Dear Editor:
Recently there has been circulating on the Internet a proposal to abandon the constitutional role of Congress and to let citizens vote directly on federal healthcare reforms and all legislation. The folly of disbanding Congress and converting our Republic into a democracy is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Are you aware that democracy was the form of government our Founders feared the most? And rightly so! Have you considered that a lynch mob is actually an example of democracy in action - pure rule by majority with no consideration for individual, God-given rights? Democracies are unstable forms of government: someone has to administer them, and therein lies the problem. George Orwell made the case very well; in a democracy, within a very short time a few gain control and become "more equal" than all the others.
We don't need to abandon our constitutional republic, we need to restore it. Under the Constitution, for example, no power is granted to Congress over health. Were we to insist that our representatives abide by the oaths they take, there would no socialized medicine bill of any kind, nor any Food and Drug Administration.
The truth is that most of the massive governmental power grab that has taken place over the past century has been due to the fact that a small but powerful elite has been working assiduously to transform our Republic into a democracy.
Lenin advised his revolutionaries to "create the appearance of popular support," a principle we saw in action during the 1960s when major cities across the U.S. were burned in order to justify new legislation and, incidentally, give more power to the federal government. But of course we were supposed to believe that those atrocities were the voice of the people - democracy in action, if you will.
Such mobocracy is exactly the predictable result of democracies and the reason our Founders so greatly feared them. Our constitutional republic gave us the highest standard of living, the least poverty, and the greatest degree of freedom of any government in history. It would be short-sighted to scrap it on a whim. Let's force the fed to abide by the Constitution as they swore to do!
Charles Fowler
Toledo, IL
