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.
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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)
“peace hath her victories
No less renowned than war; new foes arise,
Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains:
Help us to save free conscience from the paw
Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“When Abraham Lincoln penned the immortal emancipation proclamation he did not stop to inquire whether every man and every woman in Southern slavery did or did not want to be free. Whether women do or do not wish to vote does not affect the question of their right to do so.”
—Mary E. Haggart, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)