both parties during Sidney campaign visit

Independent candidate for U.S. Senate, Todd Watson promises to answer to no one but the citizens of Nebraska.

“We need a new voice not tied to the party power,” he said, during a campaign stop in Sidney on Monday.

Watson was born and raised in Lincoln and received his masters degree in accounting at the University of Texas at Austin. He’s been an entrepreneur for most of his life. He currently owns two businesses and that employ 60 people.

“In a day when we need jobs, I’ve created them,” Watson said.

The two party system doesn’t work, in his opinion. Democrats’ and Republicans’ refusal to work together means that they are not working for the American people.

Watson thinks that the Democratic party doesn’t understand the difference between promoting the general welfare and providing it and that the Republican party doesn’t understand the difference between general welfare and corporate welfare.

“No party member stands up to their own party, they don’t create dissension because they’re team players,” he said.

Western Nebraska farmers want their Senator to keep the government off their backs, to improve infrastructure to move products to market quicker and more cheaply and to open up more markets for their products, Watson stated.

This candidate describes himself as a pro-life conservative who believes in protecting the second amendment. Protecting religious liberty is one of Watson’s primary goals.

He encourages people to take advantage of their religious freedom. He thinks some are too intimidated to express their faith freely.

When the government cuts programs to help the impoverished, it will be churches and their parishioners that will have to step up and provide help to the poor.

“If people come to the church, they’ll have spiritual needs, social needs, food needs,” Watson said.

Taking advantage of religious freedom also means volunteering to help out in schools, hospitals and nursing homes as well, he said.

Watson thinks an Independent in the Senate can bridge the gap between Republicans and Democrats. It will be no more difficult for one independent to pass laws than one Republican or Democrat, he opined.

“Republicans are obsessed with destroying Democrats and Democrats are obsessed with destroying Republicans,” Watson said. “We’ve always coexisted. We’ve never agreed but that doesn’t mean that we have to demonize each other.”

In Watson’s mind, the Affordable Care Act doesn’t work, but neither does Republican special interest healthcare, which reduced competition for hospitals. He believes that people with preexisting conditions should be covered, but the government shouldn’t be running healthcare.

Watson thinks that selfish thinking has resulted in overspending. Each Senator wants to pass certain bills in order to tell his constituents that he accomplished something.

“So we spend all this money that we don’t have collectively as a country so that each politician can go home and say, ‘look what I won’,” Watson said.

He thinks it’s fundamentally un-American to bail out Wall Street banks without offering the same treatment to home town banks.

“I just want them to be fair, I want them to play by the same rules,” Watson said.

He also believes that it’s unfair to regulate small banks when the large banks that performed criminal activities should be the focus of this regulation.

He thinks we should work to expand our religious freedom and by this he means that kids should be allowed to pray in school, on their own.

“They should have a freedom right to pray,” Watson said.

He also thinks people who own businesses should not be made to violate their conscious. This doesn’t mean discrimination, he said.

“It’s suppressing the consciousness of people that, faith is part of their lives and everything they do and shouldn’t feel like they’re walking on eggshells, living life with their faith,” Watson said.

Watson claims that he was calling out special interests from the beginning of his campaign. He spoke of the outside spending during the Republican primary. These PACs have 3 million members, while the state of Nebraska has a populations of 1.9 million.

“I represent the citizens of Nebraska, period and their interests and their values and what they desire,” Watson said. “I don’t have to respond to my party boss. I don’t have to respond to the GOP Senate majority leader. I don’t have to respond to the PACs that got me elected. I’m accountable to the people only.”

Voters cannot keep electing representatives from the two major parties which have both contributed to the ballooning national debt and expect different results.

“By golly, we need to start throwing all these guys out of office until they respond back to the American people,” Watson said.

Sherri Wiedeman, of Dalton, who volunteered to collect signatures for Watson’s campaign said she identified with his values.

“It’s time for us to stop the party politics,” Wiedeman said.