Republican legislators are pretty uniformly against net neutrality. The Republican public is not, with one recent poll showing 3 out of 4 Republicans familiar with the issue voicing opposition to the rollback of regulations. [1]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/12...

And yet they still vote for candidates with known public positions that are contrary to their own!

Would you suggest they not vote?

There is no candidate that does not hold policy positions contrary to at least some my own.

What they've done is decided that this issue is less important than others, and based their votes on that.

> Would you suggest they not vote?

Of course not. As you say, it's clearly not a significant issue for most Republican voters.

However, I think a lot of voters assume that the party reflects the values of the voters though - clearly that is not always true.

That's because you don't get to choose your issues one at a time. You get to choose a basket of issue positions at the same time as a legislator's personality. Normally from a choice of two.

> You get to choose a basket of issue positions at the same time as a legislator's personality.

And this is at best -- it assumes your elected representative even holds their campaign promises, which is maybe a long shot.

Indeed. However, most politicians take their election as a mandate for all of their public positions.

Yes. Mandate theory is a convenient fiction with basically no basis.

That's because they prioritize fighting a culture war... Over a minor issue like NN.

Because people voted for someone, doesn't mean they fully agree with the elected person's whole program. In an election you have only a few candidates for a large number of possible combinations of positions. If you mostly agree with republicans except on a few things, you're probably still going to vote republican.

Exactly. For example, if you believe very strongly in Second Amendment rights, most Democratic candidates are not an option on election day. Additionally, Hillary Clinton was a very polarizing candidate even among registered Democrats.

As a prolific (and I mean prolific) gun owner, I've yet to see evidence of mass-Democrat candidate opposition to the 2nd amendment in general. "Gun Grabbing" hasn't been a party-wide concept despite Republican propaganda otherwise.

Stupid gun rules, like magazine size limitations, sure, but they almost never "come for my guns." Often the suggestions are perfectly reasonable in my mind - national gun registry, for example.

What purpose would a national gun registry serve other than to set the stage for eventual confiscation? I'm genuinely curious, because I can't think of any crime it would prevent, while being a big affront to privacy.

Considering that guns keep being sold to people they absolutely should not be, a registry makes it easy for the FBI or ATF to get flagged when an "unallowed purchaser" attempts or succeeds to make a purchase. Then they can know to either confiscate (because of an illegal purchase) or start monitoring heavily. Previous mass shootings were by people who should not have been able to purchase, but lack of a registry allowed them to "slip through the cracks."

Another scenario - the FBI is monitoring radicalization in a small community. They check the gun registry to see which of the people in the community becoming radicalized are actual potential threats and zero in their investigation on those individuals, to prevent a shooting.

Etc. Basically just makes law enforcement's jobs more feasible.

The government doesn't have the resources to "confiscate" every registered gun owners' guns at the same time, and so we would be well aware if a confiscation by a tyrannical government is coming, and all of us weirdo militia folk and preppers would already be putting the sandbags out. Trust me, some of these guys are practically wishing for it.

The intent behind a gun registry is to empower courts, and potentially police. A judge would be able to identify that someone owns several more guns when considering whether to grant bail for an armed robbery, and the surrender of those weapons until trial might be a condition of bail. It might be useful information for a judge who is crafting an order of protection in a case of stalking or domestic violence.

Similarly, police who are serving an arrest warrant might be able to serve the warrant with the knowledge that person of interest has several firearms on the property. Sometimes police know this today, but not because of government records.

(I'm not arguing a personal position one way or the other, just explaining the rationale.)

I believe he was referring to constituents, rather than politicians.

If an opinion isn't important enough to affect what politicians you vote for, you shouldn't be surprised that the government you elect doesn't represent your view on that issue.

I agree.

Please don't post like this here. Maybe you don't owe better to a political party but you do owe better to the community you're participating in.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I've edited the post.

Thanks!

Thank you :^)