What We Ask of Our Own
What we expect from every candidate who runs on this platform — and how we enforce it when a law can't.
A policy platform means nothing if the people elected under it don't actually hold to it. Several of the commitments in this platform can't be enacted by a single law or a single election — they depend on constitutional amendments that don't exist yet, or on decisions made by city councils, state legislatures, and utility commissions the party doesn't control directly. Until that changes, the Sunset Party enforces its own standard on its own candidates. A Sunsetter who runs on this platform and abandons it in office doesn't answer to a party committee — they answer to the same voters who elected them as a Sunsetter, in the next primary. That's the entire enforcement mechanism, applied consistently across every commitment below, not a different rule for each one.
A Sunsetter elected to office works in the legislative halls. They don't campaign — that responsibility belongs to the party's delegates.
Existing House ethics rules already require separating official time from campaign time (House Rule 23): official staff, offices, and resources can't be used for campaign purposes, and campaign work has to happen on a member's 'own time.' That's the floor, and it doesn't go far enough — a well-documented practice lets incumbents pay their own official staff additional stipends from campaign funds to do campaign work after hours, meaning the same people, with the same institutional access and relationships, do both jobs on a technicality about which clock they're on. A November 2025 law review analysis (Columbia Journal of Law and Social Problems) calls this exactly what it is: indirect government subsidization of incumbents' reelection campaigns.
The Sunsetter Standard goes further than the existing rule allows, not just further than current practice: it's not about which hours are used, it's about who does the work. An elected Sunsetter's time — official and personal alike — goes to the job they were elected to do. Campaigning, including their own re-election, is the job of the party's delegates and volunteer structure, not the officeholder or their staff moonlighting after hours. This isn't a new bureaucracy — the party's existing delegate and volunteer structure, described in the Bylaws, is what already exists to do exactly this.
A Sunsetter in Congress commits to casting a recorded vote on at least 95% of all votes for which they are eligible. This isn't an arbitrary bar — it's close to the existing norm for a legislator actually doing the job: chamber-wide participation was 96.8% in 2025, and the long-run career average missed-vote rate is only about 2-3% for House members. The standard mainly catches a real, well-documented, and specifically named pattern: campaign-trail absenteeism. In 2025 alone, Rep. Eric Swalwell missed nearly a third of votes while running for California governor; Rep. Mikie Sherrill was present for only 43.6% of eligible votes in her final year in Congress; Rep. Wesley Hunt missed nearly a quarter of votes while running for higher office. GovTrack maintains a dedicated public tracker specifically for presidential candidates' missed votes, because this is a recognized pattern, not a hypothetical one — directly relevant given what this platform is building toward.
This has to distinguish clearly between campaign absenteeism and legitimate absence, or it punishes good-faith circumstances as if they were bad-faith ones. Senator Ruben Gallego had the Senate's highest missed-vote rate in 2025 — 12.6% — but his stated reason was the birth of his son, not campaigning. Medical emergencies, serious illness, and family emergencies are excluded from this standard's enforcement entirely, the same way they would be for any job — a Sunsetter with a disclosed, genuine medical or family reason for an extended absence doesn't answer to a primary challenge over it. A Sunsetter who racks up absences while campaigning for their next office, with no such reason, does — the same enforcement mechanism as every other commitment in this standard.
A Sunsetter in Congress commits to a lifetime limit on Congressional service as a condition of the party's support, until a constitutional amendment — blocked today by U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton (1995) — makes this federal law.
A Sunsetter in Congress commits to introducing and supporting only single-issue legislation, not omnibus bills, as a condition of the party's backing, until enough Congressional support exists to formalize this into House and Senate germaneness rules.
A Sunsetter in Congress commits to supporting federal legislation codifying medical privacy protection as the interim step before a constitutional amendment is realistic.
A Sunsetter in state government commits to opposing and working to repeal state-level restrictions on medical privacy.
A Sunsetter serving on a state Public Utility Commission or in a state legislature commits to the ratepayer-benefit test, large-load rate classes, cost-shift prohibitions, and minimum-bill contract structures described in the Infrastructure section.
A Sunsetter commits to requiring a real accounting of what a previous data center tax incentive actually produced before backing a new or renewed one.
A Sunsetter in state government commits to supporting mandatory public disclosure of water source, volume, and cooling method for large data centers.
A Sunsetter serving on a city council, county commission, or planning board commits to mandatory public notice and comment before any data center land-use or utility agreement is finalized, and to bringing proposals to the public before they're substantially negotiated.
This list will grow as the platform does. Every future commitment that depends on local, state, or currently-blocked federal action follows the same rule: state it plainly, and enforce it the same way — a primary challenge, not an empty promise.