Conservative Opposition to Health Care Leads them to Embrace Plebiscitary Democarcy

I oppose the current health-care bill, but a lot of conservative/Republican commentary over the bill is silly and annoying. One of the more annoying arguments in my book is the argument deployed by all stripes of conservative commentators about how the health care bill should not be enacted because polls show that a majority of Americans currently oppose the bill.

Well, shoot, as the old conservative adage used to go, "America is not a democracy, it's a republic." (In this context we should recall that Madison famously, if idiosyncratically, defined a "republic" to be a "representative democracy.") That is, a central political truth about the U.S. is that it is a representative democracy, and not a democracy in the pure sense of direct rule by the people. The Constitution's framers thought that was a good thing, not a bad thing. Ironically, it was the Progressive's who criticized representative government for blocking the will of the people. And now conservatives have adopted the Progressive's rhetoric of attacking constitutional principles to serve in a policy debate.

So now it's the conservative ox that is getting gored, and conservatives now discover that they love plebiscitary democracy. It's just nonsense. I think it's proper to attempt to leverage political opposition to the bill by pointing out to legislators that they may put their political careers at risk by voting for the bill. But that's a different argument than saying that Congress should not enact the bill today because over 50 percent of the American public opposes it, as if popular opposition to a bill had some sort of normative claim on what Congress can or should enact today. That claim -- now deployed by conservatives -- is one that undermines the theory underlying the U.S. constitutional system. Real conservatives do not employ that argument.