Most votes are not that hard to make. They reflect your views and beliefs. They are a template to who you are. They mirror the values of your constituents.
And on and on. Blah, blah, blah.
But there are some tough votes in politics.
Ask around. Some are tougher than others.
Breaking with your party is a tough vote. And it doesn’t matter which party.
Refusing to be bound by a caucus position is a tough vote. And it doesn’t matter which caucus–both can be, and often are, retributive in the extreme.
Voting against friends, supporters, against the door-knockers, the poll workers, folks who check-booked your campaign, is not easy.
Voting against your governor can be a tough one. Same deal with a president of your party. These are not quite as hard to do, though. Somehow, it seems that the difficulty of a difficult vote is in inverse proportion to distance: the closer the harder.
And then there is the toughest vote in all of politics–tougher than voting against your mother–that vote that pits your conscience against the obvious majority of your constituents.
What do you do?
Yeah, you.
What do you do?
I would hope that I didn’t need the job bad enough to vote against my conscience.
On many issues of a complex nature, It is more difficult to know what to do, than to actually do it. In this situation when retribution comes your way be grateful that this decision was easy to make - go with your conscience.
Interesting. So the three of you believe that an elected representative should not, to the best extent knowable, represent the majority desire of a constituency on any given issue, but simply go with conscience? That would save a lot of time listening to constituents. Interesting. Interesting. BKD