I frequently ask myself why voters don’t elect better people to represent them. A quick poll of elected office holders around the country tells us that there are plenty of questionable representatives holding office who repeatedly get reelected. The framers of our Constitution gave us a splendid, if imperfect, government; they seemed to think of everything in regard to the distribution of authority and balance between freedom and government prerogatives. Unfortunately, the one thing that they could not ensure was the election of good people to office.
Here in Georgia, Buddy Carter, U.S. representative for Georgia’s 1st congressional district (representing coastal Georgia) might be a poster child for our failures at the polling booth. My criticism of Carter’s performance is not because he is a Republican or conservative, but because he is neither deliberative or conscientious in the performance of his duties. Too often he votes against the public interest, and he alway acts as a “yes man” for Trump’s policies no matter how blatantly false or wrongheaded they might be.
Most egregiously, Congressman Carter supported Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and promoted Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen.
In 2017 Carter renewed his efforts to require drug tests for people who receive unemployment insurance.
In 2025 Carter introduced a bill to purchase or otherwise secure Greenland and rename it “Red, White and Blueland.”
Carter has repeatedly voted against environmental and conservation interests; most recently, he voted to rescind protections for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Minnesota to allow copper mining there. Here in Georgia he failed in his support for a proposed space port in coastal Camden County which threatened homeowners in the adjacent Cumberland Island National Seashore. Failing that, he lobbied for development of 700 homes on 500 acres of land he owned in the area; this was also defeated. In both cases, Carter appeared to have put his financial profit ahead of the public’s best interests. In the ongoing hotly contested effort to rezone Sapelo Island for larger, more expensive homes, Carter has been conspicuously quiet. Residents of Sapelo, home to a Black Gullah Geechee community, correctly fear that they would lose their homes to high taxes. Rezoning Sapelo would destroy a way of life and threaten the natural environment of the barrier island all for the enrichment of a few real estate brokers and their potential wealthy clients.
Congressman Carter, like too many other elected officials, does not seem able to do the right thing when doing so conflicts with his political party or the special interests of his district. Certainly there must be some time when he might put the best interests of all Georgians first, regardless of party or their station in life.
Something tells me that he is simply trying to ride Trump’s coattails to the Senate.