Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

We are all representatives of the American people. We all do town hall meetings. We all talk to our constituents. And I've got to tell you, the American people are engaged. And if you think they want a government takeover of health care, I would respectfully submit you're not listening to them.

Increased town size hurts real democracy in two ways. First… it dramatically reduces the percentage of citizens who attend town meetings. Second, town size increases the number of citizens who attend, which dramatically reduces the percentage of these attendees who participate.”

A government is republican in proportion as every member composing it has his equal voice in the direction of its concerns: not indeed in person, which would be impracticable beyond the limits of a city or small township, but by representatives chosen by himself and responsible to him at short periods.

What does a political revolution look like? It means that 80 percent of the people vote in national elections, not 40 percent. It means that billionaires can't make unlimited campaign contributions and buy and sell politicians. It means that the U.S. government represents the needs of all the people, not just the 1 percent and their lobbyists.

If, then, the control of the people over the organs of their government be the measure of its republicanism, and I confess I know no other measure, it must be agreed that our governments have much less of republicanism than ought to have been expected; in other words, that the people have less regular control over their agents, than their rights and their interests require.

It is through states that the American people get the job done every day, often in spite of a deeply flawed bureaucratic federal government.

So I think that if we want to have a Congress, if we want to have government that looks like America, if we want to have government that is truly a representative Democracy, then we need to clearly address how we get our campaign laws out of the way of Democracy.

Representative government demands an ongoing conversation between legislators and constituents.

Logically, in a society ostensibly grounded on representative government, it would seem reasonable that a majority of the people in a State would elect a majority of that State’s legislators.

Democracy, in brief, requires government by parties because the citizens are too numerous, too ill-informed and too preoccupied to come together spontaneously to choose the policies and leaders they wish to prevail. Political machinery has to be worked. The parties work it.

How is it the community can check ? The community can act only when assembled; and when assembled, it is incapable of acting. The community, however, can choose representatives.

At the federal level, as a member of Congress, you have one vote out of 435, and in the Senate, it's one out of 100. So, the ability to get some stuff done exists as a much larger opportunity at a local level than in the federal government.

The key is to vote because we need a vote to put the people in power that we want to represent us.

Spend a while listening to people in your district to make sure you understand how they are served well in government and how they could be served better.

Speaker Boehner has said many times that the House of Representatives is the closest institution to the people, and he recognizes that by empowering the members to have direct input into the process.

A robust democracy requires active participation.

My big idea is that democracy can only work properly if you have truly representative people at the table.

Having a vote once every four years is not the same thing as democracy.

People want the government to go back to the people.

I think that the voters should choose the elected officials, not the elected officials choose the voters.

I'm all for experimenting with sortition - randomly selected representative bodies of citizens. But I don't favor direct democracy. We're busy. We have lives. There is reddit. Who has time to work out the right answer to the thousand policy choices a gov't must make all the time?

People in a democracy should be satisfied with drawing the Government's attention to a mistake, if any.

The only way change happens is when people become more significantly involved in the political process. We have to increase voter turnout and citizen participation so that people know what's going on and demand a government that works for everybody and not just the one percent.

One of the best ways to stop the failed policies coming out of Congress is to bring in the ideas and the involvement of the American people, which the America Speaking Out project is designed to do.