In Canada, it’s this one. There’s a bit of history of party leaders winning their own ridings, even if everyone knows that the party isn’t likely to become the government. Part of that is that party leaders run in the safest seat they can find, but part of it is also the local people thinking it would be beneficial to have their Member of Parliament be Someone Important, rather than just Joe Backbencher #12.
This is enough of a tradition that, were a party leader to lose their own riding, it is The Expected Thing for them to resign from politics entirely. The notion is, “If you can’t even convince your neighbors to vote for you, what chance is there that you’ll convince the whole country to vote for you?”
There’s been some talk of changing how we select MPs in the last few years, but so far, nothing has come of it.
@Martin_Hyde pretty much explained it. Each parliamentary representative, including party leaders, is elected individually in his or her own riding. Whichever party has the plurality of seats is generally the one to form the government, unless several parties band together in a formal coalition. However this has only happened once in Canadian history at the federal level, back in the 19th century, and is even less likely today.
Things can get strange if a party leader loses his or her own seat, but that’s really rare unless the party suffers a massive defeat across the board. It’s usually a signal for said party leader to resign.
In fact, though I could be mistaken, I seem to remember hearing that years ago, ballots for federal elections in Canada contained only candidate names and not their party affiliation. So it was really the other way around – you voted for the person, and if you were interested in voting for a party, it was up to you to know their affiliation. In modern times both name and party affiliation are listed.
Quoting myself to add in–I just remembered that as a matter of fact, at one point in early U.S. history some States did actually use multi-member districts for the House. Until 1847 it was fairly common, and until 1967 it could still be used for special circumstances. Under Federal law Congress has supremacy over Federal elections, so it passed laws in 1847 and 1967 restricting and then eliminating multimember districting, but there is nothing about that approach that is non-viable for a Presidential system.
Is there a constitutional restriction on who the president can nominate for a Cabinet level position? Because that’s the point I was making when I said the President can appoint anyone he wishes.
That’s a separate question from whether they will get confirmed.
Other than the statutory restriction on serving members (thanks for pointing that out), are there any constitutional or statutory restrictions on the President’s choice of nominees, and who can be appointed to cabinet?
Because that’s the significant difference I’m pointing out. There is a constitutional restriction in the Westminster system. A Cabinet minister must hold a seat in Parliament, either at the time they’re appointed or as quickly as possible afterwards.
That means the pool of people eligible to be Cabinet ministers in Canada, for example, is no more than 338, the size of the House of Commons (and in rare cases, the Senate).
To put it another way: Is the President of the US limited to the 538 individuals in Congress in naming his Cabinet? Or can he go beyond that and consider anyone he thinks would be appropriate to hold s Cabinet position?
In the spirit of better explaining the parliamentary system, the fact that Cabinet ministers must be elected MPs, and that they and the Prime Minister all sit in the House of Commons and propose and vote on legislation, is probably the biggest single difference between the American system of government and the Westminster parliamentary system.
Your quoted words do not align with what you said you are talking about, which is a purported Westminster constitutional requirement that all cabinet members be Members of Parliament. While it is possible that is what you meant, the reading of your words simply doesn’t follow that–the words you used stated that Cabinet secretaries hold power solely because the “Prez” put them there and that all power flows from the President. That is not the correct telling of facts as per the United States constitution. It’s certainly fine to say something you didn’t quite mean, but let’s be clear on what you did actually say. What would be unambiguously correct would be to say cabinet secretaries serve at the pleasure of the President, this means the President can fire them at any time. Congress has actually attempted to stifle that power in the past (a dispute over that very matter led to Andrew Johnson’s impeachment), but in the 20s it was settled in a Supreme Court ruling that Congress cannot impose limits on the President’s power to fire members of his own cabinet for any reason he wishes.
Now as to your other questions:
Yes, from the Constitution:
no Person holding any Office under the United States, shall be a Member of either House during his Continuance in Office.
This actually means you cannot be a member of the House or Senate and hold an office of the United States (essentially any executive branch office.) There is no constitutional bar to a Federal judge or a member of the military serving an executive office, however there are statutory and “norm” barriers. This is why Lloyd Austin had to get a waiver to be SecDef and why Judge Garland retired from the judiciary before becoming Attorney General. There have been cabinet officers who held military commissions concurrent with their membership in the cabinet, in recent years typically people who were in the reserves or national guard, obviously not active duty.
He’s actually explicitly prevented from having anyone who is in Congress also in his cabinet. Cabinet secretaries are frequently chosen from that pool of 538, but they vacate their legislative office before assuming their executive office.
Let’s also eliminate potential quibbles–the term “cabinet” is a little squishy in the United States, in some contexts it has a specific statutory meaning but not always. The Vice President is often viewed as part of the cabinet in many contexts, and creates odd considerations. The Vice Presidency being a strange office that actually serves as the President of the Senate, meaning VPOTUS is in some respects part of both the legislative and executive branches, and is arguably a constitutional paradox in that the Vice President does hold an office in the executive branch but also the Congress. [The Vice President initially physically presided over session of the Senate, this ended due to the first Vice President, John Adams, using this power to make a bother of himself and the Senate drafted rules to basically make him go away. To this day the Vice President still has a very lavish and nice office in the U.S. Capitol, as part of her role as President of the Senate. Vice President’s Room - Wikipedia)
Also to revisit what I said earlier:
a purported Westminster constitutional requirement that all cabinet members be Members of Parliament
I’m less familiar with Canada/AUS/NZ, but “constitutionally” this isn’t true for the granddaddy of all Westminster Parliaments–the one actually in the Palace of Westminster. To avoid getting overlong, the Cabinet of the United Kingdom is technically part of the Privy Council, an institution that existed in some form back to the 16th century but in its legal modern form dates to 1708. Specifically, what is publicly called the “cabinet” in the UK today is the executive committee of the privy council. (The rest of the council is largely made up of people like retired politicians holding ceremonial positions, and some high ranking members of the royal family–Prince Charles, Duchess Camilla and Prince William are all Privy Counsellors.) There is a constitutional / legal reason that the cabinet is part of the Privy Council, under British constitutional law, Acts of Parliament are legally implemented by Orders in Council, so essentially to effect laws you need the Privy Council (at least in so much as Parliament has chosen to continue this arrangement, for historical reasons as Parliament stripped power away from non-Parliamentary sources of power–mostly the monarch but also high officials appointed by the monarch, they often did so in ways that preserved the old monarchical legal constructs.)
Essentially this is why it makes constitutional / legal sense for a cabinet member to be part of the privy council. However, it has never been constitutionally established you must be an MP to be a member of the cabinet. Prior to Peel being Prime Minister, in fact, cabinet members frequently were not MPs. The Peel convention established the rule that members of cabinet should be recruited from the House of Commons or Lords (a common practice for appointed non-MPs to the cabinet after this was to quickly create for them a Peerage, as those historically could be easily created by whomever was PM–although now that is not commonly done), however Peel’s convention never quite became part of Britain’s infamously non-centralized constitution. There have been several times after the implementation of his convention of people who were neither in Commons or Lords serving in the cabinet. So in Britain at least, it is more of a “strong norm” backed up by not strictly binding rules from the mid-19th century), which isn’t quite the same as a constitutional requirement.
I would guess that in the rest of the Westminster Parliamentary world it is probably more clearly spelled out in a constitution, Britain has a lot of relics of the fact that parts of its legal and governing system date back 500 years or more versus the more recent off shoots had a good opportunity to draft a more cohesive and comprehensive governing plan.
Yes, that’s it. Her riding is Saanich-Gulf Islands, off the southern coast of Vancouver Island, in the Salish Sea. BC tends to be more sympathetic to environmental issues. May has held the seat since 2011,
That’s a restriction on who can hold a seat in Cabinet. It’s not a restriction on who the President can nominate. The President can nominate any sitting member of Congress for a Cabinet position. It’s not a restriction on the President’s nominating power. If the candidate is confirmed, such as Secretary of State Clinton or Secretary of State Kerry, then they cease to hold their position in Congress. That is not the same as a restriction on the President’s nominating power.
Technically Senate confirmation does not start their cabinet appointment, they still have to be sworn in, and there are usually a few days in between. Merrick Garland was confirmed March 10 2017 and was sworn in March 13 2017. He retired as a judge on March 11 2017.
Correct on both counts. Private members can introduce bills, but the chances of getting through are generally slim, unless for some reason the government picks it up. That will vary in different countries and parliaments, depending on the political practices.
The restriction on spending restrictions is the “royal recommendation” - since the late 17th century, there has been a standing order of the House of Commons that no spending bill can be introduced unless there is a recommendation from the monarch, agreeing with the bill. The purpose for this order is to ensure that there is a unified approach to budgeting and spending. Both the Commons and the monarch (ie the executive) have to agree on the need for a proposed spending bill.
This order gives substantial discipline to the budget process in a Westminster style government that is lacking in the US Congressional system.
In Canada, the standing order for the royal recommendation was incorporated into the Constitution Act, 1867. It’s not just a practice of the House of Commons.
In trying to explain the system to other Americans I frequently start with the supposition of “imagine whoever was Speaker of the House basically ran the country like the President does.” However, unfortunately a barrier to this working is that more Americans than you might imagine don’t actually know who the Speaker is at any given time and also don’t understand the office or what it does. The Speaker:Prime Minister analogy also suffers from not being quite apt, but it’s a bit of a life raft to understanding something that a lot of Americans struggle with because one of the few things that gets really hammered hard and repeatedly in civics / history classes K-12 is the idea of government being “divided into three branches.”
It’s genuinely a little hard to explain to most Americans who have a vague High School civics level of understanding of their own government, and it lacks a lot of the nuances needed.
Probably the closest regular governing units we have to a parliamentary system are actually some forms of municipal governance in the U.S. where councils or commissions wield both executive and legislative powers, but that’s also esoteric to most Americans who rarely pay attention to local politics.
Again, not really–the American system requires the President to approve any budget, and by convention the President typically proposes a budget. It is not an order coordinating budgeting between executive and legislative that creates a disciplined budgeting process in Westminster systems–if that was all it took we have laws and regulations that are functionally similar here. No, it is rather that the executive in a Westminster system also controls by definition, a controlling faction in the legislature. The U.S. system explicitly allows for the opposite scenario to happen.
It should be noted that back when the monarch still had independence of political action, budget disputes with Parliament were common and crippling, very akin to what happens when a President and a Congress struggle to come to agreement.
Sure, the President proposes the budget. But Congress is not bound by that recommendation, and can introduce and pass whatever budget bill it wishes, correct?
The royal recommendation is a restriction on what bills can be introduced in the Commons relating to the finances, needing the prior approval of the executive.
In your reference to “laws and regulations” are you saying that the President has the power to restrict what budget bills can be introduced in the House of Representatives?
I agree. I find it’s better to not try to use analogies to explain the parliamentary system to Americans, for just the reason you identify - even trying to use an analogy to the US system can be confusing. Better to take the approach “I’m from Mars. Here’s how we do it on Mars.”
Again–the reason a Westminster system has a disciplined budgeting system is because the executive by definition controls the legislature. It is not because of an order from the 17th century. Your question about the U.S. system is not relevant to that line of inquiry.
That 17th century order, which is still part of the standing orders of the Commons in the UK, is part of what helped to create the discipline of the executive over the legislature.
Does this happen very often? The reason for elections in the event of non-confidence in the Westminster system is to prevent a weak government from limping along.
Yes, but it is really just a way of ordering business inside the House of Commons, essentially. The core constitutional issue that allows for Westminster systems more easily handling budgetary matters is that the executive by definition controls a legislative majority that can pass a supply bill. I don’t believe there is any Westminster government in which a PM who could not pass such a bill would be able to avoid calling an election to try and resolve it.
If we had an exactly identical rule in Congress it would not alleviate the reality of our budget woes. In fact, while the President has no power to regulate what bills get proposed in Congress, he has far more power even than a Prime Minister in deciding what bills can become law–nothing becomes law over the President’s objection unless you can get 2/3rds of both the House and Senate to agree. if a majority of parliament in a Westminster system decided that the PM was failing to implement some legislative promise from the campaign, for example, they could implode his premiership fairly quickly. In the United States Congress can’t effect anything into law over the President’s veto without a commanding supermajority of votes. [Versus in a Parliament if even a majority of MPs want the PM out, he/she is functionally sacked, or at least forced to try and hold on via a new election.]
In essence that already gives the President vast power to restrict what can be budgeted and appropriated.
