One of the things that so deeply disappoints me about our current Democracy is how many votes are completely uninformed and based upon hunches and soundbites on television. How many minutes or hours does an average voter think about any one issue?
How many people, when they show up for the voting polls, see an issue and make a knee jerk reaction without any serious thinking, study, or reflection? If your typical NASCAR Dad or Soccer Mom went to the voting booth and saw “Gay Marriage: Yes or No” their reflexive reaction would be “No” simply because it violates tradition and their church pastor said it would “water down” the value of straight marriage.
Likewise, I suspect that if we had a national referendum on whether to legalize marijuana or keep it illegal, most people would automatically vote to keep it illegal simply because it’s more comfortable to maintain the status quo. This issue would never come up before Congress, I suspect because the powerfull Anti-Drug lobby and the Alcohol and Tobacco companies that don’t want competition would throw their full force behind demonizing this Representative (with short soundbites like “think of the children!”) and getting him voted out of office.
With certain issues, the U.S Supreme Court is willing to correct injustices caused by the inertia of the popular vote and the governing majority. An example of this would be their decision in Lawrence versus Texas where they overruled a Texas anti-sodomy law. Of course, these kinds of “corrections” often leads to the Supreme Court being denounced as a bunch of elite judges in robes trying to impose their policy preferences on an unwilling populace.
So what’s the solution? How can our country make fair, informed, untainted, yet still democratic decisions? I propose that our government randomly select people for duty in single issue “Focus Groups”
These focus groups would be like juries, except they don’t decide guilt and innocence. They are a randomly selected cross section of the U.S population who are assigned to study issues in depth and then issue recomendations. These recomendations would not have the force of law, but they would certainly aid the entire population in making fair decisions.
These single issue focus groups would have a comfortable number of people in it. Enough so that it represents the diverse views of our great nation, but also enough so that everyone has enough time to contribute towards the group discussion. Let’s say 50 people would be in each group.
The groups would have a significant amount of time to study the issue they are assigned to and to debate the merits. Let’s say 6 months. Then they have a vote and issue a final report. The report would include a written summary of the majority opinion, any concurring opinions, and then the dissenting opinions.
Voters and Congress would then be able to decide how they want to deal with the decisions of these focus groups. They’d be free to ignore their recommendations, of course, but I think it would be a lot harder to dismiss a report made by a bunch of ordinary people than it would an elite self selected group like the American Anthropological Association or the ACLU or Amnesty International.