The following rebuttal was written in response to a proposal circulating on the Internet that the constitutional role of Congress be abandoned in favor of disbanding Congress and letting the citizens vote directly on the federal health care “reform” plan – and all legislation. The advocates of this idea called it “direct democracy.”
To consider disbanding Congress and converting our republic into a democracy is like throwing the baby out with the bath water. Are you aware that democracy was the form of government our founders feared the most? And rightly so. Have you considered that a lynch mob is actually an example of democracy in action – pure rule by majority with no consideration for individual, God-given rights?
Democracies are not stable forms of government. Someone has to administer them and therein lies the problem. George Orwell, in his classic book “Animal Farm,” made the case very well; in a democracy, within a very short time a few gain control and become “more equal” than all the others.
We don’t need to abandon our constitutional republic, we need to restore it. Under the Constitution, for example, no power is granted to Congress over health. Were we to insist that our representatives abide by the oaths they take, there would be no socialized medicine bill of any kind, nor I might add, any Food and Drug Administration.
The truth is that most of the massive governmental power grab we have seen taking place over roughly the past century has been due to the fact that a small but powerful elite has been working assiduously to transform our republic into a democracy.
Lenin advised his revolutionaries to “create the appearance of popular support.” We saw that principle in action during the 1960s when major cities across the United States were burned in order to justify new legislation and incidentally, give more power to the federal government. But of course we were supposed to believe that those atrocities were the voice of the people – democracy in action, if you will. Such mobocracy is exactly the predictable result of democracies and the reason our founders so greatly feared them.
Our constitutional republic gave us the highest living standard, the least poverty and the greatest degree of freedom of any government in history. It would be shortsighted indeed to scrap it on a whim. A more appropriate course would be to force personnel in all branches of the federal government to abide by the Constitution, as they have sworn to do.
Edwin Storm
Enumclaw
