Missouri Senate candidate John Brunner wants to change how things are done in Washington. Namely, he will only meet to talk about issues highlighted in the Constitution -- literally.
"When I'm in the U.S. Senate," he told KMOX radio in an interview on Wednesday, "I'm going to tell my scheduling guy, 'Here's how we're going to work it here: I'm going to have a pile of Constitutions on my desk, I'm going to have a can of yellow highlighters. Anybody who wants to have a meeting with me, you grab that yellow highlighter [and] mark it in the Constitution and we'll have a meeting. If it's not there, no meeting.'"
The Constitution gambit, Brunner told KMOX, is part of his larger goal to "decentralize power," eliminating the "crony capitalism" and special interests so engrained in Washington.
If that sounds unusual, so is the candidate -- or so the campaign would have you think. Brunner's advisor, John Hancock, has worked to burnish Brunner's image as a Washington outsider willing to look for atypical solutions.
“He believes that he has a skill set as a businessman and an entrepreneur that is desperately needed in Washington, D.C." Hancock told Roll Call recently. "And he believes that the voters might just agree with him.”
Brunner, chairman of Vi-Jon, a cosmetics and health care products manufacturer in Missouri, is one of a growing field of Republicans hoping to take on the state's Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill.