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Thursday, December 29, 2011

Idly Pining for a More Parliamentary Form in the USA

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot longtime friend of blog "jollyspaniard" writes:
The useful idiots in the GOP base are now the GOPs own worst enemy. Good luck taking control of both houses though. I used to think that America had the best designed Democracy on paper. Not anymore.
It's hard to disagree with you about that! Just look at the catastrophe of the profoundly anti-democratic Electoral College, for one thing. But ugly as was the plutocratic sentiment that inspired the inept Electoral College (and the appointment rather than election of the original Senators) I actually think so many of the Founders' anti-factional fears may have introduced some of the worst blind spots into the Constitutional framework as well. Needless to say, the very factionalism they sanctimoniously bloviated against and refused to account for already had a hand in allotting the electoral votes that made Washington President and by the Adams and Jefferson election full-on party politics already brought the fledgling Republic to the brink of utter dysfunction.

Since we are not just electing "representatives" but "Administrations" (a term that implies a basic capacity to accomplish the actual work of establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, providing defense, promoting general welfare) I must say that the Parliamentary Democracies do seem to have gotten some of it better than us, generally speaking. I do think it would be better, for example, if every four years in electing an Executive Ticket we voted in not only a President and Vice-President of a party with a clear platform clearly contrasted with alternatives and with a real mandate, but also the Speaker of the House and with the Vice-President functioning not just as the occasional tie-breaker but as the Senate's Majority Leader.

The power of the Leaders of the House and Senate over the running of the meetings and composition of committees and so on would give the Party in power the ability to implement, within limits, the program their election mandated, while also giving them powers to check tendencies in the Opposition to abuse rules to create dysfunction. The periodical regularity of elections would check abuses of the Party in Power. In moments of divided government when the Executive presided over majorities of other parties in Opposition, the majority would have the power to force real compromises on the Administration but not abuse rules to grind the people's business to a halt. Especially in a mass media environment, our present system invites dysfunction and disinformation -- and gets it.

By the way, I am still a booster for publicly funded campaigns and instant run-off voting and same-day registration in every state and an Election Day holiday and all the rest of the reforms one tends to hear championed by those who want to get money out of our hopelessly corrupted system and who want to break the present two-party system but in a way that doesn't always render third-parties functional spoilers always undermining our intentions as happens now. But I think your comment referred to even deeper problems in our Constitution that even such wholesomely and radically democratizing reforms would fail to address.

Of course, campaigns for publicly funded elections and instant-runoff are already an incredibly hard slog, as are important ongoing efforts to switch from the electoral college to the popular vote state-by-state. I don't even think campaigns to make our system less dysfunctional and more parliamentary are even on anybody's radar screens, and they could hardly be described as organizational priorities given everything else afoot. So this post should be taken in a completely philosophical spirit with no real practical substance, except insofar as it might usefully illuninate certain structural difficulties we deal with in our dysfunctional notionally-representative plutocratic constitutional republic.

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