A writer in State Sen. Gray Tollison’s hometown newspaper, The Oxford Eagle, observed recently on the newspaper’s opinion page that “the fundamentals of democracy seem to be eroding.”
One of the examples he cited was Tollison’s pigeon-holing a bill that would have loosened vaccination requirements for Mississippi schoolchildren. In our opinion, Tollison, a Republican who chairs the Senate Education Committee, was correct to kill the bill which would have weakened the Mississippi State Department of Health’s authority to prevent communicable diseases among children in the state.
Tollison’s action prevented the full Senate from voting on the bill, which is the way a lot of lawmakers like it. Committee chairmen in both branches of the Legislature frequently bottle up legislation, preventing up or down votes in the House or Senate. A lot of times lawmakers would rather not vote on contentious legislation on which their constituents are divided.
“I’m not sure that is how democracy was planned to work by the Founding Fathers,” the Oxford writer noted.
One problem with that observation is the Founding Fathers never intended for democracy to work at all.
Benjamin Franklin, in reply to a woman’s inquiry just after the signing of the Constitution as to the type of government the Founders had created, replied: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
One dictionary definition of a republic is “a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law.” For the U.S., the law in this definition would be the United States Constitution.
A democracy is a government in which supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving free elections where the majority rules.
Here’s what some Founding Fathers said about democracy:
James Madison in the Federalist Papers: “Hence it is that democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general have been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths... A republic, by which I mean a government in which a scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect and promises the cure for which we are seeking.”
Thomas Jefferson: “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51 percent of the people may take away the rights of the other 49.”
John Adams: “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
Our form of government, with three separate branches, was designed to move slowly and deliberately on public policy issues.
Agree with him or not, Tollison’s committee action probably comes closer to what the Founding Fathers intended.
