Global Use of The Conscience Vote
Free votes are found in Canadian and some British legislative bodies, conscience votes in Australian and New Zealand legislative bodies.
In the United States, parties exercise comparatively little control over the votes of individual legislators, who are almost always free to vote as they wish. Accordingly, most legislative votes in the United States can be considered free votes, although in rare circumstances a legislator may be disciplined by his or her party for a renegade vote. Such discipline usually occurs only on votes regarding procedural matters on which party unity is expected as a matter of course, rather than substantive matters. For example, Democrat James Traficant was stripped of his seniority and committee assignments in 2001 when he voted for a Republican, Dennis Hastert, to be Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. Because free votes are the norm in the United States, the terms "free vote" and "conscience vote" are generally unused and unknown there.
Read more about this topic: Conscience Vote
Famous quotes containing the words global, conscience and/or vote:
“However global I strove to become in my thinking over the past twenty years, my sons kept me rooted to an utterly pedestrian view, intimately involved with the most inspiring and fractious passages in human development. However unconsciously by now, motherhood informs every thought I have, influencing everything I do. More than any other part of my life, being a mother taught me what it means to be human.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Control cannot be called conscience until we are able to take it inside us and make it our own, until—in spite of the fact that the wrongs we have done or imagined will never be punished or known—we nonetheless feel that the clutch in the stomach, that chill upon the soul, that self-inflicted misery called guilt.”
—Judith Viorst (20th century)
“While I believe that with a fair election in the South, our electoral vote would reach two hundred, and that we should have a large popular majority, I am yet anxious, as you are, that in the canvassing of results there should be no taint of dishonesty.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)