Op-ed: I fought for Nebraskans. Then the GOP tried to silence me (Blue Dot)
FULL story: http://archive.today/yQ7i0
By Crystal Rhoades Mar 23, 2026 Updated 1 hr ago
For more than two decades, I’ve dedicated my life to serving the people of Nebraska. Not the powerful or well-connected, but everyday Nebraskans who expect fairness and accountability from their government. I’ve never avoided a tough fight even when it made me unpopular in certain rooms.
However, that willingness to speak up has come with its own consequences. Not once, but twice, Republican lawmakers have proposed laws to push me out of my positions after I found flaws in systems that ultimately hurt the people I was elected to protect.
For example, when I first started serving as a Nebraska Public Service Commissioner in 2015, I was working to hold large telecommunications companies accountable, including CenturyLink for 911 outages and Sprint, after noticing some billing discrepancies. I asked whether Nebraskans were getting what they were paying for, or being quietly overcharged.
I got my answers. It turned out that nearly 80,000 customers were being overcharged by a nickel a month. That may sound small, but it added up to nearly $300,000. We forced the company to return all of the money from improperly charged fees to their customers. That money belonged to Nebraskans. We also penalized Sprint with a $50,000 fine to hold them accountable.
FOUR paragraph copyright limit. Full story at link above.
ORIGINAL pay link: https://omaha.com/opinion/column/article_c9b02f4e-a8ab-4421-8c0d-5bb06f2da392.html
Website:https://crystal4congress.com/
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Crystal Rhoades
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