[Tailgunner Joe]

I don't think Torie's idea of "democracy" has much to do with the "will of the people."

Rousseau claimed that representative governments are based on the "general will," which could somehow be different from the conscious will of the people themselves. "The general will is always right and tends to the public advantage," he wrote. "But it does not follow that the deliberations of the people are always equally correct...the people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived." - LINK

[risk]

I don't agree with what you said about natural law earlier. Locke and Samuel Adams who quoted him extensively point out that the rights of man are superior to governments, and government's entire authority to govern is encased in the requirement that every law, every ruling, and every enforcement be conducted within the limits of those rights. They point out that those rights emerge from the Creator, or from Natural law. In other words, if the Constitution began to violate the rights of man, it would become a worthless piece of paper.

And yes, Rousseau's ideas abandon the critical notion that laws must respect the rights of man. Man cannot redefine those rights. The right which I claim is not to have my approval forced out of me with a rubber stamp in a courthouse. I will not grant that approval. If the majority of my fellow Americans also reject that approval, the government has exceeded its authority, and therefore it has lost it.