The voters don’t get asked (by the legislatures) their opinions on each and every piece of legislation worked on. I thought I made it clear that I fully understand that, if, in each and every case of impending legislation, the representitives had to go back and poll the voters that need to be hashed out, progress would be exceedingly slow, and would be impractical in the long run.
Here’s the rub: I don’t get involved (nor do I expect to need to be involved) in routine matters, such as budget debates, or hashing out mandated minimum standards for fertilizers, etc. In this arena, I trust our representitives to be able to conduct their buisness with little or no imput from the constituents.
It’s the non-routine stuff that we notice in the news (It’s in the news because the debates are on unique, once-in-a-while stuff.), stuff that the public becomes aware of and has time to voice their opinions, that the representitives should be paying attention to the constituents. Stuff like Same Sex Marriage, Drivers Licences for Illegals, Voter ID’s, Oil drilling in ANWAR, for example.
You make it sound like we are deciding on hard science here. As if there is only one “right answer”. If all political issues dealt with such black-and-white questions/answers only, I might agree with you. But there is a ton of subjective stuff that our society deals with that needs to get debated as well.
In these cases, the “BDM” is on a playing field with shifting goal posts. That “BDM”'s opinion is not necessarily better than mine, IMO.
I came up with three hypotheticals questions where I laid out an issue which is a little more subjective, and where a politician could conceivably “trump the majority” because that politician felt that he/she believed that their answer was the “right one”, while the public was wrong. (Amnesty, Same Sex Marriage, Junk Food Ban.) You ignored two (and agreed with me with the junk food example). Why is that? (I am not implying any negative unlterior motives here. I just think that my examples show that not all decisions by our representitives are cut-and-dried right-and-wrong here.)
In practical terms, this ends up manifesting as the politicians doing what they want, no matter what. If the public happens to agree, great. If not, tough titties. You make it sound like we are electing someone to a “noblility caste” position. If you think the voters only role is to appoint the political leaders, and then have effectively no voice in any of the decision making until the next election cycle, how is that a democracy? It sounds like a Constitutional Oligarchy.
