In a Westminster-style parliamentary system, the party that controls the majority in the lower house (in the U.K., the House of Commons) essentially controls everything. It would be like the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives being the chief executive and the U.S. Senate being powerless.
In the U.K., if your party holds a majority in the Commons, then they are able to essentially pass whatever they want. There is no problem of having to wait for the Senate (which might be controlled by a different party) to also pass the same legislation, and no problem of a threat of veto by the president.
Ok, then what’s the problem in Colorado? Like Robot Arm said it has been at 88% for hours. I know it looks super close but they should have updated numbers by now. And the same thing for the Illinois Governor’s race.
My under standing was that things have to go past the Lords but if the Lords return something three times the Parliament Act can be used to force something through. However, there is a certain stigma to the Parliament Act and is used rarely, most recently for the law against hunting with hounds and Labour’s use of the Parliament Act took a fair amount of criticism.
On the other hand, Sweden’s system of one house is something I really don’t understand.
Sorry for the use of ‘our’, I didn’t mean to piss anyone off. It is just I see it written so often here in such a way that people seem to genuinely believe that the US system is inherently superior and that checks and balances do not exist elsewhere. I was merely asking about that, because the reponse I got to a question brought this up even though I couldn’t see why.
Which would be an extraordinary event. It rarely happens, and is not considered an essential factor in routine legislative proceedings.
In the American system, every single piece of legislation must go through this process, and there is absolutely no way for one house of Congress to override the other.
There was a great line in the intro to one of the Yes, Minister books (I think) comparing the legislative systems of the United States and Great Britain. It said that the complete impossibility of getting anything passed, which was arrived at accidentally in Britain, seems to have been copied deliberately by the U.S.
As far as I can tell from 3 different radio stations:
Bennett’s about 6000 votes ahead and a bunch of those uncounted 22% are from Boulder/Denver has a bunch of uncounted votes, but apparently military votes haven’t been counted either.
Plus, I think we’re close enough that it’ll trigger an automatic recount, so…who knows?
It’s a good thing if it’s because the other parties are giving an honest, critical look to the legislation and doing their best to ensure what passes is the best possible law. It’s stupid when the stated goal of the other party is to obstruct everything, even if it’s good legislation. “Well, the law does a lot of good, but not under this president” is the sort of thing that was actually said by republican representatives about the health care bill. That’s not good governance, that’s childish. The Republicans would like to see this country get worse if it meant Obama got the blame for it, and there’s absolutely nothing noble in that.
This is laughable. Most teabaggers don’t even know what his policies are. They think he raised their taxes and “took over” the health care system. Economic policies have fuck all to do with it.
It really isn’t as bad a lot of my fellow lefties think. The real legislative sausage making gets done in the Senate, and we still have that. We also still have the White House, of course. With only the House, the Republicans can do little more than grandstand or try to start harassing investigations which will uncover nothing and annoy independents. They will have to write legislation, and they will have to write legislation that the Senate can work with. The Democrats will still be able to remove the really crazy stuff. It’s not like the House Republicans will be able to actually pass any laws or anything. The worst they can do is do nothing, and that will hurt THEM this time, not the Dems.
It’s not bad from a legislative standpoint, true. In fact, it’s pretty meaningless. As I noted in the other thread, the Democrats will fail to pass all the same legislation they would have failed to pass anyway, and the Republicans will do exactly what they would have done anyway.
From a message standpoint, it’s bad; voters clearly rejected the Democrats. On the other hand, people like Rick Scott (who won by under 50,000 votes out of over 5 million) talking about mandates is laughable.
Well, the budget has to originate in the House. The Republican majority in the House can try to be obstinate and shut down the government, like they did in 1995-1996.
Not necessarily. It can be argued that the president usually bears most of the backlash when something goes wrong. It’s not entirely unreasonable to think that the Democrats would get most of the blame.
Of course, it didn’t work when they tried it with Clinton, but clearly, Clinton had political skills of a quality that Obama hasn’t demonstrated.