Repoliticizing Politics (and Sex) | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson: Don't hold your breath. Congress all too often abdicates its duty, passing vexatious policy questions to the bureaucracy and the courts via vaguely worded statues. By doing so, legislators avoid taking stances on controversial issues, which is to say they protect their hides for the next election. The phenomenon is not isolated to sexual harassment: Congress has punted continually on racial preferences, environmental regulation, entitlement reform, etc., ad nauseam.
Such diffidence frustrates representative democracy by telling citizens their genuine opinions do not matter, which is just another way of saying they are incapable of self-government. To prove otherwise, we need to reclaim for politics such properly political matters as sexual harassment law. We need to compel Congress to confront such matters if we are to continue to demonstrate our capacity for self-government through representative democracy. In short, we need to re-politicize our politics.