I’ll admit I don’t follow politics very closely these days, but it seems that increasingly major votes in congress are along party lines with a few Congressmen or Senators voting ‘their conscience’.
But how should they vote? Should they be going along with their political party’s views to help make their party stronger? Should they all be voting their conscience on every issue? Or more interestingly, should they be voting on what their constituents want regardless of what they thing?
False dichotomy, if you ask me. People organize into political parties according to genuine and generally sincere ideas on how to run things, and most political districts are majority for one or another of the parties.
Still, conflicts do occur. When they do, the representative above all has an obligation to the voters. However he decides, he has to justify his decision to them, and answer to them at the next election.
As Mr Moto says, it can be complex. Here are three factors, which every honest Congressman and Senator must weigh for every vote he makes:
He is supposed to represent his constituents. His vote should, to some extent, reflect the opinion of his district or state.
He is supposed to be the representative for his constituents. (Note that this is different from “to represent them.”) In other words, he is to cast an informed vote based on study of the issues involved, what they (presuming they are reasonable men and women) would want him to vote if they had all the facts at hand that he does. The district may be largely opposed to measure X – but, armed with facts not available to his constituents, he sees that the good of the country – and in the long term, of his constituents – depends on passage of measure X. So he votes for measure X against his constituents’ wishes.
He is a party member, and one of 100 or 435 people who together make laws. So if he agrees to a subsidy of the widget industry, he may be going against his general principles about government subsidies, but winning the votes of four congressmen whose districts’ economies depend substantially on the widget industry. And they in turn will back him in blocking closure of the federal facility that is a mainstay of his district’s economy. Too, he owes a certain amount of allegiance to the principles of the party that supported and helped to elect him. If the Republocrat caucus of which he is a part agrees that its members will take a stand against underage noodling, then he is honorbound to support them unless it goes completely against his own conscience or would be political suicide for him to support – at which point he’ll be given a “free pass” by the caucus, largely because they know they can count on him on other issues where he’s not caught in such an antinomy.
The Founding Fathers consciously rejected the idea of a direct democracy, thinking (rightly) that the average citizen is not capable of keeping sufficiently informed on important issues to be able to cast informed votes. Hence, the US is a republic, not a democracy. Their idea was that a representative could represent his consituent’s interests without necessarily doing their bidding. This is clearly the way things ought to be: if the majority of a congressman’s constituents support a policy that is clearly not in their interests or the interests of the country, then it is the job of the representative to vote in their best interests and, ideally, convince his constituents that this really is their best interest. So the upshot of this is that a representative should serve the interests of his constituents and of the nation (ideally, without engaging the US in gross immorality in pursuit of these interests).
Of course, the problem is that the founding fathers also didn’t envision the job of representative as a career. It has become so for many people, and so their primary concern is getting re-elected, which means they pander to their constituency and give them what they want rather than what is right or rational. Happily, the Senate serves as some corrective to this, as was intended–part of the point of making Senate terms 6 years is that it makes Senators less subject to the whims of their constituencies, whereas Congressmen must heed their constituencies’ wishes or get the boot in short order.
It’s a common fallacy that a republic and a democracy are conflicting terms. The terms you’re actually looking for are direct democracy and representational democracy (the United States and almost all other modern democracies are the latter). A republic is a country where the Head of State is a non-hereditary position - it says nothing about whether or not the country is a democracy.
This part is not a winner. He/She has an obligation to his/her own conscience. Otherwise, all one is doing is bending as a straw in the wind. I expect my representatives to vote as they feel is proper, not according to the poll of the moment.
Nope, the representative always has an obligation to his voters and the country at large. That obligation trumps even his conscience.
Now, that obligation does not mean that he should vote according to polls, or pressure, or the fashion of the time. But it does mean that he should always vote with the well being of his various and sometimes competing constituencies in mind.
I get the sense that if a congressman is supposed to prioritize the will of the voters over his own conscience, then one could say the measure of a congressman is mostly based upon how many times he gets reelected. Is this what you’re driving at?
For example, Jeanette Rankin was a devout pacifist and voted against WWI and WW2. She suffered electoral losses because of these positions: first she failed in a bid for the Senate, and then she didn’t even bother to run again because her position was so unpopular. Would you say then that Jeanette Rankin was a bad congresswoman?
Now, she was a most admirable woman, it is true, but it is also undeniably true that if a majority of the Congress had taken her view in either war, the results would have been disastrous. Consequently, she was a bad representative. She was deeply wrong on the two most consequential votes of her career, not only wrong but not representative of the will of her constituents either. And as you can see, the voters corrected what they saw as an error in their own judgement - they decided they could only risk a Jeanette Rankin in less consequential times.
You will note that few such devout pacifists get elected to office now - most politicians reject pure pacifism as such. They have Rankin’s example, for better or worse, to go by here.
Wait – to reach that conclusion that Rankin was a bad representative, you’re completely absolving voters of their decision to send a die-hard pacifist to Congress. The people of Montana knew damn well why Rankin voted against WWI, and they decided in 1940 that someone of her principles and views was needed in Washington, and they voted for her.
So what did the voters get? They got a congresswoman who was against ALL war. The voters bought a known quantity; and because the voters got what they wanted, you blame Rankin for being a bad representative? When the views of the voters changed, Rankin was out of a job. It seems to me that is the way it is supposed to work – here we have someone relying on their principles – and the voters endorsement of those principles – going to Congress and doing what they think is right, and when the voters change their mind on an issue, they find someone else to do the job.
I can’t help but think that if we were talking about the invisible hand of the market, we’d hear crowing about what a success this story would be – consumers making their choice, etc. But since we’re talking about politics, I still can’t shake the feeling that you’re saying the only good politician is one who gets reelected.
And the question isn’t “what if we had 535 Jeanette Rankins,” so bringing up the specter that Congress may have rejected entering WW2 is nothing more than a red herring. And of course, the most recent example of the Iraq war vote cannot be overlooked. From my eyes, it certainly looks like a decent number of Democrats voted for the war because they subordinated their judgment to the “will of the people.” How this has served our country well – setting aside one’s judgment to get into a war that the American people now do not support – boggles my mind.
I’m not absolving anybody of anything. I’m just noting that Rankin voted her conscience then, that that was the wrong vote from an objective viewpoint (if it was the right one, it probably wouldn’t have been the only one) and that she paid the price then for representing her constituents so poorly.
There are all kinds of political cranks and outliers in the world, and few of them are given credit for the courage of their convictions. Most are dismissed for not being able to convince enough voters to win major victories, or enough other politicians to mold together coalitions and get major changes made.
In your view, should Republican congressmen now be voting to end the war in Iraq if they are doing their jobs properly? Probably most constituencies – and the nation as a whole – does not want the war to go on for another two years. That would be a major change.
Not necessarily. Republican and Democratic congressmen alike should be voting according to what they feel would be best for the nation they serve.
Now, that may mean voting along with the public’s expressed will in some polls. But it might not. We have all said above that a representative’s job is not to parrot the will of his constituents without the imposition of his own judgement.
These opinions may seem contradictory, especially when applied to specific issues and politicians. In this, they exactly mirror our own system, which generally shows these contradictory and seemingly incompatible trends and values.
Excellent point. Sadly the fact of the necessity of being elected for a career politician is that the needs of the country, and even the constituency, might not be served if the representative votes only with elections in mind and not the moral or even practical consequences of a given vote.
I think representatives should vote their conscience, based on knowledge of the situation, regardless of the polls in the home district. Unless they disagree with me.
That the President thinks he can tell legislators of the other party to obey his orders?
Clinton? No. Bush I? No. Reagan? Not directly; occasionally he was able to do the “use the bully pulpit to go over their heads to the people” approach. But other than that, no. Carter? You jest. Ford? Fuhgeddaboutit. Nixon? No, not even Nixon. Maybe LBJ, on a good day. But it certainly isn’t the norm.
Uhh… I’m missing the part where the President is “ordering” anyone in Congress to do anything. Are they arguing? Yes, and that’s the way it should be. Clinton was pretty forceful in criticizing Gingrich for shutting down the government in 1995. Although Bush is wrong on the substance, I don’t see that he’s doing anything unprecedented.