It's hard enough to get even Congress as a whole to care about issues normal people actually care about, but it's even worse if even Congress itself can't pass good laws because it's being hijacked by a few. For example, most of the House voted to pass the USA Freedom Act as is (which was pretty good originally), but the Rules Committee, comprised of a handful of people, stripped down almost all the good reforms in it, making it essentially useless, and potentially worse than if it had not existed:
Sometimes, it all falls onto one man, such as the Audit the Fed bill, which also got a huge majority in House, but Harry Reid refused to put it on the floor in Senate, or when Patrick Leahy single-handedly killed the recent patent reform bill.
All of this doesn't seem "democratic" at all to me.
We're not even talking direct democracy, here. The parent post is saying (for example) that a single Senator can prevent a bill from entering the Senate, even if said bill would get a majority of Senate votes.
If it was possible to get such bills put to a vote over the objections of singular individual representatives, then there would be less need for direct democracy.
Switzerland is not a direct democracy. No country is. Some have more democratic processes, at the extreme ends being Switzerland, Finland, and I suppose Germany, while at the other end, with least democratic processes being US among others. US has great constitution/rights, terrible democratic system.
http://www.emptywheel.net/2014/05/23/four-reasons-usa-freedu...
Sometimes, it all falls onto one man, such as the Audit the Fed bill, which also got a huge majority in House, but Harry Reid refused to put it on the floor in Senate, or when Patrick Leahy single-handedly killed the recent patent reform bill.
All of this doesn't seem "democratic" at all to me.