Imperative Mandate – the notion that elected representatives are to do the will of those who elected them — is incompatible with our republican form of government — and I would argue — with any form of representative democracy.
I have some personal dealings in Ukraine, and learned that they — that is, their national legislature (the Verkhovna Rada) — recently enacted this into their political system — with a healthy amount of opposition — as they try to figure out how to improve the way it operates for them. Not being familiar with this term, I did some research, to find that it means as I stated in the lead-in to this posting.
That is Ukraine — this is America. I also found that it is a major goal of at least the Green Party. Thus, it deserves to be discussed. This posting is not about the Green Party. Imperative Mandate effectively turns any form of representative democracy into a direct democracy. If we wanted to have a direct democracy, we could amend The Constitution to abolish the Congress and hold national referenda on every issue. I do not want that.
The Founding Fathers gave us a republican form of government — and they did not include Imperative Mandate either explicitly or implicitly. They envisioned that both Congressman, as representatives of We The People, and Senators, as representatives of each of the several states, would act as autonomous entities, rather than as walking pollsters. If We The People decide that we don’t like how our Congressman votes on our behalf, we have an opportunity every two years to replace him. Until the 17th Amendment changed Senators to being directly elected by the people instead of being appointed by the states, it was similar for them — if the state didn’t like how their representative in Congress was voting, they could refuse to send him back for another six-year term (and perhaps, although not explicitly stated, they could swap him out early for a new guy).
Individual representatives can ask The People to elect them upon, and if elected, operate with, Imperative Mandate. That is their choice and the choice of their electorate. But, when all representatives are bound by law to Imperative Mandate, then all room for innovation, compromise, and consensus is lost. The result is stalemate and chaos. When individual representatives can act according to their own conscience, then the will of We The People gets done relatively smoothly in the long run. As our collective ideas of governance change with time, those representatives who cannot abide it are slowly replaced by new ones who can. If some idea is a passing fad, then it will not immediately become backed by the force of law and do possibly irreparable harm to the Body Politic.
We shall have the opportunity to see Imperative Mandate in action in Ukraine over the coming weeks, months, and perhaps years. If my analysis of what they have done to themselves is correct, I hope that they see this and take corrective action before it’s too late. As is usual when people do dumb things to themselves, this was done by party bosses who wanted to keep the elected members of the party “in line”. The proper way to do that is how we do it here — The Party withholds its dollars from them in the next election. We all know that the Almighty Dollar is the Mother’s Milk of politics — when the tit dries-up, the baby dies. It can get a little messy, but it usually works. Sometimes not — Democrats last year decided that Vermont’s Joe Lieberman wasn’t properly towing the line, so they put their dollars on his rival in the primary, who beat him. Lieberman had the last laugh (at least so far) — he ran as an Independent and beat Ned LaMont in the general election to retain his seat in the Senate.
