It's hard enough to get even Congress as a whole to care about issues normal people actually care about, but it's even worse if even Congress itself can't pass good laws because it's being hijacked by a few. For example, most of the House voted to pass the USA Freedom Act as is (which was pretty good originally), but the Rules Committee, comprised of a handful of people, stripped down almost all the good reforms in it, making it essentially useless, and potentially worse than if it had not existed:

http://www.emptywheel.net/2014/05/23/four-reasons-usa-freedu...

Sometimes, it all falls onto one man, such as the Audit the Fed bill, which also got a huge majority in House, but Harry Reid refused to put it on the floor in Senate, or when Patrick Leahy single-handedly killed the recent patent reform bill.

All of this doesn't seem "democratic" at all to me.