House Republicans haven’t been terribly successful at many things this year. They struggled to keep the government open and to keep the United States from defaulting on its debt. They’ve even struggled at times on basic votes to keep the chamber functioning. But they have been very good at one thing: regicide.
On Friday, Republicans dethroned Jim Jordan as their designated Speaker, making him the third party leader to be ousted this month. First, there was Kevin McCarthy, who required 15 different ballots to even be elected Speaker and was removed from office by a right-wing rebellion at the beginning of October. Then, after a majority of Republicans voted to make McCarthy’s No. 2, Steve Scalise, his successor, a number of Republicans announced that they, too, would torpedo his candidacy and back Jordan instead. Finally, once Republicans finally turned to Jordan as their candidate, the largest rebellion yet blocked him from becoming Speaker. After losing three successive votes on the floor, the firebrand lost an internal vote to keep his position as Speaker designate on Friday.
The primary rationale behind representative democracy is that it fosters a certain level of technocracy by default. To the extent that our collective “goal” is to collectively implement evidence based policy, then there needs to be a mechanism for expertise in that framework. Representative democracy accomplishes this in two ways - by allowing the direct election and appointment of subject matter experts to policy making positions, and via fair and transparent expert advisory pipelines to elected officials.
Regardless of whether you believe that humans are good or bad or dumb or smart or free, the individual human focus simply does not have the capacity to delve deeply into every possibly complexity of every possible policy. So either we restrict society to a much simpler form, or we require representative democracy.