Remember when Mitt Romney said “Washington is broken?” Remember what he was planning on doing about it? Probably not. Because it has been a long time since a real candidate campaigned for the presidency with real ideas. Not opinions about abortion, but something substantial like a constitutional amendment. And since you probably cannot find a real candidate with real ideas, then you, like the rest of us, are faced with a decision. Do you support someone who has a chance at winning the White House? Or do you support your favorite idiosyncratic politician who is willing to stand for something. If you, like three percent of America, chose the latter, then you’re in luck.
When Mike Gravel lost the Democratic nomination, he went Libertarian, not to win the presidency, but to raise awareness for his brainchild: the National Initiative for Democracy. The initiative consists of a federal statute and a constitutional amendment designed to create ballot initiatives at the federal level similar to those at the state and local levels. In other words, it seeks to have citizens vote on national laws the same way you might have voted on a Massachusetts law, like gay marriage. Even if you don’t support the initiative, it raises some good questions. Like why do our towns and our states trust us to create, pass, and nullify laws, but not our country? More likely, our country does, but the federal government will not give us this right because the only road to a constitutional amendment is through Congress, the group that would lose the power we would gain; trying to get Congress to grant us lawmaking privileges is like asking the gatekeeper to let you in so you can fire him.
So our representative government is failing us and it seems we have not power to change it. Congressmen have become trapped in a vicious cycle of partisanship; to get elected they need to run as a Democrat or a Republican, and once elected as such, they need to support the policies traditionally supported by their own party or they won’t be able to run under it for their next term. While we navigate the ballot, trying to pick the lesser of two evils, we rarely think about the alternative. There are other parties with other ideas, and most people don’t care which party’s umbrella a policy falls under. If a majority of Americans support something, it should be law.
And yet it isn’t. As it stands we can do little to amend this. We can lobby Congress to give us their direct power or we can throw our vote away on a meaningless presidential candidate. The only other option is Gravel’s farfetched proposition. In the National Initiative, he claims that because the Constitution was established by a large majority of states approving it, a majority of people can amend it. Whether the right is directly stated in the document or not, and whether Congress recognizes it or not, a majority of people advocating for an amendment might be forceful enough to make the federal government acknowledge it. What’s ironic is that a person as deeply pessimistic as Mike Gravel, who has lost complete faith in our Congress to protect us, would actually think this plan could work.
2 comments:
Interesting point, but I think you are forgetting that a representative democracy is still a democracy, and I'm not ready to declare representative democracy broken just yet. Do you think there's a compromise, and if you think there's a way to bypass Congress, how would that be implemented?
In terms of bypassing Congress it's a long shot. Just today I heard on NPR that this (the 110th)Congress' approval rating is 19%. That's significantly lower than even the president's 28%. So many people including Kucinich talk about impeaching the president, but how can we impeach Congress? As I say in the article, a majority of Americans supporting a specific amendment and over 80% of Americans opposing Congress' actions would either make Congress or the Supreme Court recognize this as law. It's something of a minor revolution, but Congress' approval rating may mean that the country is ready for it.
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