"I don’t think there’s anything necessarily so special about this particular issue that it must be handled by a Legislature."This was in the context of arguing for a referendum on gay marriage, rather than just passing the bill outright. But note that this is precisely backwards. Legislatures are not councils of experts upon whose intervention we depend when the issue is too complex or misunderstood or, you know, important to let the people decide it for themselves. Legislatures are the solution to the problems posed by the overwhelming desire of most people not to spend all their time thinking about public policy concerns. They pick a group of people whom they trust (in theory, at least) to study the issues and render informed decisions which reflect the interests of the people themselves, so that most of us can just lead our normal lives. Some people then think that on certain issues of particular importance or centrality, particularly though not exclusively things of constitutional stature, it's not enough just to let the delegated powers of the legislature decide, and that we should ask the people directly. Some people might think it a shame that we allow legislatures to decide these things in the first place, as Rousseau did. But there's no world in which the more important, or "special" in Christie's terminology, an issue is, the more we ought to have it decided by a legislature. The way it works is that issues to be decided by the people are more important than issues to be decided by the legislature, which are in turn more important than issues to be decided by unelected government officials and bureaucracies.
There are a lot of reasons not to like Governor Christie, and not to like this recent statement of his, of which this is a fairly minor one. Still, it reflects a profound lack of understanding of very basic political theory, and that just kind of pisses me off.
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