Given the enormous power that a President has, and the extreme damage he can do (such as blurt out highly classified information to our adversaries, or use nuclear weapons) I don’t think the bar to removing our leader should be so high.
In a Parliamentary system, the Prime Minister can be removed by a simple majority vote of “No Confidence.” In the U.S Presidential system, if we elect a President who is incompetent at doing his job (but who hasn’t committed a “High Crime or Misdemeanor”), we’re stuck with him for 4 years.
Another advantage to the Parliamentary system is that the people don’t directly vote for their leader. Instead of elections being focused on the personality quirks and personal failings of the Presidential candidates (mishandled emails, crude sexual remarks), the focus is more on policy issues.
We don’t vote directly for our leader in the USA either. We vote for delegates who get to vote for the President. Remember that Trump got fewer citizens to vote for him, but had more delegates because he won more states.
Also, the delegates, or electors, can go rogue, they don’t have to vote the way their states did.
You can turn every single argument around and argue the opposite case. Every one.
In Canada, the Prime Minister in theory is an elected dictator; if in control of a majority government he or she can do damn near anything, including passing legislation that violates rather important civil rights. They could make it illegal to practise Islam. The Supreme Court could not prevent it, since they could invoke s.33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to simply ignore the part that guarantees freedom of religion. Oh, the Governor General has to sign off on it, but s/he is an appointed figurehead. The Senate could stop you, but if you hold a majority there, they’re not usually inclined to stop you, and did I mention the Senate is appointed, not elected? The only thing stopping you from doing something like that is public outrage - that it’s too far outside the normal for anyone to stand for it.
I’m sorry to tell you this, but you will never ever ever ever ever ever create a system that can’t fall apart. You take any constitution in the world out of the 190 or so that there are and I’ll show you fifteen ways it can fail, and indeed in most countries it HAS failed in whole or in part. Donald Trump can wreck the United States only to the extent that the people allow him to, and right now they’re allowing him to. He could he removed from office by Thursday, if there was enough public outcry, but there isn’t, and he has quite ferocious support in fact.
The Canadian system, a Parliamentary one, has worked only because we’ve chosen to make it work. If Canadians fell in love with a dictatorial strongman, you could wreck our democracy in no time at all.
I realize that no system if foolproof, but it still seems to me that one system can be better than another. Can you give me some examples of authoritarian parliamentary governments?
In practice, the time between turnover of the executive office between parties is roughly comparable in the US and the UK: the top job generally switches parties every 8-12 years in the US and every 10-13 in the UK, with some shorter interludes here and there and a rare longer stretch once in a great while (FDR-Truman, Thatcher-Major).
I think voting directly for the leader is overrated.* What I truly care about is policy. I like the platform of the Democratic Party much more than the platform of the Republican Party. I don’t care whether I want to have a beer with Hillary more than Trump. I think if we take the specific identity of the leader out of the equation, people will be forced to focus on the issues instead of obsessing over the personality quirks and charisma (or lack thereof) of the candidates. Give me a boring but competent leader who can steer the ship of state, over a charming know nothing. Direct selection of leaders makes it a lot more likely that the latter will gain power over the former.
*Yes, I’m aware that we technically don’t vote directly for the President, we vote for the Electoral College, and then Electors vote. But in practice, Electors are hand picked for loyalty to the candidate, and seldom vote other than how they pledged.
Presidentialist v. Parlamentarian are matters of form. Whatever the system, governments rule “by the consent of the governed” which includes those with the ability to control power inside and outside the formal structures agreeing to play by both the written and unwritten rules.
With enough voter support, you can directly elect a rat bastard who’ll fatten his cronies, erode civil liberties and ruin the treasury as President, or you can have a rat bastard who’ll fatten his cronies, erode civil liberties and ruin the treasury rise to be party leader and upon gaining a majority be asked to form government as PM at the next sitting.
The old Soviet Bloc communist nations were almost all nominally parlamentarian, except that it was the Party Central Committee and not the constitutional government that actually ran policy. Meanwhile, virtually all of Latin America has been Presidentialist from the start, and the level of stability and respect for the Rule of Law has oscillated wildly.
One advantage of the Parliamentary system is that it selects for both the ability to get on with your colleagues, without which you can’t get the leadership of your party and also the ability to sell yourself to the country, without which your party won’t get power. If you’re not successful at both of these, you won’t last long.
Of the last 4 PMs of Australia, each has performed badly at one of these tasks (2 from each party - we’ve now collected the full set). Leading to their replacement with depressing regularity.
In the Presidential system, you only have to convince the people. So it’s easier for a politician who’s really crummy at the ‘working with other politicians’ side of things to get in power in the first place.
As best I can tell, the main problem with a presidential system is that it gets mingled with celebrity-worship, where the candidates aren’t competing on the basis of experience or policy but on sheer popularity, encouraging voters to pick the candidate they feel is better, the one they like more, rather than the one more likely to serve their interests.
Was Clinton v. Trump a year-long thoughtful analysis of competing policies and visions, or was it closer to a bunch of high-school seniors voting for Homecoming Queen?
I’d also point out that claims that parliamentary states are less concerned about personality are not entirely true. The UK’s current election is awash with comparisons between the personalities of May and Corbyn, with hardly any coverage of the rest of their respective teams.
Well, that’s because one turned out to not be the leader she wanted everyone to think she was, and the other turred out to be a leader of sorts which many thought was beyond him.
I’m by no means an expert on UK politics, but here in the USA the personalities of the candidates totally eclipsed policy issues in the media. Here’s an example of how screwed up our priorities have gotten:
But if we had a parliamentary system how would it be any different in this case? The Republicans are the majority party in the ‘parliament’ today…so, you wouldn’t get your no-confidence vote anyway…and we’d be stuck with Trump until the Dems managed to regain control as the majority party.
I don’t think either system is better than the other, they are just different. Trying to game them to get the outcome you want isn’t a good way to pick a system.
[QUOTE=RickJay]
You can turn every single argument around and argue the opposite case. Every one.
In Canada, the Prime Minister in theory is an elected dictator; if in control of a majority government he or she can do damn near anything, including passing legislation that violates rather important civil rights. They could make it illegal to practise Islam. The Supreme Court could not prevent it, since they could invoke s.33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to simply ignore the part that guarantees freedom of religion. Oh, the Governor General has to sign off on it, but s/he is an appointed figurehead. The Senate could stop you, but if you hold a majority there, they’re not usually inclined to stop you, and did I mention the Senate is appointed, not elected? The only thing stopping you from doing something like that is public outrage - that it’s too far outside the normal for anyone to stand for it.
I’m sorry to tell you this, but you will never ever ever ever ever ever create a system that can’t fall apart. You take any constitution in the world out of the 190 or so that there are and I’ll show you fifteen ways it can fail, and indeed in most countries it HAS failed in whole or in part. Donald Trump can wreck the United States only to the extent that the people allow him to, and right now they’re allowing him to. He could he removed from office by Thursday, if there was enough public outcry, but there isn’t, and he has quite ferocious support in fact.
The Canadian system, a Parliamentary one, has worked only because we’ve chosen to make it work. If Canadians fell in love with a dictatorial strongman, you could wreck our democracy in no time at all.
[/QUOTE]
Exactly this. Within our own system, we COULD get rid of Trump…we just haven’t (so far). We do have the ability to do so, even though it’s not exactly the same as in many parliamentary systems. In the context of America, though, even if we had a parliamentary system it wouldn’t change the fact that DT would still be prime minister or whatever until the Republicans lose control and allow the Dems (and their coalition of other parties) to do their no-confidence thingy and get rid of him.
This suggests that the opposite is true: the fact that the leaders keep failing is an indication that the system is not selecting successfully for the abilities needed.
I disagree. The shopkeeper’s daughter was often described in just such terms by her opponents.
I think all systems are capable of screwing up. The crucial difference is that our Presidential system forces us to live for these mistakes for longer. I can easily envision Trump serving out the rest of his term with an approval rating in the middle to lower thirties. More people think Trump should be impeached than approve of him! But even so, it would take a majority of the House of Representatives and 67 Senators to remove him.
We’re stuck with him until January 20th, 2021. Good job, America.