Should your Congressmen or Senator vote yes on bills that are widely unpopular with their citizens? (Representatives, poll)

[Refugee56]

Many voters are going to try to punish their elected Representatives this fall who voted yes on the One Trillion Dollar Bail Out of Washington. I understand that the phone lines to Washington are burning up with millions of people angry about the whole thing.

If most Senators and Congressmen were to do a poll on if they should support the bailout, it would lose. But most Senators and Congressmen will vote yes.

Why? Their own financial situation will likely suffer if things get worse and the experts and party leaders have told them to vote yes on the eventual compromise.

Should your CongressPerson or Senator be thrown out of office for voting yes on something most people want them to vote no?

[NewToCA]

[quote=Refugee56;5420937]Many voters are going to try to punish their elected Representatives this fall who voted yes on the One Trillion Dollar Bail Out of Washington. I understand that the phone lines to Washington are burning up with millions of people angry about the whole thing.

If most Senators and Congressmen were to do a poll on if they should support the bailout, it would lose. But most Senators and Congressmen will vote yes.

Why? Their own financial situation will likely suffer if things get worse and the experts and party leaders have told them to vote yes on the eventual compromise.

Should your CongressPerson or Senator be thrown out of office for voting yes on something most people want them to vote no?[/QUOTE]

Nope, they should vote as they believe to be correct for the country, and then explain it to the folks in their district. The voters can then decide if they "buy" the reasoning behind the vote.

[mhouse2001]

The will of the constituents should prevail only when they are properly informed of the situation. Do the elected officials know more than the people? If so, then that information needs to be divulged. Should the elected official vote contrary to the will of their constituency in this circumstance, they had better have a good reason. If that reason is insufficient, reelection should be made impossible.

[Mircea]

Originally Posted by Refugee56

Should your CongressPerson or Senator be thrown out of office for voting yes on something most people want them to vote no?

No. This is a classic example and the greatest argument as to why the US should be a republic and not a democracy, and why democracies always fail.

The Founding Fathers worshiped the ground Plato walked on. In building a Republic modeled exactly on Plato's Republic with a few modifications to disenfranchise the majority of people, they thought they could avoid the errors and pitfalls Plato said plagued democratic forms of government, including republics.

Democracies always fail because people are basically selfish and always vote in their own selfish interest and they do so based on emotion, usually fear or greed, instead of logic and reason.


The Founding Fathers knew that one or more days like this would occur in the future, and that's why you vote for an Elector, instead of a President.

That's why for over 115 years you weren't allowed to vote for Senators.

That's why originally only landowners could vote.

The funny thing about fickle Americans is that these very same people decrying the bailout would be the first to jump up and down and scream for help when they lost their job and their standard of living dropped to that of a Honduran.