Why Is Democracy Necessary?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns democracy and its ability to preserve freedom. The president and prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, President Dallin H. Oaks has long discussed importance of democracy, and he chose to focus on the same message in his first address as president of the Church of Jesus Christ. His message on Easter Sunday is that “peace and democratic freedoms, especially in times of conflict, require believers to extend Christ’s love to their opponents, even across vast differences in values and beliefs.”

Mariya Manzhos reported on President Oaks’ message in her article at the Deseret News. 

President Oaks also continued the theme of his predecessor, President Russell M. Nelson, calling believers to be peacemakers – those who “seek to reduce human suffering” and those who “work to promote understanding among different peoples.”

President Oaks described the current climate as “toxic” and “a time of contempt or hostility toward adversaries.” This kind of “hostility,” he said, is spreading across society, and involves “many whose Christian beliefs should orient them otherwise.”

Christ’s teaching, which the church’s leader described as “revolutionary,” is to extend love not only to the neighbors, but also to the enemies, whom President Oaks identified as “military foes” and those in direct conflict with one another. “Today we might say that we are commanded to love our adversaries,” he said.

The church’s leader has himself demonstrated a way of finding common ground in Utah politics. He played a key role in shaping the Utah Compromise in 2015, helping broker an agreement between religious groups and LGBTQ advocates, and supported a framework that paired protections for same-sex couples in housing and employment with safeguards for religious liberty – an agreement that became a national model for balancing competing rights.

In his Sunday address, he said: “As followers of Christ, we should seek to live peaceably and lovingly with other children of God who do not share our values and do not have the covenant obligations we have assumed. In a democratic government we should seek ‘fairness for all.’ In countless circumstances, strangers’ suspicion or even hostility gradually give way to friendship when personal contacts produce mutual respect.” …

In a new leadership position, Oaks is showing that there is no distinction between being Christ-like in personal life and being Christ-like in civic life, Rauch said.

President Oaks acknowledged just how hard reconciling the requirements of the church and civic life can be. “We balance our various responsibilities, this balancing is not easy,” Oaks said….

In President Oaks’ view, by contrast, the Constitution guarantees a shared civic space.

 

Are Democrats Destroying Democracy in Their Attempt to Stop Trump?

Democrats do a lot of yelling about “saving democracy” from President Donald Trump, a person that the Left consider to be a tyrant, a dictator, even Hitler himself. One problem with this attempt by Democrats is that they think that the end – saving democracy – justifies whatever they need to do to accomplish their goal. Their effort is actually destroying democracy as they seek to destroy Donald Trump. Victor Davis Hanson explained what this means in his article published at The Daily Signal. 

What do I mean? One of the issues that they are agitating is the redistricting of congressional districts in Texas and California now. And the general problem the Left has is, if you look at gerrymandering to make these jigsaw puzzle piece-like districts, the Left is way ahead of the Right. In other words, states that have proportions of 30% to 40% to 50% for Donald Trump do not have that level of representation in the Congress.

And there’s been sophisticated studies of gerrymandering. And it boils down to the Republicans re short some six to 10 seats in the House, based on the proportion of the national vote they have received.

The Democrats know that, but they’re angry about the Texas reapportionment and gerrymandering. And their attitude is: “We’ve already gerrymandered our states to the maximum. Don’t dare try to emulate us.” …

There’s been three great scandals in the 21^st century. The first was the Russian collusion hoax that was prompted by Hillary Clinton and facilitated by the Obama administration on its way out. That almost destroyed the Trump campaign, sabotaged his transition, and ate up 22 months of his first two years.

The second was the Biden FBI and CIA – but especially the CIA and the intelligence agencies – got 51 people, former intelligence authorities, to lie to the American people on the eve of the second debate to affect the 2020 election, and claim, falsely, that Donald Trump was lying about the laptop of Hunter Biden, that it was “fake,” that it was a “Russian production,” and Donald Trump then was colluding, again, with the Russians.

That was a complete lie. It was Hunter’s laptop. We know because the FBI had it in its possession and authenticated it.

And finally, the great scandal that the Democratic Party and the obsequious media knew that President Joe Biden was no compos mentis, he was not cognitively able to fulfill the office of the presidency. And they kept that from the American people, until they could no longer keep it, when he finally challenged Donald Trump to a debate and melted before our very eyes. Sort of like the Wicked Witch in “The Wizard of Oz.” …

So, my point is, if you look at the Democrats, they have staged three great scandals to try to destroy the Trump administration and by extension, democracy.

They impeached Donald Trump twice. No one’s ever done that. They tried him as a private citizen. Nobody’s ever done that. They raided his home in Mar-a-Lago. That is a terrible precedent for an ex-president. No one’s ever done that. They tried to get him off the ballot in 25 states. No one had ever done that. There were two attempts at assassination during the campaign. That had never happened before. They tried to debank him and make it impossible for Donald Trump to write a check, whether from Morgan Stanley or Bank of America, or any bank.

So, my point is this, when James Carville says, “We’re gonna get tough. We’re gonna get really tough. And we’re gonna let in Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., to get four senators. Or we might have to pack the court to 13 justices,” I’m thinking, “Well, you always were going to do that.” …

So the problem, James Carville and Democrats, is that you have sabotaged democracy. And you’ve done things that no one has ever done before to an oppositional candidate, presidential transition, and president.

And now you’re furious because you’re on the 40% side of every issue that’s dear to you… And you have no political power…. And your institutional power – the media, academia, the foundation – they are under assault….

And so, you’re frustrated and you’ve created this completely false narrative that you have to get tough, and you’ve been very Marquess of Queensberry rules-like. In fact, the opposite is true, everybody. You have been the most vicious and the most abject subverts of democracy, all for the short-term gain of destroying Donald Trump. And now that’s boomeranging upon you. And you don’t like to see it happen to you – what you tried to do to Donald Trump….

The answer to the question, Are Democrats destroying democracy in their attempt to stop Trump, appears to be “Yes.” It seems that Democrats are willing to do anything to stop Trump, including killing him. How democratic is assassination?

It appears that many Democrats as well as some Republicans are part of the “secret combinations” prophesied to be in every land in the latter days. It appears that this secret combination or combination of secret groups is attempting to destroy the government of the United States, but they ran into a rock wall by the name of Donald Trump. No matter what the Democrats say or try to do, he pushes forward in his goal to Make America Great Again, with the latest move to clean up Washington, D.C.

 

What Did the Founders Think of Democracy and Electoral College?

Numerous Democrats -- including President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz – claimed that Donald Trump would destroy democracy if he were elected. Republicans, on the other hand, claimed that Trump needed to be elected to save democracy from the Democrats.

Mark Levin, sometimes known as “The Great One,” is an expert on the U.S. Constitution, and he says that we need to remind Americans that we do not have a democracy in the United States. He said, “[Our Founding Father] didn’t support democracy; they supported republicanism. The wise men who wrote the Constitution created a democratic republic, not a democracy. 

The staff at Blaze Media transcribed some of the information from a video where Levin discussed the work of the Founding Fathers. I encourage you to watch the video, but at least check out these comments by Levin as reported by Blaze:

“Democracy means factions can take over or a majority can be tyrannical,” he says, adding that our Founders saw this in other countries and “didn’t want anything to do with it.”

“They wanted republicanism; they wanted checks in power,” he explains.

That’s why they enshrined certain principles in our Constitution.

That way, “you can’t have people vote away your rights,” says Levin. If “90% of them don’t think you should have the right to bear arms, that’s too damn bad.”

The fact that our forefathers foresaw the inevitable issues with a true democracy and created our brilliant system proves that “they were geniuses.”

Their installation of the Electoral College was equally brilliant.

Even though we see people like Tim Walz advocating for the demolition of it, Levin knows the truth: It’s for our nation’s protection.

“You choose a president not through a direct election” but rather via an “Electoral College. Why?” asks Levin. “One person is the head of an entire branch; we can’t just leave it up to a popular vote” because then “the cities will choose the president.”

“In order to have a union and in order to make sure every aspect of the society was represented, they came up with this brilliant Electoral College,” he explains.

Because of this brilliant system of balance, “California doesn’t get to drown out Montana, Wyoming, [or] Idaho.”

“If you had a national popular vote, that’s what [California] would do,” says Levin.

A system in which “the president [is] chosen by the people through the Electoral College but not chosen by the legislature” was “unheard of” at the time. So was the idea of “staggered terms” and a “bicameral congress.”

“So the accumulation of power, the centralization of government is limited,” Levin explains.

For more wisdom straight from the mouth of Levin, check out this video. Two reminders we all need after the election: We are NOT a democracy, and the Electoral College is good | Blaze Media

Is Democracy in Danger and By Whom?

The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday concerns democracy and who is trying to destroy it. Victor Davis Hanson opened his article on the topic with this: “The 2023-2024 campaign season is not just the strangest on record, it’s also arguably the most anti-democratic.” He offered the following information to support his statement. 

Ostensibly, the Democratic Party has claimed over the last decade that former President Donald Trump posed a continued and existential threat to the republic. That allegation subsequently justified a variety of anti-democratic means to neuter his first two presidential candidacies, his presidency, and now his third and final run for the White House.

A near decade ago, we witnessed the 2015-2016 Hillary Clinton/Democratic National Committee/FBI-assisted effort to plant the false accusation of Trump-Russian collusion to warp the 2016 election. That gambit centered around the fraudulent Steele dossier and nearly fatally crippled the Trump 2016 campaign. That hoax would later sidetrack 22 months of his presidency before being proven a fantasy.

On the eve of the 2020 election, the left next birthed the Russian laptop disinformation campaign. That hoax also warped a presidential debate with false charges that Hunter Biden’s own incriminating laptop was once again the work of Russians seeking to conspire with Trump.

Those unusual efforts continued during the Biden administration.

For the first time in election history, the allies of one campaign sought to persuade some 16 states to try to remove a major party’s likely nominee from their primary and general election ballots.

The plan was to smother a Trump third presidential bid in its infancy, and thus once again not allow the people to accept or reject his candidacy.

Nearly simultaneously, four federal, state, and local prosecutors filed dozens of felony charges against Trump. They all shared some strange similarities.

These indictments would likely not have been filed had Trump not run for office. Nor would any of them have proceeded had Trump not been a controversial conservative Republican seeking reelection.

Almost all the charges had not been filed against any other prior candidate, and rarely a private citizen.

Some of them could just as easily have been lodged against President Joe Biden and his son.

Some indictments and convictions may still achieve their objectives of bankrupting, jailing, or keeping Trump inert during the final weeks of the campaign….

Nonetheless, Trump had survived collusion, disinformation, de-balloting, lawfare, and a subsequent assassination attempt to surge far ahead of Biden in the June presidential polls.

As is well known and as outlined by Hanson, Biden was doing so badly in the polls that he lost the support of “Democratic donors and high-ranking politicos.” They wished to stress test Biden in an unusual presidential debate held prior to either party’s convention to nominate their candidate.

Biden’s inferior performance in the debate proved to Americans and people worldwide that Biden was unfit to run for re-election or to remain in office. He was forced to end his candidacy for a second term to remain in office for the remainder of his first term. After trying to remove Kamala Harris from the ballot to stop her from dragging Biden down, Democrats suddenly decided that she was the best politician who ever lived.

By ending Biden’s candidacy, Democrats nullified the primary votes for nearly 15 million voters. Then they coronated Harris “who had neither won a primary nor a single delegate through an election” as well as “without an open convention contest or vote.”

The same secret combinations that convinced Biden to drop out of the campaign and installed Harris are now keeping Harris in the dark. Sure, she makes speeches where she tells lots of lies without any challenges. However, she is not allowed to hold press conferences or to give live interviews, hold unscripted town halls, and be caught in any situation where she does not have a scripted speech.

So, the party that had proclaimed democracy dies in darkness now favors the shadows as the preferable means to obtain and retain power – whether by ignoring primary voters, open conventions, or transparent venues with the voters.

Add up the last decade’s purchased collusion caper, unprecedented two impeachments, orchestrated disinformation hoax, efforts to de-ballot Trump, warping of the legal system to jail him and destroy his candidacy, forced removal of an unpopular but unwilling Biden from the Democratic ticket, virtual anointing of Harris by fiat in his place, and the current collusion with a compliant media to avoid public scrutiny and cross-examination of Harris.

And the conclusion?

Have those who lectured us about democracy in danger now decided to save it by destroying it?

 

What Is Democracy?

The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday is democracy. From the time that Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United States, Democrats have declared that our democracy is in danger. They are claiming that the United States is a democracy, something that the Founders guarded against.

The United States is a democratic republic, a combination of a democracy and a republic. The Founders understood that democracies do not last for long, and they sought to set up a government that would last. They set up a republic with some democratic characteristics.

According to Merriam-Webster online dictionary, a democracy is a “government by the people; especially, rule of the majority.” It is “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.” 

Meriam-Webster defines a republic as “a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usually a president; a political unit (such as a nation) having such a form of government; a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law; a political unit (such as a nation) have such a form of government.” 

In other words, both democracies and republics are governments of the people. However, a democracy is a nation where the majority rules, and a republic is a nation where the people elect representatives to run the government. A democracy has been defined as “two wolves and one sheep” – the majority gets what they want regardless of what happens to the minority. In a republic, the people elect representatives who are elected by the popular vote. Even though the people vote for who they want for President, the POTUS is actually elected by representatives in the Electoral College.

Democrats seek to change our government into a strict majority where the POTUS is elected by a popular vote. The majority would have all the power, and the minority would not matter. This is the reason they always make a big deal about which candidate wins the popular vote. Democrats desire to get rid of the Electoral College and turn campaigns into popularity votes.

Any person, who desires to know whether Democrats or Republicans seek to destroy democracy, needs to only look at the words and actions of members of both parties. It is Democrats who seek to destroy the Electoral College. It is always Democrats who seek to add more justices to the Supreme Court – to pack the court -- to gain power over the conservative justices. It is Democrats who sanction violence against conservative justices on the Supreme Court and conservatives nominated to become justices and judges. Consider the following information published by Josh Hammer at The Daily Signal: 

More recently, in the aftermath of the just-completed Supreme Court term, many notable Democrats have resuscitated the threat of court-packing, which had momentarily died down following the ambiguous conclusions and recommendations of President Joe Biden’s Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, which disbanded on Dec. 8, 2021.

(It is curious that Democrats have chosen to do this now, even as this term had fewer 6-3 “ideological” splits than the prior term and even as the two justices who found themselves in the court majority least frequently this term were the two most consistent conservatives, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas.)

There are few threats as vehemently anti-democratic as that of packing the Supreme Court. As even the Democrat-dominated Senate Judiciary Committee concluded in its bone-chilling 1937 report issued after Democratic presidential icon FDR’s own court-packing proposal.

Let us of the Seventy-fifth Congress, in words that will never be disregarded by any succeeding Congress, declare that we would rather have an independent court, a fearless court, a court that will dare to announce its honest opinions in what it believes to be the defense of the liberties of the people, than a court that, out of fear or sense of obligation to the appointing power, or factional passion, approves any measure we may enact. We are not the judges of the judges. We are not above the Constitution.

Consider also the extraordinary preliminary injunction granted earlier this week by Judge Terry Doughty in the case of Missouri v. Biden, which pertains to what this column has previously referred to as the Biden regime’s intentional “collapse” of the “public-private distinction.”

In a whirlwind 155-page ruling, Doughty validated the plaintiffs’ complaints that the Biden administration eroded the First Amendment by dictating that social media companies censor specific users, accounts, and posts to tamp down on COVID-19 “disinformation” and “misinformation.”

In Doughty’s own words, that should terrify anyone even remotely concerned about the actual state of American democracy: “The United States government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’” Yikes.

But the Biden regime disagrees. Indeed, the administration has already appealed the grant of the preliminary injunction to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5^th Circuit. We should not mince words here: The Biden Department of Justice is appealing to the 5^th Circuit for the “right” to jawbone putatively “private” companies into censoring disfavored online speech when it comes to certain sensitive subjects that implicate regime priorities.

That is simply astonishing. So much for “our democracy” – the Left would prefer that the public and private merge together to squash all who dare to dissent from regime orthodoxy. In Political Science 101 class, most freshmen learn that this is a trademark trait not of democracy, but of fascism.

In reality, the Left’s crocodile tears about the fate of “our democracy” can be easily explained by the fact that when Democrats and left-wing activists speak of “democracy,” they really mean “progressivism.”

It is quite a sleight of hand. The victim of that sleight of hand, unfortunately and ironically, is actual American democracy itself.

The bottom line is that Americans should be aware that Democrats are trying to destroy America. Anyone that is genuinely concerned about democracy in American should remember that America has a democratic republic. They should carefully look at the actions of those claiming to be protecting democracy.

What Is the Connection Between Trump, Democracy, and Free Speech?

The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday concerns democracy and free speech. Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk recently purchased Twitter, and he has been causing leftists heartburn since the purchase. He decided to ask Twitter users if former President Donald Trump should be allowed by on Twitter.

Musk sent a simple tweet with a poll: “Reinstate former President Trump.” Two hours after the poll was published, it received more than 3 million votes. The final numbers were 15,085,458 votes with 51.8% of voters voting yes and 48.2% of voters voting no. At the time that The Blaze published their article, the percentages were 57% to reinstate Trump, while 43% did not want him to be reinstated. Musk used the voice of the people to reinstate Trump’s right to free speech.

Twitter suspended Trump’s account on January 6, 2021, during the riot at the U.S. Capitol because he was somehow responsible for the riot. He was later suspended permanently from its platform, and other social media platforms suspended him.

Trump joined Truth Social and other social media platforms, and he indicated that he is not interested in returning to Twitter. Now that he has been reinstated, he may change his mind, but democracy and free speech won.

Will Democracy Destroy the Progressive Movement?

             The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday concerns freedom of speech and the consequences of using it. Freedom is the opportunity to use our God-given right to choose for ourselves. However, freedom does not excuse us from the consequences that come from speaking freely.

            The progressive wing of the Democrat Party has pushed and pulled the party to the left with policies like defunding the police, renaming schools, and toppling statues. America does not like the direction that the nation is headed and is striking back. Now top Democrats are blaming the progressive wing for damaging the party and sinking Democrat chances in the midterm election. Left-wing progressives are lashing out at Democrats for putting the blame on them.

            The party in power always faces the prospect of losing seats in the midterm election. This year, Democrats have more seats up for election than do Republicans. Recent polls show that Democrat chances are getting worse as their policies are rejected by Americans. One obvious sign is the recall of three progressive members of the San Francisco school board. According to Carlos Garcia, this is how progressives responded. 

While the aides to the squad members didn’t comment for the report, some of the congress members responded on Twitter.

“In case you hadn’t caught on by now, every time there’s a media push blaming progressives, there’s something conservative Democrats are trying to cover up. This time it’s that they sent 4 million kids into poverty because they killed the Child Tax Credit. Don’t get distracted,” replied Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.).

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded with an emoji symbol of agreement, but in her own tweet, she blamed capitalism for the report.

“Truly wild how these folks called the shots & got their desired nominees, agenda, priorities, legislative order, and excluded us from participating in campaigns yet find no shortage of ppl willing to write as their uncritical stenographers. This is how capital & power works folks,” she tweeted.

Others on social media responded by called the report “racist and sexist.”

The social media kerfuffle is just the latest in the battle waged by far-left progressives to wrestle control of the Democratic party away from the centrist establishment wing.

            Progressives are not willing to admit that their policies are troublesome. Instead, they choose to blame other people and call them names. They do not seem to understand that their heavy use of such words has rendered them meaningless. If everyone is sexist or racist, then no one is.

The ultimate Hail Mary cry is that democracy is at fault. Democracy allows Americans to state their opinions and to vote their consciences. Socialists do not want Americans to have freedom and push policies to destroy it. More people can see what leftists are doing to America, and they are fighting back. I agree that the loss of progressives in San Francisco is the result of democracy – people using freedom to choose their representatives.

Why Are Leftist Elites So Concerned about Democracy?

            Have you noticed the pessimistic attitudes of many elitists about democracy? Under recently, leftists did not seem to care at all about democracy, but many of them are crying about the loss of democracy. We hear it from politicians like Adam Schiff and want-a-be politicians like Hillary Clinton. We hear it from media personalities like Brian Williams. They all are terribly worried that democracy will be destroyed in 2024, if not in 2022.

            Victor Davis Hanson believes that he knows the answer: “The left expects to lose power over the next two years.” In 2020, Democrats won the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, and they have been running wild with the power of those positions. In doing so, “the left has managed in just 11 months to alienate a majority of voters.” Hanson then recounts the many ways that Democrats lost support. 

The nation has been wracked by unprecedented crime and nonenforcement of the borders. Leftist district attorneys either won’t indict criminals; they let them out of jails or both.

Illegal immigration and inflation are soaring. Deliberate cuts in gas and oil production helped spike fuel prices.

All this bad news is on top of the Afghanistan disaster, worsening racial relations, and an enfeebled president.

Democrats are running 10 points behind the Republicans in generic polls, with the midterms less than a year away.

President Joe Biden’s negatives run between 50% and 57% -- in Trump’s own former underwater territory.

Less than a third of the country wants Biden to run for reelection. In many head-to-head polls, Trump now defeats Biden.

In other words, leftist elites are terrified that democracy will work too robustly.

            Senators are sponsoring a bill to add four justices to the Supreme Court because they are terrified that the conservative justices will rule in favor of the Constitution. They clamored to defund the police and allowed hoodlums to burn and loot their cities. Now they are trying to hire more police.

Democrat policies have wrecked the economy and destroyed millions of jobs. Their policies have made the U.S. the laughingstock of the world and weakened our military. They mandate COVID-19 vaccinations even as data shows that vaccinated people are catching the new variant more than the unvaxed. Biden’s polling numbers are in the tank with only a third of Democrats supporting his re-election.

The Democrats are so fearful of the loss of democracy that all they can talk or write about is the January 6^th assault on the Capitol. Their so-called investigation is a witch hunt for Donald Trump and his supporters. The vision of increasing numbers of Americans is clearing, and they are starting to see the Democrats as they really are. Hanson continued:

[The leftists] are fearful and angry not because democracy doesn’t work, but because it does despite their own media and political efforts to warp it.   

    

When a party is hijacked by radicals and uses almost any means necessary to gain and use power for agendas that few Americans support, then average voters express their disapproval.

That reality apparently terrifies an elite. It then claims any system that allows the people to vote against the left is not people power at all.

            Americans must continue to awake and to see things as they really are. They must first learn that America is not a democracy. The Founders created America as a democratic republic because they knew that democracies are easy to overthrow. That is why Democrats want to do away with the Electoral College and have presidents elected on a popular vote. The Founders understood what they were doing and why they were doing it. The problem comes from Americans of our day who do not understand the greatness of America and want to fundamentally transform the United States. If leftists are allowed to remain in power, they will destroy America as we know it.

Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Democracy?

            The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday is democracy. Is it possible to have too much democracy? If so, is too much democracy a bad thing?

            From its organization, leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have taught that the U.S. Constitution was inspired by God. In a revelation published given to the Prophet Joseph Smith at Kirtland, Ohio, on December 16 and 17, 1833, and published as Doctrine and Covenants 101, Jesus Christ gave the following information concerning the Constitution of the United States.

77 According to the laws and constitution of the people, which I have suffered to be established, and should be maintained for the rights and protection of all flesh, according to just and holy principles;

78 That every man may act in doctrine and principle pertaining to futurity, according to the moral agency which I have given unto him, that every man may be accountable for his own sins in the day of judgment.

79 Therefore, it is not right that any man should be in bondage one to another.

80 And for this purpose have I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose, and redeemed the land by the shedding of blood.

            The Lord explained in these verses that the U.S. Constitution was to protect the rights and freedoms of all people for the purpose of allowing them to use their moral agency to choose how they want to live. He also said that He “established the Constitution … by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose.”

Leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ continue to teach that the Constitution was divinely inspired. In the April 2021 General Conference, President Dallin H. Oaks, first counselor in the First Presidency, spoke on the topic “Defending Our Divinely Inspired Constitution.” President Oaks that this claim of a divinely inspired Constitution “does not mean that divine revelation dictated every word and phrase.” This is one reason why the Constitution has been amended so many times. 

However, President Oaks identified five principles that he believes were divinely inspired. Those principles are: (1) We the People are the source of government power. (2) The delegated power of government is divided be between the nation and its subsidiary states, meaning our federal system. (3) The separation of power between the three branches of government – executive, legislative, and judicial. (4) The implementation of the Bill of Rights, a “cluster of vital guarantees of individual rights and specific limits on government authority.”

(5) The vital purpose of the entire Constitution. “We are to be governed by law and not by individuals, and our loyalty is to the Constitution and its principles and processes, not to any office holder. In this way, all persons are to be equal before the law.”

            Justin Collings, a professor at Brigham Young University Law School and a fellow at the Wheatley Institute, wrote the first in a five-part series with plans to write upon the five points outlined by President Oaks. The title of his essay is “Opinion: What do you do when democracy is too much of a good thing?” He stated that the answer to this question is found “in the U.S. Constitution’s inspired balance between popular rule and centralized power.” He quoted Thomas Jefferson as saying: 

We have been fellow-laborers and fellow-sufferers, and heaven has rewarded us with a happy issue from our struggles. It rests now with ourselves alone to enjoy in peace and concord the blessings of self-government, so long denied to mankind: to show by example the sufficiency of human reason for the care of human affairs and that the will of the majority, the natural law of every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of man.

            To Jefferson, the purpose for the eight long years of the Revolutionary War (1775-1783) was to gain “the blessings of self-government.” It was self-government that the Constitution was designed to secure. Collings continued with his explanation:

In the summer of 1776, in the most famous paragraph he ever penned, Jefferson proclaimed “self-evident” truth that “governments … deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Four score and seven years later, Abraham Lincoln described the country’s deadliest crisis as a test of whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people” could “long endure.”

For both Jefferson and Lincoln, then, “America” was an experiment in self-government – in what political theorists called “popular sovereignty.”

            The Founders of America, the Framers of the Constitution, and Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War all understood that the idea of popular sovereignty was an experiment. Could the people of any nation govern themselves? Ancient Greeks debated the concept of rule by the people. It was also a point considered during the French Revolution. Collings explained why the idea works sometimes and does not at other times.

Did this mean that the people shouldn’t govern at all? Not necessarily. The key was to distinguish between popular sovereignty and day-to-day governance. The people could govern themselves by delegating lawmaking powers to their chosen representatives. Self-government didn’t require actual governing. It proceeded via representation. It required only what Jefferson called “the consent of the governed.”

The rub was how to secure that consent – how to ensure that representatives pursue the people’s interest, rather than their own, and that legislation reflect the people’s considered wishes, not just momentary passions. This was the conundrum, above all others, that perplexed the framers of the U.S. Constitution.

            Collings’ essay has much more information in it, and I encourage you to read it. It is important for all Americans to understand that the Constitution of the United States organized a democratic republic and not a democracy. Yes, the people vote for the candidate that they want to be the next President of the United States. However, the President is not elected on a popular vote.

This is where the Electoral College and the idea of representatives come into the picture. The people vote for who they want to be President, but their vote actually chooses which delegates vote in the Electoral College. If candidate A gets more votes than candidate B, the delegates for candidate A votes in the Electoral College.

This is also one reason why the members of the U.S. House of Representatives must stand for re-election every two years. They represent the people, and they can be removed from office much more quickly than Senators – who should be representing their states.

To answer the question about too much democracy, the answer is yes. In a pure democracy, the people can vote themselves into total destruction. In a democratic republic, there are checks and balances all along the way, and this is the reason why the United States of America has existed under the Constitution for more than 200 years.