Majority Rule

Public land worth billions is sold for a pittance under an 1872 law, but the U.S. Senate fails to take action on legislation designed to get a fair price.Exploding gas lines, ruptured by unknowing excavators, pose a threat to public safety, but the U.S. Senate does not act on a bill that would make it easier to learn their locations.Health care coverage for children through Medicare might well have been approved by Congress this fall, but the Senate did not act.Big money influence over elections continues unabated in part because curbs were not voted on in the U.S. Senate.

DURING THE last full decade of South Africa's apartheid in the 1980s, neighboring Zimbabwe was often hailed as proof that black majority rule could work. More recently, though, it has become an example of how unwise policies practiced by an unchallenged, aging leader can throw a country into hopelessness.This situation has been only too common in post-colonial Africa. Eventually, unhappiness swept aside such founding presidents as Tanzania's Julius Nyerere, Zambia's Kenneth Kaunda and Malawi's Hastings Kamuzu Banda.

KHAYELITSHA, South Africa -- Albert Khandekana is relishing all the attention his calling is getting under black majority rule here.He hopes that the government will fund an ambitious training center in this impoverished township and that a major corporation will come knocking on his door.Khandekana is a traditional healer, one of an estimated 350,000 in the country who treat their millions of patients with a mixture of natural remedy, counseling and spiritualism.For decades they were forced underground by the minority white supremacist regime, which scoffed at traditional healing as primitive, despite its use by the masses.

ALEXANDRIA, VA. -- In honor of Constitution Day, which was celebrated yesterday, allow me to dispel the most popular myth about our government: In America, the majority rules.Wrong answer. One of the basic principles of the U.S. Constitution is that democracy is not an unmitigated good. That's why we have a Bill of Rights -- which gives individuals and minorities some protection against the tyranny of the majority. For, as James Madison recognized, a democracy can be just as despotic as any other form of government.

WASHINGTON -- Using a century-old Supreme Court case as a model, lawyers for 15 Democratic representatives and the League of Women Voters filed a lawsuit yesterday challenging the constitutionality of a new rule in the House of Representatives that requires a three-fifths vote to approve any increase in the income tax rate."

ON A CONTINENT that has had more than its share of turmoil and disasters, South Africa continues to beam a ray of hope. Granted, much of the euphoria of the first days of majority rule in the spring of 1994 has been tempered by the hard facts of real life. But President Nelson Mandela governs by pragmatism and South African voters are proving to be surprisingly astute, considering that the country was long deprived of real democracy.The recent local elections are a case in point. The ANC rallied, gaining about 60 percent of the vote, to no one's surprise.

Chicago. -- Our constitution has many checks and balances -- too many, some have thought in the past.One House of Congress can block another; the president can veto what is passed by both Houses.But the Republican Contract With America would add another check, one not decreed by the framers of our government -- a three-fifths majority vote needed for the passage of new taxes.This reflects the mood of the Republicans, who want to cripple government, to take freedom of maneuver away from our representatives.

MANY Americans think the primary cause of gridlock in Congress is the inability of a majority to agree on action. The real problem is more basic.In the Senate, majority rule is becoming the exception rather than the rule.Week after week, we see as many as 59 of the 100 senators ready to act on legislation -- to pass or defeat it. But Senate rules permit a minority of 41 or fewer to filibuster -- to prevent the majority from voting at all. To stop a filibuster, 60 votes are needed.A minority -- sometimes one senator -- can demand ransom in exchange for providing the 60th vote; often, the price is either watered-down legislation or "pork."

-- Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. -- As South Africa approaches its first democratic election next month, apprehension over the prospect of majority rule is not confined to Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Inkatha movement, nor to the country's 5 million whites.Apartheid has left behind a legacy of fear and suspicion that infects all ethnic groups, not just black and white. Although widely viewed as a collaborator with the former apartheid regime, Chief Buthelezi has become a leading articulator of those fears.

President Clinton, like most of his fellow citizens, tends to take for granted and, thus, to underrate the achievement of the people who came together to make the United States of America. So, he overestimates the prospects of ''new'' democracies in the rest of the world.The triumph of American democracy is not that the majority rules; it is that multiple minorities are tolerated. Majority rule is easy to achieve, but it is not so easy to prevent the majority from disenfranchising, suppressing, driving out or killing minorities.

Tis the season of commencement speeches. At bigger schools we'll look for the celebrity speechmakers and listen for sound bites from the Bills - Clinton or Cosby - along with an assortment of CEOs and novelists and local politicians. Most of their talks inspire, but there has come to be an underlying message that links education, graduation and material success. In our excitement for the new grads, are we putting the emphasis in the wrong place? As we celebrate, we calculate the value of a high school or college degree: We compare tuition with the expected wages and future positions as if that's the transaction in full.

Foe of abortion shows disregard for democracy Stephen Peroutka is not only the chairman of the National Pro-Life Action Center but a Maryland lawyer ("Roberts' words give abortion foes reason to be wary," Opinion/Commentary, Aug. 9). Yet his column shows that the foundations of anti-abortion beliefs are truly anti-American because they are anti-democratic. Mr. Peroutka asserts that "We" - by which he mean America - "declared that the laws of nature and nature's God take precedence over unjust decrees, even when those decrees are wrapped in the guise of law."

WASHINGTON - Hearings are under way before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the first of President Bush's resubmitted judicial nominations that Democrats blocked last year. There are signs that opponents are no more willing to swallow them now than they were then. Committee Chairman Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania has expressed hope that a compromise can be reached. But with the Republicans holding a 10-8 edge on the committee, it's likely that the names of most or all of the Bush appointees to federal appellate courts will be sent to the floor again.

CAN A COUNTRY be marched at gunpoint into democracy? Sure. There were a pair of brilliant examples 50 years ago, in Japan and Germany. But can Iraq follow their example? The Bush administration wants to think so, but Iraq is both more complicated and less of a real nation than either of those old Axis powers. Germany and Japan are ethnically very homogeneous and cohesive, and that makes a huge difference. A more instructive lesson might come from America's own South following the Civil War, where all it took was about 100 years before Washington was able to extend democracy to all ethnic groups.

DURING THE last full decade of South Africa's apartheid in the 1980s, neighboring Zimbabwe was often hailed as proof that black majority rule could work. More recently, though, it has become an example of how unwise policies practiced by an unchallenged, aging leader can throw a country into hopelessness.This situation has been only too common in post-colonial Africa. Eventually, unhappiness swept aside such founding presidents as Tanzania's Julius Nyerere, Zambia's Kenneth Kaunda and Malawi's Hastings Kamuzu Banda.

KHAYELITSHA, South Africa -- Albert Khandekana is relishing all the attention his calling is getting under black majority rule here.He hopes that the government will fund an ambitious training center in this impoverished township and that a major corporation will come knocking on his door.Khandekana is a traditional healer, one of an estimated 350,000 in the country who treat their millions of patients with a mixture of natural remedy, counseling and spiritualism.For decades they were forced underground by the minority white supremacist regime, which scoffed at traditional healing as primitive, despite its use by the masses.

ON A CONTINENT that has had more than its share of turmoil and disasters, South Africa continues to beam a ray of hope. Granted, much of the euphoria of the first days of majority rule in the spring of 1994 has been tempered by the hard facts of real life. But President Nelson Mandela governs by pragmatism and South African voters are proving to be surprisingly astute, considering that the country was long deprived of real democracy.The recent local elections are a case in point. The ANC rallied, gaining about 60 percent of the vote, to no one's surprise.

ALEXANDRIA, VA. -- In honor of Constitution Day, which was celebrated yesterday, allow me to dispel the most popular myth about our government: In America, the majority rules.Wrong answer. One of the basic principles of the U.S. Constitution is that democracy is not an unmitigated good. That's why we have a Bill of Rights -- which gives individuals and minorities some protection against the tyranny of the majority. For, as James Madison recognized, a democracy can be just as despotic as any other form of government.

WASHINGTON -- Using a century-old Supreme Court case as a model, lawyers for 15 Democratic representatives and the League of Women Voters filed a lawsuit yesterday challenging the constitutionality of a new rule in the House of Representatives that requires a three-fifths vote to approve any increase in the income tax rate."

Chicago. -- Our constitution has many checks and balances -- too many, some have thought in the past.One House of Congress can block another; the president can veto what is passed by both Houses.But the Republican Contract With America would add another check, one not decreed by the framers of our government -- a three-fifths majority vote needed for the passage of new taxes.This reflects the mood of the Republicans, who want to cripple government, to take freedom of maneuver away from our representatives.