Centrist Policy Positions and Politicians Worth Supporting
Author: Centrist Independent Voter, PAC
The Centrist Independent Voter Political Action Committee, Inc., also known as CIVPAC, was formally established in 2022. Its predecessor organization was founded in 2011 as the New Independent Party. CIVPAC is a nonprofit political action committee focused on moving the existing political parties toward the political center. CIVPAC’s purpose is twofold: first, to promote centrist solutions to difficult public policy problems; and second, to support moderate candidates, including Democrats, Republicans, and independents. CIVPAC’s logo is adapted from Francisco Goya’s The Sleep of Reason. The inscription in the image reads, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.”
CIVPAC has endorsed Sen. Shelley Moore Capito for reelection to the United States Senate from West Virginia.
Capito’s strongest case is her demonstrated commitment to constitutional democracy, her support for Ukraine and the international order, and her record of bipartisan governing. She is also substantially closer to CIVPAC on economic and health-care policy.
The endorsement is not without reservations. We disagree with Capito on reproductive freedom and are troubled by her position on presidential war powers in the current conflict with Iran.
CIVPAC has endorsed Sen. Cory Booker for reelection to the United States Senate from New Jersey.
We have significant policy disagreements with Booker, particularly on health care and economic policy. But his commitment to constitutional democracy, congressional responsibility, bipartisan legislation and American leadership abroad makes the choice in this race unusually clear. Booker is also considerably closer to CIVPAC’s positions on reproductive freedom and immigration reform.
His Republican opponent, Justin Murphy deserves credit for his service in the United States Navy and for his forthright statement of his conservative principles. But Murphy’s refusal to accept the lawful result of the 2020 presidential election presents a threshold institutional problem that outweighs ordinary policy disagreements.
Centrist Independent Voter (CIVPAC) has endorsed Jamie Davis for the United States Senate from Louisiana over Republican Julia Letlow.
The endorsement comes with significant reservations. CIVPAC disagrees with Davis on several domestic economic issues and believes voters should seek greater clarity about his positions on Ukraine, NATO, Russia, China, Israel, and Iran.
The endorsement gives substantial weight to other considerations, including Davis’s emphasis on congressional independence, his opposition to tariff wars, support for political reform and government transparency, and the institutional concerns raised by Letlow’s close alignment with President Trump. Letlow’s June 2026 vote against the Ukraine Support Act also figured prominently in CIVPAC’s assessment.
The basic position has not changed. We continue to support a $100-per-metric-ton carbon tax, comparable carbon charges on imports from countries that do not adopt similar policies, and a market-based approach that allows competing technologies to determine the least expensive ways to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
What has changed is the depth of the analysis.
As we have continued to think through the proposal, several questions deserved more explicit answers: What would a $100 carbon tax actually do to household energy bills? How should carbon capture be treated? What happens to existing coal and natural-gas power plants? Who really bears the economic burden of the tax? And what should we do with what could initially be several hundred billion dollars a year in revenue?
Being More Explicit About the Costs
The revised policy now says much more clearly what a $100 carbon tax would mean for consumers.
If fully reflected in retail prices, it would mechanically add about 89 cents per gallon to gasoline. At today’s generating mix, it could initially raise the average residential electricity bill by roughly 20 percent, although the effect would vary enormously depending on how electricity is generated. Residential natural-gas bills could initially rise by roughly 35 to 40 percent.
Those numbers are not forecasts of permanent prices. Consumers, utilities and producers would respond. Demand for fossil fuels would fall, generating systems would change, and some of the economic burden would be reflected in lower prices for fossil fuels and lower values for fossil-fuel reserves and carbon-intensive assets rather than simply higher consumer prices.
But a serious climate policy should not hide the central point: changing relative prices is how a carbon tax reduces emissions.
Carbon Capture and an All-of-the-Above Strategy
The revised policy also makes our treatment of carbon capture much clearer.
Carbon that has already been taxed and is later captured and permanently stored should receive a credit equal to the carbon tax previously imposed. That is not an additional subsidy. It simply means the tax ultimately applies to carbon released into the atmosphere.
Direct removal of carbon that is already in the atmosphere is different and may justify separate public support for research and deployment and ultimately a payment or credit reflecting the value of the carbon removed from the atmosphere.
We also expanded the discussion of existing power plants. A carbon tax does not order a coal or natural-gas plant to close. It gives the owner choices: pay the higher fuel price resulting from the tax, capture the carbon, operate less often, or retire the plant.
That is what we mean by an all-of-the-above energy policy. Government should price the environmental harm and allow coal, natural gas, nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, storage and technologies not yet developed to compete.
Using the Revenue
Another revision of the policy from its original form, which was mentioned in our last iteration, was to use most of the remaining carbon-tax revenue to help finance Social Security rather than create a large new stream of revenue that might be viewed as justification for permanently higher federal spending.
That approach is now developed much more fully.
A successful carbon tax should produce declining revenue over time as emissions fall. That makes it poorly suited to financing any permanent spending program, but potentially well suited to providing transitional financing for Social Security while longer-term reforms are phased in.
In practical terms, carbon-tax revenue could reduce federal borrowing and reduce or delay the need for future increases in payroll taxes or reductions in benefits.
We would still devote a portion of the revenue to basic research in low-carbon energy, direct atmospheric carbon removal and potentially useful geo-engineering.
The Principle Has Not Changed
The revision also expands our discussion of carbon tariffs, the distribution of the tax burden, carbon taxes versus cap-and-trade, the developing world, nuclear power and the economics of coal and natural gas.
But the central principle remains simple:
Price theenvironmental harm, allow markets to search for the least-cost response, encourage the rest of the world to do the same, and use government research dollars where private markets are least able to capture the benefits.
A $100 carbon tax would not painlessly solve climate change. Some energy prices would rise. Some existing assets would lose value. Coal use would probably decline substantially. Other technologies would gain.
Those are not unintended consequences. They are the means by which the policy works.
AI is likely to be one of the most consequential technologies of our time. It will increase productivity, alter the way many jobs are performed, create new industries, and displace some existing forms of work. Our view is that public policy should encourage those gains rather than try to preserve obsolete jobs simply because they are familiar.
That does not mean adopting a laissez-faire attitude toward every consequence of AI.
Where Government Should Focus
Our policy focuses government attention where it is most needed: cybersecurity, terrorism and other malicious uses, competition and market power, infrastructure constraints, and the need for appropriate internal controls as increasingly capable systems are developed and deployed.
Our approach is therefore neither to suppress AI development nor to assume that every problem will solve itself. We favor rapid innovation, competitive markets and broad adoption of productivity-enhancing technology, combined with focused safeguards where genuine risks exist.
Who Is Responsible When AI Causes Harm?
We believe that one of the most important questions in AI policy is too often neglected: who is legally responsible when an AI system causes harm?
The existence of an autonomous or partially autonomous system should not create a liability vacuum. Responsibility should be allocated among developers, deployers, owners and users according to who controlled the relevant risks and who was in the best position to prevent the harm.
Clear rules of liability can provide powerful incentives for safety without requiring government to prescribe every technical decision in advance.
Why Not Give Them Spoons?
We are also skeptical of policies designed principally to protect existing jobs from technological change. Economic history gives us little reason to believe that making production deliberately less efficient leaves society better off. The challenge is not to prevent productivity growth, but to help people adapt to it and to ensure that the gains are broadly shared.
There is an old story, usually attributed to Milton Friedman, that captures the point nicely. Friedman was visiting a public works project where workers were using shovels rather than modern machinery. When he asked why, he was told that the purpose was to create more jobs. His response was essentially: why not give them spoons?
I have always liked that story because it exposes the flaw in the argument so neatly. Jobs are not themselves the objective of an economy. The objective is to produce things people value as efficiently as possible and allow the resulting prosperity to create new opportunities. Artificial intelligence does not change that principle simply because the productivity gains may arrive unusually quickly.
Artificial intelligence will create difficult policy questions, and our position will undoubtedly evolve as the technology develops. But the basic principles are already clear: encourage innovation, preserve competition, address identifiable risks, assign responsibility clearly, and resist the temptation either to panic about technological change or to regulate simply for the sake of regulating.
U.S. Capitol with the White House and Supreme Court in the distance, illustrating Congress’s constitutional role in checking executive power.
The Supreme Court’s recent decision allowing construction of President Trump’s White House ballroom to continue raises an issue that extends far beyond the ballroom itself.
On August 31, the Court stayed a lower-court injunction that would have halted above-ground construction. Importantly, the Court did not decide that the President had legal authority to undertake the project without congressional approval. Instead, the five-Justice majority concluded that the government was likely to prevail in showing that the National Trust for Historic Preservation lacked Article III standing to challenge it. The Court expressly said that it was not passing on the legality of the project. (Supreme Court decision)
That distinction matters.
A presidential action can potentially exceed the President’s lawful authority and yet escape judicial review because no plaintiff who objects to it can establish the concrete and particularized injury required by Article III. Indeed, Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson, concluded in dissent that the ballroom construction was likely unlawful because Congress has expressly prohibited construction of buildings on federal grounds in the District of Columbia without congressional authorization. (Supreme Court decision)
We have seen versions of this problem before.
During President Trump’s first term, 215 members of Congress sued alleging that his receipt of benefits from foreign governments violated the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause. The D.C. Circuit dismissed the case because the individual legislators lacked standing to assert an institutional injury belonging to Congress. (D.C. Circuit opinion) Other litigation over the Emoluments Clauses ended without a definitive Supreme Court ruling on the merits. After Trump left office, the Supreme Court vacated judgments in two of the major cases and directed that they be dismissed as moot. (Congressional Research Service / Constitution Annotated)
Standing doctrine serves important purposes. Federal courts are not supposed to issue advisory opinions whenever someone believes a president has exceeded his authority. But the practical consequence is unavoidable: the judiciary cannot always be counted upon to police the boundary between presidential and congressional power.
Sometimes Congress has to do it itself.
That has implications for how CIVPAC evaluates candidates for the House and Senate.
Members of Congress are not simply representatives of a political party that happens to control or oppose the presidency. They are members of an independent constitutional branch. Appropriations, tariffs, war powers, oversight, confirmations, subpoenas and numerous other powers belong to Congress precisely because the Framers did not want them exercised solely by a president.
A candidate for Congress should therefore be willing to exercise those powers even when doing so means opposing a president of his or her own party.
That is becoming an increasingly important part of our endorsement decisions.
The difficulty is that genuine political independence has become uncommon in both parties. Members of Congress face enormous pressure from presidents, party leaders, activists and primary voters to treat loyalty to their party as more important than loyalty to the institution in which they serve.
When we have affirmative evidence that a candidate will resist that pressure, it should count heavily in the candidate’s favor.
Senator Susan Collins provides an example. We do not agree with every vote she casts. But she has demonstrated a willingness to defend congressional authority against a Republican president. She joined bipartisan legislation requiring congressional approval for presidential tariffs and opposed President Trump’s unilateral tariffs on Canada. (Collins on congressional tariff authority) On war powers, she has likewise maintained that sustained military action requires congressional authorization and, when the War Powers Act’s 60-day deadline was reached in the 2026 Iran conflict, voted to terminate continued hostilities absent further congressional approval. (Collins on war powers)
That kind of record matters.
When such evidence is absent, the calculation becomes more difficult.
If legislators of both parties normally support presidents of their own party, then electing members of the president’s party tends, as a practical matter, to weaken the legislative check on executive power. Electing members of the opposing party tends to strengthen it.
That does not mean CIVPAC should automatically endorse Democrats when a Republican occupies the White House, or Republicans when a Democrat does. Candidate quality, policy positions, respect for democratic institutions and the particular circumstances of the race still matter.
But other things being reasonably close, our burden of proof should change.
A congressional candidate from the president’s party should give us some reason to believe that he or she is prepared to be a legislator rather than simply a presidential ally. A demonstrated record of independence can satisfy that test. Mere assurances of independence should receive considerably less weight.
The Framers created three branches of government because they did not expect any one of them to be permanently trustworthy.
The courts cannot always intervene. When they cannot, Congress must be willing to be Congress.
An imagined depiction of an intellectual journey from youthful socialism toward a more market-oriented view of economics and public policy. The books shown are illustrative.
Republicans have unearthed a 2020 video in which James Talarico described capitalism as one of several “oppressive systems” and spoke about dismantling it.
It was a bad comment. I disagree with it.
But I am considerably less troubled by what James Talarico said at 31 than I would be if, six years later, he still believed it.
Part of the reason is personal.
I too was, briefly, drawn to socialism when I was young. Its moral appeal is easy to understand. It begins with concerns that are real and important: poverty, inequality, unfairness, concentrated power, and the sense that too many people are denied a genuine opportunity to flourish. To a young person trying to make sense of injustice, socialism can appear not merely plausible but humane.
What changed my mind was not that I stopped caring about those things. It was experience and study.
Over time, I came to understand more clearly what markets do, how prices communicate information, how incentives shape behavior, and how difficult it is for political institutions to reproduce the decentralized knowledge contained in millions of individual economic decisions. I also learned more from history about the distance that can separate the intentions of socialism from its actual results.
That process did not make me less concerned with poverty or inequality. It changed my understanding of how best to address them.
Capitalism is imperfect. Markets require rules. Competition must be protected. Government has important responsibilities, including providing a social safety net and addressing genuine market failures. But a market economy, properly governed, remains an extraordinary mechanism for innovation, adaptation, wealth creation, and the expansion of human opportunity.
There is an old aphorism, usually attributed to one statesman or another, that a person who is not a socialist when young has no heart, while one who remains a socialist has no head. Like most aphorisms, it is too sweeping.
But I understand the truth it is trying to capture because I have lived some version of it myself.
Youth naturally places great weight on intentions and ideals. Experience teaches us to pay closer attention to consequences, incentives, tradeoffs, and the stubborn complexity of human institutions. The moral instinct that draws someone toward socialism can be admirable even when the economic conclusions that follow from it are mistaken.
That is why I see Talarico’s evolution on capitalism not simply as something to excuse, but as something worth understanding.
His earlier comments reflected an economic view I believe was wrong. His subsequent evolution suggests that he was capable of reconsidering it. That matters.
Politics increasingly encourages us to treat every statement a person made years ago as a permanent declaration of character. I think that is exactly backward. We should want leaders who are capable of learning. We should want people who encounter new evidence, acquire experience, reconsider old assumptions, and occasionally conclude that something they once believed was mistaken.
Sadly we have too many politicians who are unwilling to admit that they were ever wrong even when it is obvious to the casual observer that they frequently are.
I would be in a poor position to condemn Talarico merely for having once been attracted to ideas that also appealed to me when I was younger.
The more important question is what someone does with the years that follow.
Do they learn? Do they test their ideals against experience? Do they retain their concern for people while becoming more realistic about the institutions that can actually improve their lives?
In my own case, I hope the answer has been yes.
And Talarico’s evolution gives me reason to think the same may be true of him.
That is why the old aphorism seems particularly apt here. The young Talarico’s attraction to socialism may have reflected his heart. His willingness to rethink it suggests something about his head.
His evolution reinforces what I already had reason to believe: James Talarico appears to have both.
Byrd offers Wyoming voters a substantially stronger commitment to constitutional government, congressional independence, and the principle that limits on executive power must apply regardless of which party controls the White House. Although we have reservations about his readiness for the office, we believe those concerns are outweighed by the importance of institutional integrity in this race.
We have just endorsed independent Bob Chew for the United States Senate from Colorado.
That creates an obvious complication.
Colorado will elect its senator by plurality: the candidate with the most votes wins, even without a majority. A vote for Chew therefore cannot later transfer to Democratic incumbent John Hickenlooper or Republican Mark Baisley if Chew finishes third.
Where is ranked-choice voting when you need it?
We have just seen the advantage of that system in Alaska. There, voters can rank their genuine first choice while still expressing a preference between the candidates most likely to survive to the final round. Colorado voters do not have that luxury. Colorado voters considered exactly this reform in 2024 and rejected it—and now the Chew race provides a concrete illustration of the problem the reform was intended to solve.
The spoiler problem is real. But the usual solution—never vote for an independent because the independent might spoil the election—creates its own circular logic. Independents cannot become viable because voters are afraid to support them, and voters are afraid to support them because they are not viable.
In Chew’s case, we also do not know whom he hurts more. He is a former Republican with fiscally conservative and market-oriented views that could attract moderate Republicans and independents uncomfortable with Baisley. But his support for Ukraine, opposition to Trump and institutional moderation could also attract Hickenlooper voters. There is not yet useful three-way polling that answers the question.
Colorado currently appears strongly Democratic, which reduces—but certainly does not eliminate—the risk of Chew aiding the election of Baisley. If ranked choice voting was available in Colorado our recommended ranking would be: 1) Chew, 2) Hickenlooper, and 3) Baisley.
We considered that risk and endorsed Chew anyway. An independent candidacy has to be allowed to begin somewhere, particularly when the candidate offers both serious policy ideas and a potentially important institutional strategy for independent senators.
Still, the awkwardness of the choice makes the case for election reform better than almost anything we could write about it.
Ranked-choice voting would let Coloradans vote for the candidate they actually prefer without surrendering their say over the ultimate choice between the remaining candidates.
Most political endorsements force a choice between two somewhat different questions: Who is the candidate you like best, and who is the candidate you actually want voters to support?
Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system largely removes that problem.
That is why our recommendation in this year’s U.S. Senate race may look a little unusual. We rank retired Petersburg teacher Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. first, former Representative Mary Peltola second, and incumbent Senator Dan S. Sullivan third. We recommend not ranking Gerald Heikes.
Although some may see Daniel J. Sullivan’s candidacy as a stunt built around his name, ranked-choice voting allows us to look past that novelty and recognize that, on policy and temperament, he presents a serious alternative.
We do not expect Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. to win. He received only a small share of the primary vote, has never held major public office, and became nationally known largely because he happens to share a name with the incumbent senator.
Then we looked at what he actually believes.
He sounds surprisingly like the kind of Republican we keep looking for and seldom find. He favors low taxes and a market-oriented economy, but he has criticized President Trump’s across-the-board tariffs for raising prices. He supports Ukraine. He accepts legitimate election results. He supports Alaska’s open-primary and ranked-choice system. He takes a moderate position on abortion and talks about political compromise as something necessary rather than shameful.
There are many things we still do not know about him. But ranked-choice voting allows us to put him first without pretending he is likely to become Alaska’s next senator.
Our second choice, Mary Peltola, is the candidate we would prefer in the likely decisive contest.
Peltola was an unusually independent Democrat during her service in the House. She supported Alaska oil and gas development, including the Willow project, while maintaining positions on firearms and other issues that frequently separated her from the national Democratic Party. She supports Ukraine and has been particularly good on an issue that increasingly matters to us: Congress reclaiming constitutional authority from the presidency over tariffs and war.
We disagree with her on important economic questions. Her proposed federal price-gouging prohibition is bad policy. So are some of her targeted tax subsidies. And she has opposed a carbon tax, which remains central to our climate policy.
Interestingly, we do not object to her support for Willow. Our test for approving a fossil-fuel project in the absence of a carbon tax is whether it would remain economic if carbon were properly priced. The available evidence suggests Willow would.
Incumbent Dan Sullivan presents a harder judgment.
He deserves genuine credit for refusing to participate in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. His support for Ukraine, NATO and an engaged American foreign policy is also substantially closer to our position than that of many Republicans today.
But during President Trump’s second term, his institutional independence has become harder to find. He has supported Trump’s broad tariffs, resisted congressional efforts to reclaim war powers during the Iran conflict, and repeatedly supported unusually controversial presidential nominees when other Republican senators were willing to say no.
Those were not normal nominees. They included a mix of inadequate qualifications, questionable competence and, in some cases, records or views that seemed counterproductive to the missions of the agencies they were chosen to oversee.
That is why we put the incumbent third.
We do not recommend ranking Gerald Heikes, whose ideological rhetoric and extreme policy positions place him well outside CIVPAC’s centrist approach.
Ranked-choice voting lets us make all of these distinctions without forcing them into a binary choice.
