Previous perspectives

By Jack O’Brien

“Democracy,” said Winston Churchill in a moment of exasperation with parliamentary foot-dragging, “is the worst possible form of government, except for all the rest.” That may be an odd way of putting it, but it reflects the impatience we all feel with government at times. And particularly now, when public approval of the United States Congress has fallen to near the 10 percent level.

You can pick holes in the democratic ideal, but you have to admit that the idea of popular representation is a lot better than the alternatives, where if you express a dissenting opinion you are liable to be hung up on a meat hook. No, the problem is not with the concept, but with the execution, the mechanism of making hundreds of millions of people familiar with the issues and able to communicate their opinion to the state.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution, all representatives of their respective states, wrestled with the problem and reluctantly agreed that a central government would be essential to the daily running of the United States, and would require considerable relinquishment of state power to do the job. But they were obsessed with the dangers of usurpation of power – in time, by a central government attempting to increase its own power at the expense of the states that had created it – and it was therefore essential that it should remain a creature of the states, answerable to the states and re-elected at frequent intervals to emphasize state control.

The risk of usurpation could come not only from a branch of a central government itself, but also from a revolutionary movement rejecting the rule of law. To avoid such situations, the founders created a complex system of several entities: the executive branch, headed by the president; a judiciary; and a bi-cameral legislature, each subject to the control of another branch or group. The president would be nominated by the electorate, but actually elected by an Electoral College appointed by the state legislatures; the judiciary would be nominated by the executive, but subject to the approval of the legislature, which in turn would be elected by the combined state legislatures elected by the people.

In time, the electorate has matured, a series of amendments have been added to the Constitution, and election of the central legislature now rests in the hands of the electorate – though they still have no direct power to elect either the judiciary or the president. Thus, the people now have direct power over one-third of central government, and that power is further diluted by the rise of the two-party system, whereby roughly half of the electorate is effectively disenfranchised every four years, having chosen the losing party in a general election. So circumstances, including a large increase in the population, have conspired to render the influence of the electorate as a whole on government relatively slight, and of the individual elector virtually insignificant.

This complex arrangement, to its credit, has worked reasonably well for more than two centuries, and so we hesitate to change it now; but it is incompatible with the basic idea of democracy and is beginning to show some cracks. With several hundreds of millions of citizens participating in several elections, the process has become so expensive that deep pockets are required to support the electioneering process, with the obvious risk of undue influence. The operations of each branch of central government being subject to the assent of a separate branch no doubt have  limited the undue expansion of one branch at the expense of the others, but also inevitably allowed a dissenting group to unreasonably bring the daily work of government to a standstill. In the process, it has weakened the credit of the government throughout the world, increasing borrowing costs and adversely affecting global financial systems.

All of these troubles may be laid at the door of the representational system, but can be eliminated by constitutional change. Today, our means of communication have evolved to the point where every citizen with access to a keyboard – which, including Internet service providers, means everyone – can by email, Facebook or Twitter record a “yes” or “no” vote with a central agency. Of course, not everyone is competent to understand the implications or even the language of proposed legislation, and so to insure informed assent or dissent, every such proposal must be nailed down to a maximum 500 words or less, couched in language comprehensible to a grade school student and made available on request to all voters electronically and via the media. For this purpose, while the House of Representatives will become redundant for representational purposes, a hundred-man Senate, elected by universal suffrage, must be retained to prepare, debate and publish proposed legislation.

A technically more demanding challenge is the requirement for unique identification of every voter and detection of misrepresentation. However, the banks issuing credit and debit cards already have such a system, which may need to be upgraded for universal use. Of course, it is hardly to be expected that the powerful interests presently involved in the costly and unwieldy electioneering process will go along with these changes. But the Occupy Wall Street movement, presently leaderless and uncertain of its message, might be persuaded to adopt these changes as the will of the people. If so, from there on, it is up to us to decide whether we want democracy, congressional dysfunction or revolution. The choice is ours.

Jack O’Brien is a retired oil company executive who has lived in Costa Rica for the last 26 years and likes it better than anywhere else in the world.