I know this is going to sound crazy but I long for the days when major decisions came out of smoke filled back rooms. Many of America's best decisions have come out of these smoke filled rooms like the selection of Lincoln to be the republican nominee for president. The reason smoke filled back rooms are so important is that they let our legislatures compromise. Without compromise we see complete deadlock like we are experiencing now.
The issue comes down to a more philosophical debate about the role our legislatures play once they are elected. Should our legislatures be delegates of the people or their trustees? Delegates respond directly to the will of their constituents. So what ever a majority of the people want a member to do they will do since they want to get their votes in the next election. If this were completely true it would be easy to determine how members would act. Simply take an opinion poll and you would know how they would act. However when a member of congress acts as a trustee they act as they themselves would without taking the peoples will on an issue directly into account. So by being elected the people chose the ideas he ran on so he should make his own best judgement on an issue.
The conventional wisdom is that as people have more oversight the members will take on more of a delegate roll which is good because the will of the people will be exercised. The problem is that members are so scared of alienating potential voters that they do not act. If we had more trust in our legislatures and did not exercise as much oversight members would be able to act more like trustees and get more done. If members couldn't be blamed for compromise to the same extent, they may be more apt to compromise.
While i do understand wanting our government to be accountable to its people like the founders wanted. I also think the founders would acknowledge that while they did not want to count solely on the altruism of members to make good decisions there must be some level of trust by the people in their government or the government wont survive.
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3 comments:
I couldn't agree more with the sentiment of this post. And I definitely agree that the founders at some level supported this because we are a republic, not a direct democracy. The president isn't chosen by direct vote and up until the 1900s, senators weren't chosen by the people either. At some point, I hope we get to a place where the right decisions begin to outweigh the smart political decisions. At least a man can dream.
While I agree with the need for more compromise, and appreciate the trustee argument, there's no way to avoid the fact that smoke-filled rooms equal corruption. Take a look at the behind-the-scenes activity that helped speed up the economic downturn at Bear Stearns, for instance, or the collaboration of Blackwater guards in covert CIA operations that nobody knew about until the past few days. It would be a very slippery slope.
I agree with these basic sentiments, and Madeline's point. (That being said I've far more trust for covert CIA operatives than I do for most politicians or lobbyists) The problem though with popular agitation for open government is the ease with which demagogues and corruption can also infiltrate the process-- congressional pork projects for example-- if a district's constituents benefit at the cost of further waste of taxpayer money, they'll still support it.. and if most Congressmen engage in this..a basic tragedy of the commons situation - every individual Congressman and Congressional district has ample reason to direct pet projects to their area...etc. Also, even state representatives are far more removed (in terms of population) from their constituents than a century or two ago.
Short of a fundamental change in society's mindset back to ideas of civic virtue, service, self-reliance, and tradition, I doubt things could change.
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