You know I think one of the reasons why the rest of the developed world doesn’t lock so many criminals up for so long is that it’s much harder for them to get hold of guns (and those that do mess with guns get the longer sentences).
Th emain reasons the USA has 25% of the worlds prisoners is (a) ‘three strikes and you’re out’, and (b) social inequality. Guns don’t help at all, but there are bigger reasons, as well.
Indeed, which is why the rest of the world, in general, finds the accusations of socialism flying around US politics to both be a wee bit mental and hilarious. As far as I can work out there’s exactly one member of mainstream politics in the US that is even close to being a socialist … and he’s about to retire. We routinely see people that are to the right of our country’s politics being accused of being socialists and that is just, well, confusing.
This is something even Americans and Mr Obama didn’t get or lied about. The US President is pretty weak on his own. So is the Congress and so is the US Supreme Court. The whole idea was to have a system of checks. This leads to gridlock. Of course it does prevent one branch from running over the rest.
Then we have levels of state government. So the USA was set up so that of the three branches none can do much without cooperating with the other. The states are set up so they can gridlock the system and changing the system is hard because of the way it’s done. Constitutional amendments are few compared to other countries. And the attitude of Americans is, “Why change something that worked for over 200 years.”
Americans have a habit historically of electing different parties. And in fact the parties aren’t all that different. Add to it, states are often more alike than parties. Two Democratic senators from Colorado and two Republican senators from Wyoming, will often have a political agenda that is tied together. This is because both are Western states and near each other. So often these Senators cooperate, even at the expense of their own party platforms.
The inequality of the US Senate means agricultural and mining influences are much stronger than their numbers say they should be.
Bottom line, the whole system is set up to make it hard to do anything. So why be surprised when that is the result.
I find Europeans tend to leave religion and personal life out of things. I recall the Clinton Affair in the 90s. Every single person I knew from Europe was like, “Who cares, it’s between Clinton and his wife.”
Interestingly enough many female voters thought Hillary wasn’t tough enough on Bill and that pushed them into voting for Obama for the Democratic nomination.
I don’t know a lot about it, but yeah the president can veto. But that can be overridden with a 2/3 majority of congress.
I’ve heard about the UK system, I guess the goal there is to let the party that won implement their agenda then let the public decide ‘do we want more or less of this’. In the US the system is designed to slow down and prevent government from working as far as I can tell.
Being the president, he can use the power of the executive branch to get around congress. One example would be recess appointments, if congress won’t approve certain people for government jobs the president can appoint them. Another is who he appoints to run various agencies.
The party or parties that won, yes. I can’t speak for the UK, but in Spain the Presidents and Majors are chosen from and by the Parliamentaries and Town Councilors, respectively. Depending on the laws of the specific location and on how much majority does a party enjoy, they may be able to steamroll their candidate in on the first vote, may form a coalition with other parties, or may end up as a not-exactly-majority government, which needs to negotiate with different parties any time a vote comes up. Early elections because a region’s Parliament couldn’t chose a President are rare but not unheard of: if they can’t even agree on that first point of the agenda, they’re not going to be able to agree on enough things to be effective. We haven’t had early national elections for the same reason yet, but in theory we could.
I dislike large majorities because they mean losing that whole negotiation aspect; governments with absolute majorities tend to forget not only the people who did not vote for them, but even those who did. “I won, therefore you obey” is just not healthy.
No. Bills still have to pass multiple readings in both the Commons and the Lords, neither of which is guaranteed. Govts regularly fail to pass bills, especially when their majority is as small as the current coalition govt.
Indeed - where do you think the Founding Fathers get the idea from Wesley? 
British government bills are reasonably often confounded by the Lords.
And like the 2/3 majority required to overrule the President’s veto, the House of Commons can use the Parliament Acts to push through something that has been returned from the Lords two times already. However this is a VERY rare thing to happen, the usual course of events is to give up or to amend the proposed legislation. The last time it was done was a few years ago to put through the hunting with hounds bill. The use of it was very controversial as hunting with hounds is normally the domain of those that live in the countryside which has traditionally been Tory and the bill was forced through by a Labour government.
Yes, that is a nasty little British secret isn’t it. Disgustingly anti-democratic and something of which we should be ashamed.
My mistake then. I was under the impression that parliamentary systems like the one in England are designed to give the ruling government the ability to pass their agenda so the public could judge it and decide if they want more or less of it. In the US the system is designed for gridlock (at least the senate was especially, which is what has been happening lately).
Well, in Canada there’s a lot of talk that a prime minister with a majority government is effectively an elected dictator. (And before someone protests, I heard this as well back when Jean Chrétien was PM, not just now.) The Canadian system is similar to the British one, but maybe the British House of Lords still has more political legitimacy than the Canadian Senate, which is largely seen as a collection of old party loyalists, and which generally accedes to the government’s wishes without too much fuss. That’s especially true if the government has a majority in the Senate as well, but even a Senate with a majority of opposition members wouldn’t dare opposing the government’s agenda too much, since being largely made of unelected party hacks they have no political legitimacy to do so.
The House of Lords has less legitimacy than the Canadian one, being an appointed body but also in possession of a rump of hereditary peers and a small number of bishops.
However, the pro-Lords position is that its very lack of legitimacy makes it more independent: not having to worry about what anyone thinks of them, the Lords tend to vote using individual conscience rather than party allegiance.
It needs doing away with, especially as one party (Conservatives) has a permanent built in majority.
But as noted The Parliament Act can over-ride them and the Lords by common practice cannot block legislation that was part of a party manifesto.
Where the Lords is performing a useful function (that needs to be preserved in another form) is that it can give detailed scrutiny of a Bill and act as a forum for introducing needed revisions (govts use it to revise legislation quite often) without jamming up the house of Commons.
It is also in practice useful to throw sand in the works of ideologically driven governments that lack a mandate for radical changes.
The reform dilemma is how to replace an anachronistic device such as The Lords without undermining the primacy of The Commons derived from it’s elected status.
I for one don’t want to see the kind of permanent paralysis of government the USA labours under with different branches of govt in the hands of different parties, especially if one is ideologically driven to oppose everything the other does.
I meant the Parliament Act!
I agree there needs to be further reform of the Lords, though I really don’t want to see a campaigning, term-limited ‘senate’ in the UK. Would prefer a system of appointment like jury service or the like. But I object to the Parliament Act more.
Agreed.
It’s a really difficult problem. I think back to the 80’s when thanks to the vagaries of our electoral system we had a series of governments basically elected by a majority of voters only in South East England (the anti-thatcher vote being hopelessly split and the Tory party wiped out outside of England) and the House of Lords was th only thing standing in its way.
But non UK’ers should not over-estimate the power of the Lords. It is, by and large a brake on the Govt in some circumstances. It cannot stop anything and is very aware of the limits of democratic tolerance and always backs down for fear of the nuclear option.
I want it gone but not sure how to replace it with something better.
I don’t want to sound like Marion Barry here, but there are other crimes besides murder. If you look at all crimes, the crime rate in the major european countries is about twice the rate of the US. Property crime is 20% higher in europe and violent crime is about 85% higher in Europe. Here is a paper discussing the different rates (pdf)
Specifically, when I said massive rates of crime I was referring to the UK which as the highest crime rate in Western Europe and which has a crime rate 250% higher than the US. All of this without adjusting for ethnicity.
The Canadian Senate, in theory, could be a house where political activists who are not the politician type can debate important but neglected issues without having to care about their reelection. But since it’s mostly staffed by old party hacks (and these last few years, by popular people who were largely apolitical before ending up there), it has no remnant of legitimacy and doesn’t do anything of substance. It certainly doesn’t function as one of the “checks and balances”.
It depends what issue you’re talking about.
One of the instances when Labour had to threaten to use that disgustingly anti-democratic Act was when the House of Lords, due to an organised voting block led by Baroness Young, voted to stop the change of the age of consent for gays from 18 to 16. Essentially the argument from Young and the Lord was “yes we know equality is lovely and everything, but we don’t want boys touching other mens’ penises any sooner then they have to lest it turn them funny for good - better make them wait longer for their own protection”. These being the same boys that, in the issue of sexual consent with girls, are themselves the aggressive predators that girls need to be protected from.
The campaign led by Young and her cronies was nothing short of hateful bigotry. Labour made clear this was something that was going to happen as the unequal position for gays in this area was a) unjust and b) untenable (the EU court of human rights had already ruled that they needed to do something about it as the position was incompatible with the Human Rights Act). Fortunately for everyone Young died and the support she had rallied against the bill fell, but there was also the threat of the Parliament Act and so the Lords passed it without comment third time around.
So in that instance it was in fact the democratic government pushing through an undemocratic set of individuals trying to hold up the Will of the People ™. The Lords has now been reformed and isn’t quite so full of people who sit there by virtue of one of their ancestors fighting for Henry VIII in Ireland or something. But I agree with jjimm that it would be far better to have a system like a jury panel. In fact I read a great book called “the Party is over” that proposed replacing the the House of Commons with a jury system, keeping the Lords unelected by appointed on a rolling basis, and making the Monarchy elected and for the monarch to be sort of like a chief executive of the government. Made perfect sense to me (the sole reviewer on Amazon didn’t seem to think so though).
… well that happened, then.