Thinking out loud really.
Parliamentary systems are generally more stable and more populist-friendly than Presidential/Congressional systems.
Also, the US Judiciary is a clusterfuck. Alternately the strongest and weakest branch depending on how daring the chief executive is feeling at a given moment. As much as America needs a parliamentary system, it needs judicial reform to match.
Can you share where you got the populist-friendliness of parliamentary systems? Piqued my curosity
Probably depends on what you mean by populist.
- Enacts the popular-will of the people: sure, maybe
- Stuffed full of people who will lie to the people just to be popular: sure, maybe.
They do, it’s impeachment, it works about as well as a non-confidence vote.
it works about as well as a non-confidence vote
That doesn’t seem true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_defeated_by_votes_of_no_confidence
vs
Nixon resigning so he could get pardoned (that’s it).
Leader resigns before the vote, next leader takes over and nothing changes no new election happens. Trick is to resign before the vote.
There’s always ways out.
No confidence votes are a referendum that forces a new vote. Impeachment is done by representatives and kicks off a process that gets blocked by the senate and results in no change, ever.
It was ridiculously political (shocker) and a lot more complicated, but the simple explanation is that the case against Nixon was so solid that he preemptively resigned to save face and get a pardon.
So not a true impeachment but effectively the only successful one.
It still didn’t result in a conviction and removal from office whereas there have been dozens of successful no confidence votes that forced new elections
*in the USA
Other countries exist with that mechanism and have had successful impeachments.
It’s more that one side of the fence has so many more times that’s it’s been able to happen. How many leaders in impeachable countries have their been vs countries with a non-confidence vote instead?
Could just be different scales here.
It was legal (adjacent) action that resulted in removing a criminal from office.
The rest is just nitpicking.
A successful no confidence vote in the UK triggers an election at the earliest opportunity
And likewise a successful impeachment would be required for it to mean anything in the US.
Trump has been successfully impeached twice. Impeachment just doesn’t mean “removed from office” like everyone thought it did. Unfortunately the Supreme Court is who makes the decision about whether an impeached president is removed from office or not.
AFAIK, the only involvement SCOTUS has in a presidential impeachment is the chief justice presides over the hearing in the Senate. That’s the procedure that would remove the president from office.
Double checked to make sure I wasn’t making a fool of myself, and yeah, you’re actually completely correct.
Chief Justice presides over the hearing and the Senate votes on it. The House of Representatives is who presents articles of impeachment and if they reach a simple majority, then bam, you’re impeached right then and there. But a successful impeachment then goes to Senate to vote whether the official in question is guilty and should be removed from office.
Interestingly, according to this gov page I’m pulling the info from (which may or may not be accurate anymore these days, who knows) a total of 21 successful impeachments have been run in American history. Of those impeached, only 8 officials have been found guilty by the Senate and removed from office. All 8 of them were federal judges. 3 presidents have been impeached, but none were removed from office - Nixon isn’t on this list because he resigned and ran away once the impeachment process began but before it could finish. DJT is the only president in American history to manage to be impeached twice.
Anyway, point being, if the president has either the Senate or the Supreme Court Chief Justice in his pockets, he’s effectively immune to impeachment. With both in his pockets he’s so immune to it that it becomes a joke to him. You can impeach him as many times as you want all day long until the cows come home, but if no one in the Senate ever votes to convict then it means nothing more than a nasty footnote on his page in the history books. Or more likely these days it means you’ll be picked up off the streets by the Gestapo and the impeachment will be conveniently left out of historical records.
Party leader resigns and their next party leader takes over and nothing changes most time. A no confidence election doesn’t happen if they resign, there’s ways around it.
Even if they resign, a no-confidence vote can occur for the next prime minister. It’s just that everybody is placated for a bit.
Under most (all?) parliamentary systems, a simple majority is all that’s required to pass a no confidence vote.
And when the leader resigns before the non confidence vote is cast? What happens then?
generally it’s a no confidence vote in the government regardless of who’s leading it
Impeachment is the US legislative form of this, but it almost never happens because getting the two party system to engage it in both the house and senate is too high of a task.
That being said, be careful what you wish for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-confidence_motion_against_Imran_Khan
Parliamentary can be better, but there’s always the chance it backfires and it becomes a massive bribery scheme, which would be even worse in the US because lobbying in the US is legal. You’d just end up in a situation where highest bidder can change between parties on a whim with reduced repercussion from voters.
All they really need to do is reset the senate into proportional representation with a constitutional amendment because state’s rights stopped existing decades ago, especially after SCOTUS torpedoed basically all the individual rights asserted by previous cases, including limits on lobbying.
Resetting the senate into proportional representation isn’t enough. It will still not fix the two-party issue. You’d need a senate that’s fully proportional, not just a bunch of first-to-the-post races.
It needs to be setup in a way that if 5% of all voters across the whole US vote for party X, then party X should have 5% of the seats in the senate, regardless of whether that party won a single state or not.
The problem right now is that the first-to-the-post system punishes vote splitting.
Say there’s three parties on an imaginary spectrum (purposely avoiding the labels left and right here). The spectrum goes fro 0 to 1, with 0 and 1 being extreme positions. Party A is at 0.2, Party B is at 0.6 and Party C is at 0.9.
Party B and C are very popular, party A is tiny.
Our imaginary voter is at 0.1 of that spectrum. So they would really like Party A to win. They don’t really want party B to win, but they would absolutely hate it if party C wins.
But if they vote for A, that vote is lost because A has no chance of winning, thus their vote for A causes and advantage for C to win, compared to the voter voting for B.
In fact, if 60% of the voters split their votes equally among A and B, and the rest votes for C, C will win, even though a majority would be against this.
Germany has a quite good system. They have first-to-the-post direct mandates to make sure there’s direct representation of constituencies. And then there’s a pool of list mandates that are filled on-demand to make up for the difference between the direct mandates and the national proportional vote.
That would mean if our hypothetical party won 5% of the votes but no state, they would have no direct mandates in the senate but would get enough list mandates so that 5% of all seats would be filled with their representatives.
This would allow coalitions which in turn increase voter choice, representation and compromise.
