In the past 10 years or so, and especially the past year, the debate over how an elected official should represent his/her constituents has increased. The one rallying point that we have seen is that our elected officials are the voice of us. But what does that mean? Some would argue that JFK had it right when he said that the elected official had a sort of carte blanch in where the people gave their consent to all his policies because they elected him into office. Others take the opposite side of this and say that the voice of the people changes as issues come up and that this carte blanch doesn’t exist. If we break both of these down we’ll find that both have plenty of issues to contend with.
First JFK’s carte blanch. The most glaring weakness of this form of representation is that it does not take changes in public opinion in to account. A glaring example of this is the current health care debate, while the majority of the American public don’t want this bill to pass our representatives in the House and Senate continue to try to pass it through under the assumption that we elected them to do our thinking for us.
The next is that our elected officials should always get our opinion on every issue. This is also a ludicrous idea because of the number of minor bills and pork politics being thrown about. If our representatives asked our opinion on everything the legislative system of our country would go slower than it already does, it would be like downgrading from a Corvette to a Yugo.
So both systems are imperfect, which do we use? Obviously we need to use a mixture of both. We can trust our representatives on minor things but when it comes to major bills, such health care reform, our officials need to listen to us, The People. Because we are the guiding force, we know whats best for us, we know when our personal freedoms are being compromised, most of all we know instinctively when something is bad for our country.
So to conclude, our system of Representative Democracy gives our elected officials a freedom of action and thought for small bills that do little to affect us, such as congressional medals of honor. But when it comes to bills that effect the majority of us personally it is the People of now that our officials must listen to, not the People who elected them in a year ago.
