This is a good piece by Yglesias debunking the idea that prominent Republicans like MCain, Flake, Bush, etc are part of the resistance to Trump. Given that a Republican Congress is demonstrably unwilling to check Trump — largely because they broadly agree with his agenda and want to advance it — the only way to counter him is with a Democratic Congress. But establishment Republicans won’t advocate that, either; again, because they want his agenda to succeed.
”…in 2018, America will either elect a Congress that continues to bolster Trump’s regime or it will elect one that tries to erode it. Those resisting Trump are pushing for one kind of Congress, and those not pushing for an anti-Trump Congress aren’t resisting Trump.”
While this is true, our system is broken and no longer seems possible.
Article from a couple years ago - it’s time to ditch our Presidential system and move to a Parliamentary democracy.
Sure, that’s easy peasy simple. Just rewrite half the Constitution.
I dunno about that. Setting aside that it’s like counting on a unicorn to save us, the virtue of Parliamentary systems is that the winning side gets to actually govern because the opposition can’t stop them and there are fewer instutional checks and balances. This sounds great to me when the left wins, but not so much when the right does.
I don’t think the problem is the President. The problem is Congress. They’re not doing their job, and I don’t see a Parliament with the same group would… help.
Well, in Parliamentary systems the leader of the executive is the leader of the party in power, so there’s usually no fighting at all between the executive and the legislature.
Hold on, I’m working on parsing that triple-negative.
Wait, if you take all the negations out you get “Those pushing for a Trump Congress are resisting Trump.”
What.
Parsing error.
Yeah I know that, thought it obvious enough that I didn’t think it needed to be stated.
(This sounds more snarky than my intent. Picture a sad face at the end of the above sentence.)
At some point however we’re going to have to do it. A bicameral Presidential system doesn’t work with rigid party discipline. It’s just as easy to undergo Constitutional reform as it is to deprogram Fox viewers from a conspiracy laden world view devoid of facts. One or the other is going to need to happen if we want a functioning democracy.
This is true, but since we’re summoning Unicorns, get rid of FPTP as well. No more winner take all and hopefully less extremism where the opposition winning doesn’t turn into an existential threat.
The article explains why a Presidential system lends itself to authoritarianism. This long piece in Vox from a few years ago goes into greater detail.
(The late political scientist Jose Linz wrote a lot about Presidential systems, but I could only find books when looking for an essay of his.)
So McConnell and the Republicans would be in charge improves things… how? I could be misunderstanding the benefit here but Trump is a megalomaniac. The Republicans enable him to push their racist, sexist and corrupt agenda. Trump’s a piece of shit but he’d push clown sex as a policy if he thought it would get him what he wanted.
It wouldn’t. I’m saying under a parliamentary system with the same players we have now, we’d be even more fucked than we are now. At least now we have fixed election terms, and some chance to change the balance of power.
To be fair, it’s unlikely that Trump would have won a leadership contest in a parliamentary party, so it’s much more likely that we’d have someone like Ryan or Romney in the White House; which would be better in some ways but still ultimately horrible.
That’s sort of how we set up the system. Then they quickly amended the Constitution to let us vote for President.
Oh man, you should see the UK right now.
Good point, but it doesn’t (yet) seem to be an actual legislative fight, in that
Parliament has thus far backed May’s position and strategy.
There’s something of a survivor bias effect there though. The only strategies Her Majesty’s Government adopts are those which they know can get through Parliament. When this goes awry (as it nearly did this year), it usually causes a general election - the fights are rarely in the Commons directly (though we actually saw horsetrading on the floor of the Commons too, this year!).
I think I read this awhile ago, so I read again. A lot I already knew, about how we helped set-up other countries in a way that doesn’t match our government, for example. I don’t know. It’s been not a secret for years that there’s a disconnect between voters hating what congress is doing while at the same time giving high approval for their guy or woman. I don’t really see how the other options would improve anything. if the Republicans had it their way, they’d just introduce slavery again and take away women’s rights. It sounds like when one party has control there isn’t much that stops that in the other forms of government…
Or ask Australia’s Malcolm Turnbull how he’s enjoying being PM. Oh wait. He’s not. His own legislature-controllong party stabbed him in the back.
Depends on the country and the legal system. European countries are bound by the ECHR, which is a quasi-Bill of Rights, and is ultimately adjudicated by a supranational court. We’ve just seen in Italy the president rejecting the coalition government’s choice of finance minister. Germany has an extremely strict constitutional court. There are constraints on majoritarianism in most systems, they just work differently. Also I’m not really seeing the US system doing a great job preserving women’s rights at the moment.