Even in the House, there is an amending process, which minority party politicians can shrewdly use to weaken or even scuttle a noxious bill by amending it to death, so to speak, especially if politicians in the majority party are divided and are unable to maintain party discipline.
As for the fetishization of consensus, the problem seems to be confined to a minority of political meetings. Even among anarchists, there is no consensus about consensus, as you can see in the disagreement between Chuck0 and Brian. Consensus was indeed all the rage among youth activists excited by Seattle and the like, but I think it's a passing fad.
Anyhow, my main point is that, since only a minority of the actually or potentially politically active show up at any given meeting (much less all who are potentially affected by decisions at the meeting), a position held by a minority of meeting participants isn't necessarily an undemocratic position. It may very well be one supported by or favorable to the majority of those who don't show up at the meeting but are interested in or affected by its outcome.
Discussion about direct democracy versus representative democracy, consensus versus the majority rule, etc. in the recent thread has been remarkably formalist. Formalist innovations don't solve a political problem of how to raise the quality and quantity of political participation and keep them high, in my opinion. -- Yoshie
* Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>