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> Checks and balances essentially don't work in the US. The best bit is simply a decent judiciary, but that was mostly copied from the British. And even that is
by ardy42 6y ago
> Checks and balances essentially don't work in the US. The best bit is simply a decent judiciary, but that was mostly copied from the British. And even that is more poorly executed than elsewhere, due to the political nature of judicial appointees, and esp. due to the tradition of direct elections of some judges. I'd say it's arguably worse than the British model it was copied from, not because the Brits were psychic geniuses, but because of the not entirely unrelated fact that the UK model is much more open to reform; it's aged better because it's less crufty. When lead by a dangerously populist government that might be risk, of course, but so far even populists have turned out not to do too much consitutional harm - might differ in the future.
That risk has been realized. Aren't the parliamentary governments of Hungary and Poland falling into "democratic" authoritarianism?
I'm pretty sure the US system was mainly designed to prevent that kind of thing, and put up democratically-derived barriers against it. The Trump presidency would have been way worse without them. Trump has been very effective at keeping his party in line behind him (even to the anti-democratic extremes). The things you complain about are mainly tradeoffs of that design.
- emn13 6y agoRight, but how much of that is (a) coincidence, and much more critically, (B) US culture? The US works; and has excellent governance; that's not really in question (IMHO). The question is whether that's due to the constitution, or despite it. If the US were as uninterested in democracy and as accepting of an autocratic leadership as hungary (and as small as hungary) - do you think the constitution of the US would have made anything better?
- lazide 6y agoYou just saw the checks and balance function today - the sitting executive used every trick he could think of to keep himself in power. He was rejected by Congress (the other arm, who he does not control), and this was affirmed by the Judiciary (who he does not control because of the lifetime appointments and other history, despite appointing a number of people aligned with his party to it). In many countries he could have just insisted (or tell a crony he insists) and that would have been that.
- WalterBright 6y ago> the sitting executive used every trick he could think of to keep himself in power. I agree. The checks and balances worked as they were supposed to. Note that if there was evidence of widespread election fraud, the checks and balances on display here would (hopefully) provide a check on that.
- Isinlor 6y agoPolish constitution has plenty of checks and balances. For example we had fairly well functioning constitutional tribunal. The difference is political culture. Especially the judicial branch of USA withstood the attack from Trump beautifully, but they were no more or less protected than Polish courts are. Polish culture is compromised by the communist mindset.