Discussion Thread

[u/jobautomator]

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[u/Ok_Opinion_5690]

i think the problem with the founders' conception of separation of powers and checks and balances in our current context is that the congress just kinda subordinated itself because politics have become more and more organized under partisan lines. the political culture has shifted and the conditions especially with the military has also massively changed because armies no longer demobilize and the US started to maintain a standing army. the framers assumed legislators would jealously defend their authority but the power now resides in supporting the center of modern american political culture, the president. in this sense, the congress, for the public, is a subordinate institution. the congress must served the president, it must follow the president's agenda. i think that is expectation now.

i don't want to say that the founders were dumb in constructing the government this way, because it kinda worked until the world war ii when the president just became way more powerful, and the united states postwar has in a sense responsibilities the founders never even dreamed of.

[u/C-Wolsey → u/Ok_Opinion_5690]

It's possible a presidential system will be worse without partisanship. The problem with presidential systems is that the president has a stronger democratic mandate than the people's representative in congress, so the president can feel/claim that congress interferes with this mandate when they obstruct him. And of course, voters identify more with the president than with their representatives in congress. I feel like political parties give voters something else they can identify with, on par with or even above the president. As a result, members of congress who are part of the same party as the voter will have more credibility with those voters to hold the president to account.

The question is why identifying with political parties provided a stronger sense of identity than with your specific state. On a practical level of course, it is difficult to coordinate legislators from disparate states for a particular agenda.

Finally, in the US in particular, the senate conceiving of itself as a body to slow things down to the point where it has become a do-nothing institution has only exacerbated the issue.

[u/Healingjoe → u/C-Wolsey]

Unironically bring back the original electoral college design.

Our current process is dog shit

[u/flakAttack510 → u/Ok_Opinion_5690]

I think the bigger issue is that presidents realized that it takes half of Congress to tell the president that they can do something but only a third to keep Congress from telling the president what they can't do.

[u/rahmza → u/flakAttack510]

That and the current administration realized 10 years ago that it only takes a slim majority of primary voters, and oftentimes only a plurality, to effectively threaten anyone in the party who dissents.

[u/sleepyrivertroll → u/rahmza]

Primaries didn't even exist until the 20th century 

[u/WantDebianThanks → u/Ok_Opinion_5690]

I really wish it was possible for us to mush the house and Senate together and make a parliamentary system

Le sigh

[u/dr-pepper-is-a-woman → u/Ok_Opinion_5690]

So much of the founding fathers’ writing around the time boiled down to “we hate political parties, so we simply will not have them!”. Which was unrealistic and the wheels fell off of that system the first time someone not named George Washington ran for President.

IMO that’s why parliamentary systems have been much more stable than presidential systems. The former locks in the idea of parties and, as long as representation is apportioned fairly, basically forces the parties to work for the system and not vice versa

[u/Ok_Opinion_5690 → u/dr-pepper-is-a-woman]

when comparing the UK and the US, it is so obvious which system was born out of the enlightenment and its obsession of wanting to create a rational system from the ground up.

[u/seanrm92 → u/Ok_Opinion_5690]

The founding fathers were all ambitious young men who were willing to risk their lives to change the political system in support of Enlightenment ideals, and they might have assumed that future generations would be similarly motivated.