the Supremes = Nine justices serving on SCOTUS.

Subtle difference, but a difference nonetheless.

However, now that you mention it, wouldn’t it be fun to swap them out?

(Commercial Voiceover) “We’ve replaced Diana’s backup singers with nine elderly jurists, let’s see if she notices.”

*shoots squiggly blue stuff out his fingers-wow,…fun!*

In my so humble opinion, most of the ‘fixes’ to representative democracy that people propose would have the opposite than the intended effect (term limits, getting rid of political parties, etc). Sadly, I don’t think most American’s are willing to accept the drastic overhaul to our electoral system or system of checks and balances (that makes change nearly impossible).

Actually, for all its drawbacks, I do believe representational democracy IS the best form of government. And I agree that personal responsibility needs to be enforced on the elected officials as well as the electorate.

Do you know that Congress is required to submit a balanced budget every year by a specific date and never does? (Not that I remember, anyway.) If I didn’t fulfill my job requirements, I wouldn’t get paid.

My personal political stance is that the system lacks sufficient personal responsibility for everyone involved. Making an effort has been glorified to the point that failure, no matter how weak the effort, is always the fault of someone else. I think forcing the established bureaucracy to accept limitations on how much they can benefit from corporate lobbying as well as real personal consequences for failing to deliver reasonable legislation and regulation would be enough for the foreseeable future to ‘fix’ the mess we currently have in place, the problem is building up enough momentum to make it happen.

Of course, I don’t think Vetinari is benevolent; he just makes the system work.

That and one vote doesn’t go so far.

There are other ways for choosing representatives. Take Belgium as an example.

I work in IT. On a daily basis I deal with doctors who can’t wrap their head around the fact that email requires a working internet connection, Ph.D.’s that don’t understand that not updating their antivirus in 5 years is equivalent to not having antivirus, and MBA’s that think we should wave a wand and make all the spam just stop. Likely less the 10% of the people who read this site could rebuild their own transmission, and less than 30% could tell you why antibiotics can stop a bacterial infection and not a viral infection. And you want these people to have a say on things like net neutrality, vehicle saftey regulations and healthcare?

The problem lies in the fact that it’s too easy for our elected representatives to ignore their responsibility to allocate resources for the betterment of their community and just go with either whatever is popular, or even worse go with the will of whichever company pays them the most in ‘campaign contributions’ (read: bribes) with no long term accountability.

The ‘just vote them out next term’ doesn’t help since under the same pressures the likelihood is the next guy is going to succumb just as quickly as the last one did (see Guantanamo, warrentless wire tapping, and government transparency under the current US administration).

Western democracy in its current incarnation is far to susceptible to corruption, this is the fundamental problem all western democracies face; and those with the power to stop it, have no motivation to do so.

Logic is not a strong suit in the electorate (or most other groups of people).

Sometimes I am *glad* the people don’t get a say in running this country.

2 minutes into this clip is where that line is from