I thought technically it was the Governor-General who has the power to prorogue Parliament. The PM can request, but the G-G (or the Queen, if she’s inclined to get involved) was the one who ultimately decides.
Yes, it’s the GovGen who has the formal authority, but it’s exercised on the advice of the PM, who takes the political responsibility for the decision, as Harper did with the prorogation over Christmas of 2008 when the Opposition was talking about a coalition.
Since the principles of responsible government mean that the decisions are made by the PM and Cabinet, we don’t usually talk about the GovGen having done it. It’s the PM and Cabinet who are responsible.
That’s today. Wisconsin Dopers, don’t forget to vote!
Looks like it turned out well.
Chuckles and chortles!
Wisconsin voters also soundly defeated efforts to eliminate the office of State Treasurer (61% voted to keep the office)
Both Supreme Court candidates recieved lots of money.
Turnout was 22 percent which is sadly high for a spring election.
Brian
A win is a win.
We have to keep up the momentum for another seven months. Eyes on the prize, people.
While it is tempting to think in terms of a race, that really isn’t the right way to look at it. The problems that all led to the infiltration of the GOP by the neoconservative and “Tea Party” movement, and the demographic shift to voting for anti-establishment, “burn it to the ground” Republican candidates are all still in existence, the current degree of reflexive outrage notwithstanding. While the immediate need is to get jerks like Scott Walker and Paul Ryan out of office, the long term goal should be to elect candidates who can and will actually deal with the fundamental economic and social problems which have resulted in the current situation, and strive to draw the GOP back to a more pragmatic position, because the political health of the country needs at least two competing viable political parties which are both basing their positions on relatively pragmatic and evidence-backed arguments rather than each hieing toward opposite extremes fostered by manipulated public outrage.
Stranger
You want fries with that, or maybe a pony?
The best way for that to happen is:
[ul]
[li]Step 1: GOP DIAF[/li][li]Step 2: Democrats use their period of dominance to fix the damage and institute reforms[/li][li]Step 3: Without a common enemy, “Progressive” versus “Business” tensions increase[/li][li]Step 4: After a couple of election cycles, the factions split into two new parties[/li][/ul]
Prob is, it is not contained. The collateral is not pretty.
True. Bit it’s still probably the best route available.
Yeah, that kind of internal cleaving can have unintended consequences.
It may not be within the memory of some here, but the Democrats have had their own issues with corruption, dominance by less-than-desireable leadership, corporate influence, et cetera, and the notion of the Democratic Party “saving democracy” because it is an inherently less corruptible representaton of public interest is not borne out in history. A functioning democracy needs at least two (prefereably more) distinct sets of representation which reflect to a reasonable extent the ideological beliefs and values of the population by advocatging for pragmatic policy and legislation which reflects those values. At a time before the mid-‘Eighties, the GOP party legitimately did so without generally succombing to its more radical elements, but ever since Newt Gingrich and the “Contract With America” it has skewed radically to an ideological right guided and funded by private thinktanks and wealthy donors at the expense of pragmatic assessment or any attempt to evaluate evidential value of policies, often trying to eliminate internal safeguards and quash independent review.
The Democrats will do the same if left unchecked and unquestioned in power regardless of internal schisms. The best thing that can happen is that the GOP radically reforms itself by rejecting the demagogic and corrupt elements, and both parties relax ideological strangleholds and promote candidates which better reflect their particular constituancies than hew to a national party line. Doing so, however, will require both campaign finance reform and legislative reform, as well as a return to earmarks and other provisions which permit legislators to compromise to come to agreement rather than be threatened and cajoled into following doctrine at risk of losing funding and donor support. And that seems unlikely at this point because it is in the interest of few people actually in control of governance.
Stranger
Please get this correct in the future: the word is “on”, not “with”.
If the likes of Kasich, Sandoval, and Schwarzenegger can somehow save the GOP from itself, great.
But right now, that party needs to lose and to lose big. Remember your B. F. Skinner. The way you change their behavior is by making it not rewarding to behave this way.
The GOP must lose elections in its present form. It must lose big. It must keep losing so long as it follows the anti-government billionaires. It must no longer be profitable to act like a Paul Ryan or a Ted Cruz.
It was actually a big deal.
Dallet won handily in a special election in a swing state. Against a somewhat flawed, but not horrible, candidate funded by the Kochs. Dems traditionally get their heads handed to them in specials in WI. She didn’t just win Dane County and other liberal bastions – she won a load of Trump counties (e.g., Outagamie, Brown, Winnebago, Marathon, etc.) handily. Frightening poor little Scotty Walker who couldn’t even last into the Iowa caucuses in 2016.
The Kochs have been financing the campaigns of friendly (to them) Wisconsin Supreme Court candidates for a decade now and this has to have been their worst defeat.
Reported
They won’t lose, that is the problem. Even if the democrats win big in 2018 and 2020, the GOP will probably win big in 2022.
For the last several election cycles, the public got enraged at whoever was in the white house and voted for the opposite party. The 1994 takeover of congress by the GOP was a response to Clinton. The 2006 and 2008 routs were a response to W, the 2018 (and likely 2020) rout are a response to Trump, and 2022 will probably be the same. A democrat will win and no matter how that democrat acts, the dems will get complacent and the GOP will get energized, and 2022 will be a GOP landslide.
One reason the GOP has gone insane is there is no punishment for them in acting this way. As long as the GOP is the party of white nationalism and white resentment identity politics, they will be a major political party. Nothing else they do wrong really matters as long as they partake in white identity politics. Roy Moore and Trump proved this.
It sucks, but we’re stuck with them. My hope is millennials and generation Z are left wing enough that as the boomers die off, the GOP actually starts losing elections. But that could be 20 years from now.
You are more optimistic than I. Given the great effort the GOP has put into shredding public education (and blaming it on the Liberals), the hope that the younger generations will do better than we have does not seem well founded.
Exactly. Why don’t you all give up on the future already? The GOP won.