Posted on 08/08/2009 7:28:36 AM PDT by nitzy
Something occurred to me after watching all of the footage of the various town hall meetings and the citizen's vocal reaction to what their elected representatives are doing. These 50 or 100 people are really an insignificant percentage of the congress person's constituents. Unions members, television advertising, slick marketing, ACORN and Obama-bots will more than make up for even a relatively large group of pissed off citizens. Today, each representative has 700,000 constituents. That is not the way it has always been. The framers of the constitution intended that number to be between 50,000 and 60,000. The number of congressional districts always grew with each census. I will let you guess when the congressmen decided they were tired of seeing their individual power diluted every 10 years.(see my comment for the answer) Imagine how much louder your voice would be if your representative was actually a member of your community and your voice only competed with another 50,000 voices. Now, imagine how much harder it would be for an industry or special interest to bribe several thousand congressman than it would be to bribe 435. This would require thousands more representatives but they would in fact be required to REPRESENT or they would soon go back home for good. I would gladly accept 6000 representatives in exchange for 435 tyrants.
For more information see Thirty-Thousand.org
They took up arms. Are you making that call right now?
With current technology, the gathered Congress is an outdated idea anyway. All reps and Senators should do all their work from their homes.
At most they can have an office in their local city hall.
Look, if someone told you 5 years ago that we would nationalize banks, nationalize automobiles, nationalize health care and give away 2 trillion dollars to wall street you would have said, "That's not going to happen in my lifetime or yours
I think we need to start thinking about long term solutions to our problems so we don't have to resort to town hall protests to eek out victories against socialism and destruction. That was not the founders intent. It is supposed to be much easier for our wishes to be carried out and our freedoms to be protected. A simple vote should suffice. The proposal in the post would make that happen.
Wrong.
I have always known that socialism can happen in a heartbeat. History is replete with the rapid evolution of tyranny and the rapid destruction of liberty.
The road to tyranny is easily traveled and is paved with the dust of complacency.
The road to liberty is uphill and is paved with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
It would be hard to argue against that but all I can say is that I guess I am more of an optimist than you.
Offices will be local and meetings by technology.
When they meet, there are any number of locations that can house 6000 reps who will be voting. No need to bring their staffs to voting sessions.
Exactly. Politicians also know that those who are really stoked for or against you decide your fate. They are the ones who will make the largest contributions and comprise the tireless volunteers who make phone calls, knock on doors and put fliers on cars. You want those kind of people on your side.
You're not going to get that level of commitment from people who won't get off their duffs unless you give them walking around money, free bread and circus and provide transportation in A/C coaches.
Politicians also see the national polls and realize that the opposition is not an anomaly to their district - it's widespread. They read the tea leaves, so to speak.
Yeah, a good one indeed—kinda makes ya wonder why we nevre heard of it—sorta defies the lawa of...let’a say...chance...
You’re just playing with words with thinking. I would rather have 1 fire ant mound in my yard than hundreds.
But if the violence continues to all come from SEIU goons and the like and continues to be caught on so many cameras how will their tactic work?
You are claiming that they would act the same under both systems. I think a representative who answers to 30,000 would behave much differently than one who answers to 700,000. I think a better comparison would be 6000 ants vs. 435 fire ants. Or another would be 6000 people doing want you want vs. 435 people telling you what to do.
When the town hall venue is only anticipating at most a few hundred attendees total, and they get that many protesters, that gets their attention. The media want to keep the appearance of these groups small so they don’t inspire more uprisings while they work with the politicians to get enough acceptance to keep moving these bills through. They want the bandwagon on their side and the appearance of unexpectedly large protests goes against that.
A truism of business and marketing is that for every customer that complains and makes known their grievances, their are many more who just go away and won’t come back. The same can be true for voters and the angrier a voter, the more likely they are to use that vote against the politician. For every person at these protests their are many more who disagree but don’t have the time or energy to come out. There are even more that are not engaged and can be quickly swayed by the seeing their fellow citizens protesting and finding out why.
You are also right that Congress MUST be expanded to better do it’s job of representing the people. Less staff, more representatives. Tho more people they represent, the less answerable they are to their constituents and the more difficult it is for the voters to be heard over the lobbyists. A bigger congressional class would make the lobbyist job more difficult and expensive as they have to sway more individual votes while competing with the voters for attention.
The more people a representative “represents” the less answerable they are, the less voice the individual voter has with them and the more influence lobbyists from outside their district can have with them. Large districts can also be gerrymandered to stifle dissenting voices and groups and limit their voice in congress. With more contact with their representatives, people will become more engaged in the political process because they can be heard.
Representatives will have their powers diluted. They won’t get as many perks and won’t be able to live so much by a different set of rules than the average American. As such they will have our interests more at heart.
Their tactic will only work if you and I stop forwarding the videos.
YouTube keeps pulling them. Network news refuses to air them. So unless someone is friends with an eager “mob” member willing to share the facts or they watch Fox News at the right time of day, they won’t see the truth.
Yes, I have noticed.
Related thread;
It’s the Narrative, Stupid [Lefty admits Dems have all but lost ObamaCare PR battle]
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2312362/posts
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