{"id":149,"date":"2005-04-14T12:13:49","date_gmt":"2005-04-14T18:13:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stardel.com\/eg\/?p=149"},"modified":"2011-10-19T18:17:18","modified_gmt":"2011-10-20T00:17:18","slug":"what-is-a-representative-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/2005\/04\/what-is-a-representative-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"What is a Representative Democracy?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It would appear that people have forgotten the principles of representative government and why we elect representatives to the Congress every two years.<\/p>\n<p>The holders of those offices certainly don&#8217;t want the people to think about how they are not doing their jobs.  They would prefer to distract &#8216;The People&#8217; and point to irrelvant issues to consider.<\/p>\n<p>Taken in the light of &#8216;The People&#8217; governing themselves, I don&#8217;t see very many liberals on the National Political Scene. And it may be that you have to sell your soul to get to that level.  &#8216;The People&#8217; don&#8217;t seem to have much to say about critical federal items like debt-ceiling and deficits.  Everything seems to be pork barrel politics; get the goods for your district and keep the voters happy, even if you have to compromise your principles by supporting someone else&#8217;s bill that doesn&#8217;t really impact your district anyway.<\/p>\n<p>And it may be that people just aren&#8217;t paying attention to what the idiots in DC are doing this term, because at the Federal level there aren&#8217;t that many items that have a direct daily impact on people.  How your representative voted regarding salmon fishing farms of the coast of Washington State probably doesn&#8217;t have much impact on the average citizen not on the coast of Washington State. But what sort of deals were cut to get that vote?<\/p>\n<p>Maybe, in the global scheme of things, Salmon Fish Farming has a role. I think that is part of why representatives are in Washington. To get the information together that will alow them to make an informed vote and not a bought vote.  Their vote should be for their constituents first, and for the US second, if they do&#8217;t see their constituency as being a primary player.<\/p>\n<p>We don&#8217;t have a very representative democracy anymore, here in the USA. There is 1 person representing almost 1 million citizens in Montana.  That doesn&#8217;t sound very representative to me.  On average, each representative represents 650,000 citizens. That doesn&#8217;t sound very representive to me. I think one representative for every 100,000 citizens is a fair goal.  It may get a bit chaotic on the Hill trying to get 50% of 3000 representatives to agree on something, but democracy isn&#8217;t pretty.<\/p>\n<p>I would actually suggest that a  2\/3  majority is needed to pass a federal law, but that might be going to far. I&#8217;m willing to compromise on 50%+.  If you can&#8217;t get 67% of the representatives to agree on a budget, maybe there are some things in it that don&#8217;t belong there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It would appear that people have forgotten the principles of representative government and why we elect representatives to the Congress every two years. The holders of those offices certainly don&#8217;t want the people to think about how they are not doing their jobs. They would prefer to distract &#8216;The People&#8217; and point to irrelvant issues &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/2005\/04\/what-is-a-representative-democracy\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">What is a Representative Democracy?<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9,12],"tags":[52],"class_list":["post-149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberating-thoughts","category-politics","tag-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4NpF-2p","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1187,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions\/1187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}