The people do have a say--it's just people like my mom and not whoever you apparently think should be making the rules. They see "someone hacked the Fed!"[1] on TV and think we need CISPA. Maybe they are wrong, maybe they are right, but the U.S. is quite structured in the direction of rule by the majority, not rule by the technocrati.

[1] By and large, they also don't care about their privacy, as the popularity of Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc, attests to.

I don't disagree with your sentiment, but you are _greatly_ oversimplifying the issue. Politics is a complex system of public and private relationships. If there's an imbalance of power, it's not because Obama is King.