Usurping the Democracy

I was reading a piece about how the Republican Party has a strategy for winning more seats in Congress than most feel they will retain, by clever and cynical use of money and volunteers, not to educate, but to overrun.

Isn't that usurping the Democracy?

When you reach the point that you no longer place the Nation, the will of the people, first, but rather the success of your own clique, you are no longer being a good citizen. You are, rather, being a bad citizen, one whose duty to their neighbor and their Constitution comes secondary to a loyalty outside of the primary goals of the Democratic Experiment that is the United States of America.

I don't recall our elected officials taking an oath of "Party first"...we usually assume that sort of disingenuousness on the part of dangerous fringe groups that seize power as an ends to itself. Nazis and Communists, at different ends of a philosophical spectrum.

We are, in the United States, supposed to be a Representative Democracy, where our officials represent the will of the people, not the platform of the party. Where ideas, not membership cards, drive our debate. Where majority rule and minority rights are more than slogans and mass media buys.

I'd hate to think that we are that far off track that getting back on the rails is going to require an upheaval of the status quo.

But, I am watching now.