by Michael Raymond

Created on: July 22, 2007   Last Updated: August 26, 2011

Annotated excerpt from the Declaration of Independence of the United States: "...That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter..."

And from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address: "...Ensure that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

I can think of no better way to keep the administrators of government in check then to have their constituents, the general public, be able to at any time, on any subject, ideally, without fear of reprisal express their opinions on the job that those representatives are doing. Or not as the case may be. Government should not exist for the purpose of controlling the populace. Rather, representatives of any government should be merely stewards.

To grant aloofness from responsibility to fulfill and protect the desires of the people is nigh unto ceding that which makes us individuals to the Roman Catholic Church of old. The Pope speaks 'ex cathedra', and thus it is law.

The responsibility of Congress (both houses) is to make laws to govern the land (read for the betterment of the people as a whole), and to provide a check and balance to the executive branch, whose responsibility it is to enforce the laws passed by Congress and approved (another check and balance) by the Supreme Court.

As it relates to the topic of this discussion, it is the responsibility of the media to report these events to the people so that they may form their own opinions of the rightness and wrongness, the usefulness and irrelevance, the continuance or abandonment of policy and direction. It is not the responsibility of the media to develop, generate or subscribe to one opinion or the other.

In response to some of the opinions expressed from the "No" side: without a touch of anarchy there is little or no debate and the status quo reigns supreme. As far as qualifications, yes journalists should be trained to do their craft... that of reporting the news, especially in the fields of public opinion and debate and to refrain from opinion except in the capacity of the journalists themselves being individual citizens restraining their government from excess.

Is the majority of the public "qualified" to receive credentials to cover Congress? I say it is the very nature of democracy that not only grants them those credentials, but insists that they use them at every opportunity, lest those opportunities, and government of the people, by the people, for the people perish from the earth.

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