BLOG: Current logic in hyperpolitical state yields undemocratic representation

America’s democratic system based on a representative body of elected officials has become grotesquely flawed.

I stumbled upon an article on CNN.com while researching the status of the health care debate that disturbed me.

Apparently, there’s such a thing as a “soft vote” in Congress:

“House leaders, especially Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are trying to corral 216 Democrats to vote in favor of the Senate’s measure. Although many Democrats have said they will vote no, CNN Senior Political Analyst Gloria Borger said Pelosi could rely on “soft votes.”

“Nancy Pelosi has some kind of soft votes … Democrats who really want to vote against the bill, but they don’t want to be the vote that kills the bill,” Borger said. “And so they’ve said to her, ‘we’ll help you out if you need us, but hopefully you won’t need us.’ So she’s keeping those in her back pocket.””

This is irrefutable proof that the country’s representatives and senators have cast their lots with their party and the wishes of their constituents have been deemed unimportant.

The job of a U.S. Representative and Senator, per the Constitution of the United States of America, is not to vote with their party (parties, of course, are not mentioned in the Constitution), but to vote for their constituents, who voted them into public office for that specific reason.

I highly doubt the majority of constituents, in any given House Democrat’s district, are telling them to offer Pelosi a “soft vote.”

That logic is ludicrous.

They’re telling their Representatives to either support the bill or not to.

Of course, Republicans are just as guilty as Democrats are for egregious party loyalty. The two squabbling parties cannot have a coherent conversation with one another because Republicans are acting like bull-headed kindergarteners refusing to cooperate with other classmates.

Whether they are right or wrong about what the Democrats are doing, they’re getting in their own damn way of compromising.

As a constituent, I want my representatives and senators, at the state and national level, to cooperate so that comprehensive legislation can be passed to better the lives of American citizens.

I also want them, when voting on controversial issues that affect everybody – such as health care reform, abortion, immigration, environmental issues, or the wars in the Middle East – to act as “delegates,” casting their votes on behalf of their district’s majority opinion.

Exactly as the Founding Fathers intended things to be.

But I’ve lived on Earth long enough to know that money is everything and I hold the greedy side of the capitalist system somehow at fault for the hyperpolitical state of things that instigate stalemates in legislative debates.

And I don’t foresee anything changing anytime soon.

Shame.