5 ms·

>Seriously, name 1 check/balance that's actually particularly good! The person in charge with executing the law is different from the people in charge of craft

>Seriously, name 1 check/balance that's actually particularly good! The person in charge with executing the law is different from the people in charge of crafting the laws to be executed.

mamon 6y ago
Exactly! And the best thing is that, unlike most European countries, executive and legislative branches are actually elected in separate elections. European system with Prime Minister being elected by Parliament is pathological, because it does not provide full separation.
- angry_octet 6y ago
  Hello deadlock! Come on down!
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > Hello deadlock! Come on down! Deadlock is not the worst thing, and the solution to it is not necessarily to remove as many locks as possible. The actual problem in the US right now is that checks and balances are strong enough to allow one party to block things, but not strong enough to deter waiting until your party stochastically has enough power to get things done. This is exacerbated by having one party's ideologically committed to having the government do less. In previous decades, stuff like earmarks greased the wheels enough to get things done (but an effective PR campaign against them got them banned). You could also fix deadlocks by strengthening the checks to force compromise among factions, like by coupling automatically expiring legislation with requirements for big super-majorities.
    - angry_octet 6y ago
      I think we know that Mitch would have blocked every Biden appointment if the Dems hadn't won Georgia. Waiting 2/4/6/8 years to resolve a deadlock isn't a great idea. The checks and balances in the Senate were ignored by Mitch to get things done, rather than compromise. Since Congress makes its own rules, and 51/49 is enough to change a rule ('the nuclear option'), supermajority would have to be a constitutional amendment... And then 45% would be enough to halt government. I guarantee you this would then happen regularly. Other systems have mechanisms to force elections if deadlocks are persistent. Of course, you also need mandatory voting, PTO for voting, full franchise, etc and that isn't going to happen in America while this Supreme Court lasts.
      - ardy42 6y ago
        > Since Congress makes its own rules, and 51/49 is enough to change a rule ('the nuclear option'), supermajority would have to be a constitutional amendment... And then 45% would be enough to halt government. I guarantee you this would then happen regularly. That was the problem with the Senate's supermajoriy requirements: basically the only thing holding them in place was convention, so they fall in the face of someone willing and able to make unsentimental tactical power plays. IMHO, someone like McConnell would have behaved very differently if he knew his opponents could block him just as easily as he has blocked them. His apparent effectiveness is almost entirely a result of his greater willingness to hypocritically use then discard convention when it gets in his way. He'd never have gotten his tax cuts or judges if he wasn't able to bend the rules. > Other systems have mechanisms to force elections if deadlocks are persistent. I think something like that could be a genuine improvement.
emn13 6y ago
I don't believe this helps, at all. If anything it makes things worse, because it lets congress off the hook, and that's exactly what happens in the US - lots of congressional powers are abrogated to the executive, which is essentially a monarchy that hasn't devolved into a dictatorship simply because of tradition and popular unease at that route - but it's really unsafe. The real protection here is that a simple majority can't throw out the minorities voice entirely. But that doesn't require the separation of the executive to achieve, it merely requires either a supermajority, and/or a differently composed senate (which doesn't need to be unrepresentative either, the differing election schedule would suffice, and it doesn't even need a veto - an election-cycle delay would be enough). Incidentally, from memory, all sliding-into-dictatorship democracies I can think of did so behind a strong "executive". Empirically at least that would suggest that simply not having such a strong executive sounds like a sound protection against despotism. Intuitively, that would suggest that it's pretty hard to rally a country behind a dictatorship that originates in congress; a powerful figurehead matters. Finally, I'm not really sure to what extent a constitution really can or should protect against popular despotism - at best it can delay the process; but part of the point of democracy is self-rule; and taking away that rule to avoid despotism also takes it away for other reform - and it's not really going to work anyhow, because if enough people want to dump the laws, they will, even if the letter of the law begs to differ.
- artificialLimbs 6y ago
  > the executive ... hasn't devolved into a dictatorship simply because of tradition and popular unease at that route > I'm not really sure to what extent a constitution really can or should protect against popular despotism Article II Section 1 of the Constitution?
  - emn13 6y ago
    I was trying to get across the point that democratic freedoms necessarily imply the freedom to make mistakes; at best you can slow them down and make em less likely by historical happenstance. And as pointed out, no legal document matters if enough popular sentiment opposes it; people just throw it out (it's happened in other countries before). So perhaps this benchmark is too high a bar.

>Seriously, name 1 check/balance that's actually particularly good! The person in charge with executing the law is different from the people in charge of crafting the laws to be executed.

mamon 6y ago

Exactly! And the best thing is that, unlike most European countries, executive and legislative branches are actually elected in separate elections. European system with Prime Minister being elected by Parliament is pathological, because it does not provide full separation.

angry_octet 6y ago
Hello deadlock! Come on down!
- ardy42 6y ago
  > Hello deadlock! Come on down! Deadlock is not the worst thing, and the solution to it is not necessarily to remove as many locks as possible. The actual problem in the US right now is that checks and balances are strong enough to allow one party to block things, but not strong enough to deter waiting until your party stochastically has enough power to get things done. This is exacerbated by having one party's ideologically committed to having the government do less. In previous decades, stuff like earmarks greased the wheels enough to get things done (but an effective PR campaign against them got them banned). You could also fix deadlocks by strengthening the checks to force compromise among factions, like by coupling automatically expiring legislation with requirements for big super-majorities.
  - angry_octet 6y ago
    I think we know that Mitch would have blocked every Biden appointment if the Dems hadn't won Georgia. Waiting 2/4/6/8 years to resolve a deadlock isn't a great idea. The checks and balances in the Senate were ignored by Mitch to get things done, rather than compromise. Since Congress makes its own rules, and 51/49 is enough to change a rule ('the nuclear option'), supermajority would have to be a constitutional amendment... And then 45% would be enough to halt government. I guarantee you this would then happen regularly. Other systems have mechanisms to force elections if deadlocks are persistent. Of course, you also need mandatory voting, PTO for voting, full franchise, etc and that isn't going to happen in America while this Supreme Court lasts.
    - ardy42 6y ago
      > Since Congress makes its own rules, and 51/49 is enough to change a rule ('the nuclear option'), supermajority would have to be a constitutional amendment... And then 45% would be enough to halt government. I guarantee you this would then happen regularly. That was the problem with the Senate's supermajoriy requirements: basically the only thing holding them in place was convention, so they fall in the face of someone willing and able to make unsentimental tactical power plays. IMHO, someone like McConnell would have behaved very differently if he knew his opponents could block him just as easily as he has blocked them. His apparent effectiveness is almost entirely a result of his greater willingness to hypocritically use then discard convention when it gets in his way. He'd never have gotten his tax cuts or judges if he wasn't able to bend the rules. > Other systems have mechanisms to force elections if deadlocks are persistent. I think something like that could be a genuine improvement.

emn13 6y ago

I don't believe this helps, at all. If anything it makes things worse, because it lets congress off the hook, and that's exactly what happens in the US - lots of congressional powers are abrogated to the executive, which is essentially a monarchy that hasn't devolved into a dictatorship simply because of tradition and popular unease at that route - but it's really unsafe. The real protection here is that a simple majority can't throw out the minorities voice entirely. But that doesn't require the separation of the executive to achieve, it merely requires either a supermajority, and/or a differently composed senate (which doesn't need to be unrepresentative either, the differing election schedule would suffice, and it doesn't even need a veto - an election-cycle delay would be enough). Incidentally, from memory, all sliding-into-dictatorship democracies I can think of did so behind a strong "executive". Empirically at least that would suggest that simply not having such a strong executive sounds like a sound protection against despotism. Intuitively, that would suggest that it's pretty hard to rally a country behind a dictatorship that originates in congress; a powerful figurehead matters. Finally, I'm not really sure to what extent a constitution really can or should protect against popular despotism - at best it can delay the process; but part of the point of democracy is self-rule; and taking away that rule to avoid despotism also takes it away for other reform - and it's not really going to work anyhow, because if enough people want to dump the laws, they will, even if the letter of the law begs to differ.

artificialLimbs 6y ago
> the executive ... hasn't devolved into a dictatorship simply because of tradition and popular unease at that route > I'm not really sure to what extent a constitution really can or should protect against popular despotism Article II Section 1 of the Constitution?
- emn13 6y ago
  I was trying to get across the point that democratic freedoms necessarily imply the freedom to make mistakes; at best you can slow them down and make em less likely by historical happenstance. And as pointed out, no legal document matters if enough popular sentiment opposes it; people just throw it out (it's happened in other countries before). So perhaps this benchmark is too high a bar.