Do Our Representatives in Congress Now Value Party Over Their Constituencies?
I want to talk about the 800 lb gorilla in the room..... Then I want to beat him down.
For years now, the United States has been caught up in a divergence of our political process that represents a fundamental threat to our democracy.
And it seems that very few people care. Or perhaps they just don't want to think about such a fundamental challenge to our form of government (aka, Ostrich mode).
We are at one of the most significant crossroads, politically, in our nation's history. Rather than recognizing that they have a duty of representation, our Congressmen and women seem to now prioritize THEIR POLITICAL PARTY over their constituencies.
Never has this been more clear as it was in the vote for the most recent economic stimulus package -- a bill that had broad bi-partisan support across this great nation of ours.
Yet, when it came down to a vote in the Congress, the Bill only passed along nearly direct party lines.
Don't under-estimate the importance and danger of this development, which portends that the political parties now have a higher power position in Congress than We the People!
In our form of representative democracy, there are two possible representation doctrines or ideologies, commonly referred to as the "delegate" model and the "trustee" model. In the delegate model, it is assumed that our representatives in Congress will faithfully and fully represent the will and opinions of their constituencies. On the other hand, in the trustee model, the Congressmen and women are considered "specialists" that only have a looser connection to their respective constituencies. I will argue here that, in the absence of term limits for Congress, we must remain closer to the delegate ideology since movement toward the trustee model in the case of a Life-Long politician represents a move away from democracy if they continue the current trend of valuing party over the will of their constituencies. But that is precisely where we find ourselves today!
We all have a duty -- to ourselves, our children, and their children to do whatever it takes to fix this. When any political party seeks to have power greater than the people, we as a nation, will have gone fully down a slippery slope.