How open to compromise are you?

[stevil]

Gerrymandering has nothing to do with the electoral (college) system. "Alternative slates of electors" are not actually legal and criminal charges related to them are likely to happen eventually.

If your votes go by popular vote and not by electorates, it doesn't matter how much gerrymandering is done. Each vote counts exactly the same as any other vote.

The 2ne amendment isn't the problem.

Yes it is a problem. Get rid of it.

I thought you were letting us keep our constitution. The so-called "mid-term" elections are just Congressional elections that take place at the midpoint of a presidential term. (Frankly, I don't like the term.) One-third of the Senate and all of the House are elected every 2 years. "Mid-term" elections can't be done away with without some radical restructuring of the legislature of the United States.

Do your vote once, get your leaders in place let them have a whole term to implement their policies, not just half a term and then get blocked.

Parties can change their leaders anytime they want, and the often do. Most party leaders are relatively unknown. I forget who the Democrats' leader is right now. (The Republicans' leader is Ronna something or other.)

Nope. They couldn't get rid of D Trump. They needed to go through a impeachment and Senate vote. The Republican party alone, behind closed doors should have been able to throw out Trump.

O good grief, no. I thought you thought the US Constitution was "kind of ok". Now you want to rip out the first two sections and replace it with some wretched parlimentary system?

Why would anyone want to have a 4 to 8 year dictator?
If you guys focus on party and policy then you get rid of this nonsense of having a Trump DOJ or a Biden DOJ, or having a Trump border policy or a Biden border policy. Or having a single person with the power to Pardon anyone.

The main focus should be on the policies, the party should be able to oust their leader especially if they have been acting disgracefully, illegally or just getting in the way of implementing policies. Let them have a no confidence vote.

I'm not sure how fragmenting parties helps prevent the election of extremists. MTG comes from a pretty conservative district, she's likely to get elected anyway. Boebert almost lost election anyway in a 2-party system.

These guys will be relegated to fringe parties and if they don't get 5% of the vote they will have no power at all, no seat at the table. Unless of course USA has significant amounts of people that like what they stand for. If so, they you get what you deserve.

 

[Hans Blaster]

If your votes go by popular vote and not by electorates, it doesn't matter how much gerrymandering is done. Each vote counts exactly the same as any other vote.

I guess that part was unclear in your text. I misunderstood. If you'd said "elect the president with a nationwide direct vote" I would have got your gist. (Though, under the current system, gerrymandering doesn't have anything to do with the presidency")

I am absolutely for a direct election of the President by the whole of the nation and have been for 25 years. (I'd even go for some sort of instant runoff, or even an actual runoff.)

Yes it is a problem. Get rid of it.

I'm going to not expand on the 2A. It could derail our sub-discussion.

Do your vote once, get your leaders in place let them have a whole term to implement their policies, not just half a term and then get blocked.

The House does serve their full terms with out interruption. To do what you seem to be implying would require changing the terms of at least two of the three elected components of the US federal government. As designed, they are elected to 2 year (House), 4 year (President), and 6 year (Senate) terms, with the full House elected all at the same time along with 1/3 of the Senate. Sure you could change all to 4 year terms that begin and end at the same time but that would eliminate the frequent elections to the House and the staggering of seats in the Senate. It would be very odd to Americans to go 4 full years without any elections that impact the national government.

(I will add here that mucking up the President's agenda by electing the opposite party to the House after two years is an American tradition. It's an alternative to running another presidential election so soon.)

Nope. They couldn't get rid of D Trump. They needed to go through a impeachment and Senate vote. The Republican party alone, behind closed doors should have been able to throw out Trump.

Oh, you want to use "big executive honcho" as the "leader of the party". I can work in that realm...

But the Republicans *didn't* want to remove Trump, so they didn't. Recall that after the 2016 elections that the Republicans had full control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency? They didn't try to remove him for the next two years. It was only after the Democrats gained control of the House (and only the House) that an impeachment (for malfeasance) was possible.

Now I'm sure you with a PM, replacing them for poor performance has less negative political impact at the next election than an impeachment which implies wrong doing, surely there is some consequence to saying "oops, our old leader was bad at leading, will you trust our new choice?"

This really gets down to the brass tacks. Trump wasn't selected to run the executive by the Republican Party. He was selected by the whole electorate (through that goofy electoral college thing). And he certainly wasn't selected by the members of Congress.

If the President can be replaced on the whim of a party leadership election, what's the point of electing him separately in the first place?

Why would anyone want to have a 4 to 8 year dictator?

The President isn't a dictator, for any term. That's what the Constitutional constraints on executive power are for. He's just hard to remove. (Making him hard to remove also keeps him from being "the creature" of the Congress and their unchecked rule.)

If you guys focus on party and policy then you get rid of this nonsense of having a Trump DOJ or a Biden DOJ, or having a Trump border policy or a Biden border policy.

XXX DOJ is (frankly) bad language and I wish the media would stop using it. The DOJ has some traditional independence in its actions and legal protections of investigations. The border policy in detail is run by the President's selected cabinet secretary for the appropriate department (the ill-named "Homeland Security"), and has some leeway where to apply stricter enforcement, or laxity, or where to deploy resources, but laws written by Congress control the vast majority of things there and elsewhere in government.

Or having a single person with the power to Pardon anyone.

Blame Hamilton. That was his bad idea.

The main focus should be on the policies, the party should be able to oust their leader especially if they have been acting disgracefully, illegally or just getting in the way of implementing policies. Let them have a no confidence vote.

Ahh, just the new-fangled Westminster system then. No thanks.

These guys will be relegated to fringe parties and if they don't get 5% of the vote they will have no power at all, no seat at the table. Unless of course USA has significant amounts of people that like what they stand for. If so, they you get what you deserve.

Neither Ms. Boebert, nor Mrs. Greene are fringe enough to be relegated to a sub-5% party. Their wing of the GOP probably constitutes about 20-25% of the full electorate. But that is enough to win election in some districts. Not sure how fragmenting the parties would change that and no one can win a seat with 5% anyway so that value is moot.

 

[stevil]

I guess that part was unclear in your text. I misunderstood. If you'd said "elect the president with a nationwide direct vote" I would have got your gist. (Though, under the current system, gerrymandering doesn't have anything to do with the presidency")

USA does have a huge gerrymandering problem. How does that come into play? Why does it not impact the Presidential election?

The House does serve their full terms with out interruption. To do what you seem to be implying would require changing the terms of at least two of the three elected components of the US federal government. As designed, they are elected to 2 year (House), 4 year (President), and 6 year (Senate) terms, with the full House elected all at the same time along with 1/3 of the Senate. Sure you could change all to 4 year terms that begin and end at the same time but that would eliminate the frequent elections to the House and the staggering of seats in the Senate. It would be very odd to Americans to go 4 full years without any elections that impact the national government.

All this stuff is just nonsense and keeps the citizens politically charged at least half the time, assuming the run up to elections goes for a year.
Vote a party in, give them a decent amount of time for their policies to be implemented, run for a bit and results to be realised. Then have another vote 4 years later based on the results.
1. Gives them enough time for their policies to bare fruit
2. Allows the people to relax about which party they want in control
3. Avoids gridlock which is not good for anyone.

Also get rid of the primaries. Allow Parties to choose their own leaders.
The problem I see with the Primaries is that citizens then register themselves as Democrats or Republicans well before the presidential election. These people then imagine to themselves that they are part of the party, and then for those people, you are not really going to get much change in opinion during the campaign season. It's best (IMHO) if the citizens don't affiliate with parties and instead consider that each party needs to woo them with favourable policies. This might help to remove the party polarisation problem USA has. It seems many of the people on the right absolutely hate people on the left and would rather have a criminal as their leader then a Democrat, it almost seems as if some would rather do away with elections rather than have even the possibility of a Democrat in control.

(I will add here that mucking up the President's agenda by electing the opposite party to the House after two years is an American tradition. It's an alternative to running another presidential election so soon.)

You'd be better off having a full election. It makes no sense at all, wanting gridlock. Stagnating and getting nothing done. It seems spiteful, cutting off one's own nose to spite the face.
Spite is a form of hate and this just builds up the great political divide you guys have going on in your country.

Oh, you want to use "big executive honcho" as the "leader of the party". I can work in that realm...

Remember, I'm not from USA, I am not expert on your system. Thanks for giving me some grace and trying to work out what I mean rather than being stoic on terms etc..

But the Republicans *didn't* want to remove Trump, so they didn't.

Things might have been different if they could just have some secret meetings within the party, get the numbers and oust Trump.
It feels like to me they were held hostage, they had no real options open to them, either praise and defend Trump or be thrown out of positions and have Trump tell his MAGA faithful to vote them out.

Recall that after the 2016 elections that the Republicans had full control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency? They didn't try to remove him for the next two years. It was only after the Democrats gained control of the House (and only the House) that an impeachment (for malfeasance) was possible.

Yip, they were weak, but the system makes it super hard for them. They can't just oust him alone. They can't complain that his antics are getting in the way of implementing policies. To oust him, they would need Democrats to vote with them. And one would think it is a great thing for the Democrats if their opposing party's leader is not implementing policies.

But when Trump started acting unethical or potentially criminal, then the Democrats were onboard with impeachment, but the long drawn out process made it hard for the Republicans as well. Anyway, I think it is too hard for the party to remove their leader. It should be easier. The country should vote for a party and its policies, rather than for a person.

Now I'm sure you with a PM, replacing them for poor performance has less negative political impact at the next election than an impeachment which implies wrong doing, surely there is some consequence to saying "oops, our old leader was bad at leading, will you trust our new choice?"

Its a good way to go.
Parties get to decide their own leaders. They rarely oust their President or Prime Minister, but it allows them to do so. If they don't want to be defending criminal or unethical activity, they can just get rid of the leader. It allows the party to maintain integrity. At the moment the Republican Party look like a party that tolerates unethical, and illegal behaviour, tolerates attempts to steal the election, attempts to throw out legal and valid votes. attempts to extort foreign countries just to win USA elections. Personally even if I liked the Republican policies, I wouldn't be voting for this Republican party.

This really gets down to the brass tacks. Trump wasn't selected to run the executive by the Republican Party. He was selected by the whole electorate (through that goofy electoral college thing). And he certainly wasn't selected by the members of Congress.

If the President can be replaced on the whim of a party leadership election, what's the point of electing him separately in the first place?

Correct, people should vote for the party and policies, not the leader.
This whole thing about having a nationwide vote for just one person is nonsense. Gives that one person way too much power and makes it really hard to remove them.

The President isn't a dictator, for any term. That's what the Constitutional constraints on executive power are for. He's just hard to remove. (Making him hard to remove also keeps him from being "the creature" of the Congress and their unchecked rule.)

Sure, there are some checks and balances.
The whole impeachment thing seems a total waste of time and money. The Special Council investigations and the powers of other branches to investigate and subpoena are pretty much useless and a waste of time and money, especially when the legal system refuses to indict a sitting president, and when the party of the president refuses to remove him from office.
The only check on him is the court system and their are cracks in that at the moment e.g. Cannon and Thomas

XXX DOJ is (frankly) bad language and I wish the media would stop using it. The DOJ has some traditional independence in its actions and legal protections of investigations. The border policy in detail is run by the President's selected cabinet secretary for the appropriate department (the ill-named "Homeland Security"), and has some leeway where to apply stricter enforcement, or laxity, or where to deploy resources, but laws written by Congress control the vast majority of things there and elsewhere in government.

Well, when you vote in a single person (a president) and he has control over who is his Attorney General, then everything looks like the president's.
The president's AG, the president's DOJ etc
Bill Barr was clearly running around trying to please D Trump. Now you have the right claiming that Garland is doing Biden's bidding (in a both sides argument)

Neither Ms. Boebert, nor Mrs. Greene are fringe enough to be relegated to a sub-5% party. Their wing of the GOP probably constitutes about 20-25% of the full electorate. But that is enough to win election in some districts. Not sure how fragmenting the parties would change that and no one can win a seat with 5% anyway so that value is moot.

Forget about the districts and electorates. These guys would need 5% of the national vote.

 

[Gregory Thompson]

That is the result of a two party system. It creates the illusion of a near 50 50 split amongst the population but in reality voters in each party have quite varied visions for our country and would preferably vote third party if that was a valid option. Until we can amend how our elections choose winners, we can’t reasonably expect change via third party votes in Congress.

Just to say, with an open party system like we have in Canada, parties that can secure 40% of the vote can often get a majority government.

So finding a working system that could still be called a democracy might be difficult.

 

[Hans Blaster]

This chain is getting long and difficult to respond in a single post, so I'll break up my answers topically a bit later, but first the answer to a simple question.

USA does have a huge gerrymandering problem. How does that come into play? Why does it not impact the Presidential election?

Gerrymandering is about the drawing of legislative districts to tilt the outcome of legislative elections and is most definitely a serious problem, but does not impact the presidential election. Presidential electors are selected on a winner take all basis in all but two states, so the subdivision of the state has no impact on the allocation of all of the states "electoral votes" to one presidential candidate or another. (The two states in question that apportion electoral votes with one per house district only allocate 5 total electors that way [out of 535 nationwide].) Some have proposed the "fix" of applying that method to all states to be more "proportional", but that wouldn't solve anything and would make things worse by allowing gerrymandering to distort the presidential election.

 

[USincognito]

(The two states in question that apportion electoral votes with one per house district only allocate 5 total electors that way [out of 535 nationwide].)

Worth noting that the at large electors for the Senators are a wash because Maine has gone Dem since 92 and Nebraska has gone Rep since 68.

 

[Hans Blaster]

This time I'll look at the items related to or related to the current structure of the US federal government. I'll leave the political and parliamentary aspects for later.

All this stuff is just nonsense and keeps the citizens politically charged at least half the time, assuming the run up to elections goes for a year.

Politics is essentially a continual process whether the elections are frequent or tediously long.

Vote a party in, give them a decent amount of time for their policies to be implemented, run for a bit and results to be realised. Then have another vote 4 years later based on the results.
1. Gives them enough time for their policies to bare fruit
2. Allows the people to relax about which party they want in control
3. Avoids gridlock which is not good for anyone.

There is nothing in the US Constitution that refers to parties *at all*. As for elected officials it only specifies their terms, powers, eligibility, etc.

The stuff you dismiss as "nonsense" is the carefully designed structure of the elected components of the US government. Three different ways of being selected. Three different sets of powers. Three different terms. Placing these three elements (House, Senate, President) in tension with each other is very intentional. No law can come into existence without the concurrence of all three.

The US Federal government was *designed* to prevent radical changes and fluctuations and to prevent accumulation of power by any party. (We could argue about how well that design achieves those goals, but these impediments to rapid change are design features nonetheless.)

Also get rid of the primaries. Allow Parties to choose their own leaders.

Before getting into the issues with primaries, we need to clarify on "party leaders" as you have referred we must clarify different kinds of leaders.

1. The party organizations have leaders selected by the organizing committees of the party membership. These are largely unknown but they control a lot of the direction and funding of the party mechanism. It is certainly one way to have power in a political movement/party without official elected office.

2.The "de facto leader" referred to as the "party leader" by the press (the item 1 leader has a formal title that is used as chair of the party's national committee). The president is usually considered the "de facto" leader of the party (he would be a weak president if the press thought some other member of their party was calling the shots). Similarly for the de facto leaders of the statewide parties.

3. The legislative leaders. Like in you paliamentary systems, the members of the party in the legislature select their leaders and usually have at least an informal choice before the election. (Though as we saw with the Speaker of the House election in January, the ratification of that pre-selection is occasionally fraught.) If the party wins the majority of the seats they will control the legislative chamber.

4. Executive leader. Unlike the parliamentary systems, this is *not* the legislative leader (and prohibited by law from being so). The elected executive holds this role for their party during the term, but the opposition party(s) have such once they have nominated a candidate (typically about 6 months before the election). Currently the Republican party doesn't have a national "executive leader" but they will in one year once they select one.

The problem I see with the Primaries is that citizens then register themselves as Democrats or Republicans well before the presidential election. These people then imagine to themselves that they are part of the party, and then for those people, you are not really going to get much change in opinion during the campaign season.

Party registration is only need to run for office or (in some states) participate in primaries. In many states (including mine) there is no requirement to be a member or registrant with a party to vote in their primary. (I am legally a non-aligned voter and I have cast primary ballots for president and other offices for both parties.) Some states restrict primary voting to those registered with the party, others do not. (Though in every state for each election you can only vote one parties primary ballot, even if you are free to choose a different party the next time.)

Are not the voters in most democracies (particularly ones with a limited group of major parties) nominally aligned with one party or another? ("I'm a Labour voter.", "I vote for "le Bloc", "I'm a Tory voter") even if the are not officially members of the party?

It's best (IMHO) if the citizens don't affiliate with parties and instead consider that each party needs to woo them with favourable policies. This might help to remove the party polarisation problem USA has.

That is highly doubtful. Partisan registration has been declining in recent years while polarization is rising. (I've become more partisan, but still after 30 years am not registered with a party.)

It seems many of the people on the right absolutely hate people on the left and would rather have a criminal as their leader then a Democrat, it almost seems as if some would rather do away with elections rather than have even the possibility of a Democrat in control.

They would and it's a problem. Imagine if a party receiving only 1/3 of the vote could seize power... (Daydreams in 90 years ago..)


As to primaries:

Primaries don't select leaders. They select candidates for office to run under the banner of a party. This may seem too fine a distinction, but it is important.

For most elected offices in the US at all levels (from president to town board), the candidates who choose to run are whittled down to a more manageable group by a public pre-selection process which is almost always a primary. Some are partisan primaries where candidates of each party are reduced to one per party and can be either open or closed to registered members, or non-partisan primaries where a couple (or few) candidates are chosen regardless of party (or in non-partisan races, absent party).

Primaries came about in the Progressive Era more than 100 years ago because the party bosses (the group of elected officials, moneymen, power brokers who ran the parties) weren't selecting the candidates the people wanted, so they *forced* the parties to give them a choice. (Other voting innovations of the time were the direct election of senators and women's sufferage.) The states that first implemented primaries are the ones that tended to have open primaries at least until the federal government forced open primaries on the ex-confederate states as part of a cure for their enduring civil rights violations.


The rest is your reconstruction of the American federal government into a parliamentary system. Perhaps I'll cover that later.

 

[Kale100]

Maine has gone Dem since 92

I think you mean Northern Massachusetts, e.g. everything south of Portland.

 

[mark46]

I think you mean Northern Massachusetts, e.g. everything south of Portland.

There have been 8 presidential elections since 1990.
Color the facts as you wish. There are few states that have been more reliably Democratic. Maine was Democratic in all 8 elections.

DEMOCRATS - 30 electoral votes
REPUBLICANS 2 - electoral votes (1 in 2016 and 1 in 2020)

 

[Kale100]

There have been 8 presidential elections since 1990.
Color the facts as you wish. There are few states that have been more reliably Democratic. Maine was Democratic in all 8 elections.

DEMOCRATS - 30 electoral votes
REPUBLICANS 2 - electoral votes (1 in 2016 and 1 in 2020)

You miss the point/joke, the people of Northern Maine (who are much more right leaning) often caricature-ize the Democratic leaning inhabitants of Southern Maine as a colonial extension of Massachusetts.

 

[USincognito]

I think you mean Northern Massachusetts, e.g. everything south of Portland.

As someone who had Great Migration ancestors who settled Northern Massachusetts in the early 1600s, up until my mom in the 30s, no, I don't

I mean Maine.