You want it all (the Democrat agenda), and I want less.

If you want less, you want us to have nothing, because we’re not getting anything now. (You probably have been too busy watching Faux to notice it.)

“Republican Majority”, “Democratic Majority”, and “Tyranny of the Majority” are all different things.

For the most part, Republicans are straight-up corporatists, Democrats are under-cover corporatists, and the ‘tyranny of the majority’ is what conservatives start bitching about when the majority party doesn’t agree with them on everything.

While I am no constitutional scholar, I wanted to provide an explanation of my concern for “majority rule.” While it may work great on a playground, the concept of majority rule can lead to a tyranny of the majority when applied to a nation.

Simply put, in a nation where a majority of citizens can pass laws that apply, not just to themselves, but to all members of the group, judgment is required to distinguish potential laws which are reasonable and fair from those which are tyrannical because they are unnecessary, unfair, and justifiably intolerable to the minority that opposed them. (source: http://www.garlikov.com/philos…..tyrule.htm)

Our Founding Fathers were very aware of this danger, particularly James Madison, who addressed this concept in Federalist Paper 51: “It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.”

So what controls does our Government have to guard against this danger? Some quick examples are our bicameral Congress (Senate and House of Representatives) and the Electoral College.

I also read another interesting essay called “On Liberty” by John Stuart Mill (http://www.constitution.org/jsm/liberty.htm), which helped me better understand this concept.

The bottom line is that no party has the “right” to impose its will simply because “we won.” This principle applies to the Republican Majority in 2001 (to which you referred) as well as to the Democratic Majority in 2009.

We are witnessing the complex, often frustrating process that our nation endures to impose the will of a particular party. Republicans were partially successful in 2001, and I expect Democrats will be partially successful in 2009.

You want it all (the Democrat agenda), and I want less. Ergo, the dance.

In any case, the opponents of either agenda are not necessarily evil, aligned with the rich, pawns of insurance companies, or socialists or communists.

PS: Note to dakine01 (#67): “Republican Majority”, “Democratic Majority”, and “Tyranny of the Majority” are all different things.

Skiritae

There were so many sheep there last night bleating subservience to The Divine One that it made me feel sorry for Northern Virginia. I’ve always been proud to be a Virginian and proud of my heritage.

How sad that you are all in a rush to commit national suicide and hand over your lives to big government.

Well, I feel exactly the same way about you teabaggers. Totally irrational, complete tools of the insurance industry. I was really glad to see a trun out of Virginians who, in the great majority, were in favor of health care reform. As for handing our lives over to the Government is concerned, right now the lives of my children are controlled in significant measure by the health insurance companies and the consequences of how they do business. What I’m interested in is their freedom from these bloodsucking profiteers who are running nothing less than a legal con game. (I’m already free because I have Medicare.) Any person with a lick of common sense would prefer being insured (controlled) by the Government to being ensured by United Health Care, BCBS, or any of the other insurance companies who are killing and bankrupting Americans everyday.

I understand that many people think that healthcare for all is also the ‘right thing to do’. I think we just disagree on the ‘how’ of it.

By the way, I am not a big fan of “majority rule”. At the risk of exciting the lawyers in here, I think that our Founding Fathers deliberately established our form of Government as a constitutional republic in order to avoid the tyranny of the majority.

Skiritae