As a follow-up to my article, ‘Do we still want limited government?’, I thought I’d tackle a bigger question, from a reader: Does it matter what we want? Abraham Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, said “…government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” But governments, like most self-policing bodies, have a way of doing what is good for government, not what is good for ‘the people’. Let’s dig.
In the United States, we have a ‘Constitutional Representative’ democracy. Each State votes for and selects its representatives, which, in turn, vote for legislation. The numbers and basic roles of those representatives are defined in Article 1 of our Constitution. House of Representatives members have always been voted upon by the registered voters living in the districts that they represent—one each of 435 such districts. Senators, two from each State, were formerly chosen by the States themselves, until the 17th Amendment was ratified in 1913. Since then, Senators are popularly elected by the voters in each State. This effectively removed the States’ voice from the lawmaking process, and changed the Senators into ‘super-representatives’, with a longer term but similar electing dynamics as the House of Representatives. The ‘democracy’ part is simply that a simple majority of each House of government (HOR and Senate), plus a signature of the President, is all that it takes for most legislation to go from a ‘bill’ to a ‘law’. (Some situations require ‘super-majorities’ in the Congressional houses, such as overriding a Presidential veto, or Amending the Constitution itself).
Note that there is no such thing as a ‘national election’ in the US. There is no ‘national ballot’, no ‘national referendum’. Instead, there are 51+ individual State and territory elections that happen to occur on the same day. And the State voting only impacts that State alone—CA votes do not have any impact on NV or NY or any other States’ elections.
What we simply do not have: any governing body to police Congress! Congress may impeach a President or a Supreme Court Justice. Presidents can relieve Executive Branch appointees. But who can punish Congressmen? And Congress frequently exempts itself from laws that the rest of us are bound by. It is a noteworthy thing to get a Congressman or woman to apologize for criminal behavior when caught red-handed! Each house does have ‘censure’ of its members, but that is such a slap on the wrist as to be nonexistent punishment. So, to say that their self-policing mechanisms are woefully inadequate is a drastic understatement. Many a crusading individual gets elected to Congress, only to become part of the Leviathan, rather than the maverick they were campaigning to be.
Let’s sat we have a CA Congressperson that is utterly vile, and obviously stretches legality on a regular basis (fill in the blank for the Congressperson of your choice). 49 States may absolutely DETEST that Congressperson! But that doesn’t matter one iota. As long as THEIR district continues to elect them (or the State of CA continues to do so for Senators), in Congress they will be! The famous phrase, “Yeah, he’s a crook, but he’s OUR crook!” comes to mind. We can vote out our own bum at the expiration of his or her term, but that is the limit of our control. Period.
Maybe that is all by design. Maybe it is just the inertia of politics, that we have, over time, created the ‘elected class’, that has no overlap, no understanding, and no concern of the rest of us. We cannot vote ourselves pay raises or benefit improvements, but they can. Note: any guesses which President signed into law the last Congressional pay raise? I have no idea. Also note that, until very recently, Congress voted themselves a fund, paid by taxpayers, to settle sexual harassment charges leveled against themselves! Only when that embarrassing fund got exposed to the public did they disband it. So, to circle back to the initial question of this writing: Does it matter what we want? In a word: NO. Unless we, as a people, get to the ‘torches and pitchforks’ stage, where we march against the 535 self-anointed overlords in DC, we have zero methods to correct that august body of ‘representatives’—even if the only folks they ‘represent’ is themselves.
