April 22, 2013 - 8:56pm
Lincoln Logs: A governing system representing who?
BY HARSHA NAHATA
“If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.”
― Abraham Lincoln, Speech at Clinton, Illinois, September 8, 1854
It’s funny, in a democracy where 90 percent of the public supports a bill the policy still doesn’t pass. Yes, I’m talking about the recent U.S. Senate vote on background checks for gun owners.
The bill was deemed moderate by anyone’s standards — asking for nothing more than universal background checks for those wishing to purchase a gun. Not only that, but it was also overwhelmingly supported by the people — with polls showing that over 90 percent of Americans support expanded background checks.
Yet, the bill still failed to pass. The most obvious follow up question then, is why. Unfortunately the answer is the same one we’ve seen all along — powerful special interest groups and political strategy get in the way of governing. Only four Republican Senators voted across party lines — a.k.a for the bill. While three Democrats (up for re-election in difficult districts) voted against it. If this isn’t pandering to elections, I don’t know what is.
Following the vote, Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords wrote an op-ed in the New York Times chastising Congress for failing to do it’s job. Perhaps she put it best: “I was elected six times to represent southern Arizona, in the State Legislature and then in Congress. I know what a complicated issue is; I know what it feels like to take a tough vote. This was neither.”
And she’s right. There are a lot of policy issues we face today that are hotly contested and debated, this for the most part didn’t seem to be one of them. Yes, our Founding Father’s designed our governing system to be slow, but it seems to have come to a complete standstill. If Senators can’t support a bill that 90 percent of the people support, what hope is there for other policies to pass, many of which have nowhere close to a 90 percent support rate.
We’ve seen long and drawn out debates over everything in the past few years – from the debt ceiling to tax cuts to sequestration. And people have been frustrated with the Senate, rightly so — we see this reflected in their all time low approval ratings. But, at some point there’s a disconnect. If the Senate isn’t representative of the people, it’s the people’s job to change that. As Lincoln said, “you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” It’s up to the people to decide whether or not they want to continue being pawns in games of political strategy or whether they want to demand governance that represents them.
Harsha Nahata can be reached at hnahata@umich.edu.
