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PT6A posted:It'd be nice to have more direct democratic control of the cabinet, rather than simply putting every policy question to a referendum or trusting the executive to put together a cabinet. For example, imagine being able to vote for Biden, but also for a HHS secretary who's strongly in favour of Medicare For All. The disadvantages mostly come down to infighting within the Executive Branch. What happens when a Cabinet Secretary refuses to implement an Executive Order, for example? Though I've had a somewhat similar idea of splitting the Presidency into multiple positions; one would deal with foreign policy (and thus would appoint the Secretaries of Defense and State), and another would deal with domestic policy (and thus would appoint most of the other Cabinet Secretaries). The presidential veto and certain other powers (judicial appointments?) would either go to a third new position (a "tribune") or to the Vice President. Maybe there would also be a "rex sacer" would would retain the pomp and ceremony that currently surrounds the President but very little actual power. Probably there would still be infighting where domestic and foreign policy intersected, but there would at least be someone in charge of foreign policy who was elected based on foreign policy issues, as opposed to the current system, where Presidents are elected based on domestic policy despite actually having more power in the foreign policy realm. Obviously this would never happen, though; it's hard to see the necessary constitutional amendments passing unless there was so much consensus on substantive policy issues that it would be unnecessary. This is true of basically all serious US constitutional reforms. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Jun 17, 2020 |
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Jun 17, 2020 20:10
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DrSunshine posted:My preference would be to do away with the Executive Branch entirely. Why does the Executive need to be a co-equal branch of government? What do we really gain from it? In almost every sub-national, sub-state level government body, an elected board appoints and dismisses professional executives at their discretion. There should be a unicameral legislative body that appoints executives to carry out the peoples' will on a national scale. Under that system, the President would be nothing more than a kind of administrator that the legislature appoints to oversee the technocratic business of running a national bureaucracy. I think you would have to introduce proportional representation as well; otherwise the two-party system would still be entrenched, so there would be no need to form parliamentary coalitions, and thus no real constraints on the Speaker/Prime Minister barring an unlikely backbencher rebellion. (The UK does have multiple major parties without proportional representation, somehow, but the UK isn't exactly a positive model to point to at the moment). In the end, I think the real problems with America's form of government lie in things like the Electoral College, the Senate, and gerrymandering. It feels weird to talk about, e.g., direct democracy, when we don't even really have representative democracy! Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Jun 17, 2020 |
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Jun 17, 2020 20:46
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DrSunshine posted:Well yeah, of course. I've already mentioned it in my first post in this thread - what I envision would be a major step forward in democracy isn't necessarily direct democracy, but a more direct representative democracy. I'm on board with around half of these things. Some of them seem to contradict each other; if the legislature is "the supreme organ of the state," then are the "independently elected citizen oversight boards" merely advisory? Term limits for representatives are a terrible idea; they lead to a legislature full of inexperienced members who end up relying on staffers and/or lobbyists. And I'm not sure how the automatic constitutional changes would work either.
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Jun 18, 2020 00:32
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