Collective Conscious

Sul­li­van asks: “If the Brits can do this after a deeply divided elec­tion, why can’t Obama offer his own frick­ing plan to cut the debt over ten years?”

Answer: it’s all in the polit­i­cal struc­ture. The folks who run Britain’s gov­ern­ment depart­ments also sit in its Par­lia­ment, and the Prime Min­is­ter essen­tially has the author­ity to fire any of them from their Cab­i­net posts if they cross him on pol­icy. These posts are extremely valu­able to hold — they’re the path up the polit­i­cal lad­der — so party dis­ci­pline is extremely high.

Imag­ine the sit­u­a­tion if both Obama and Biden still sat in Con­gress, Joe Lieber­man ran the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity, Bar­bara Boxer ran the EPA, Blanche Lin­coln ran the USDA, etc.… and Obama could let any of them go from their  spe­cial appoint­ments at any time. You’d see a lot less infight­ing and pub­lic posi­tion­ing, and a lot more party-​​line votes on cleanly prene­go­ti­ated com­pro­mises that every­one can take credit for. Plus, when you have just one leg­isla­tive house and a bare major­ity require­ment, things run much more smoothly, pro­ce­du­rally speaking.

The US sys­tem has no cen­tral author­ity like the Prime Min­is­ter. The Pres­i­dent is a pow­er­ful fig­ure­head with a great deal of respon­si­bil­ity on the “get­ting things done once they’re already law” side of the equa­tion, but he sim­ply has very few cred­i­ble threats against the sit­ting Congress.

Now, this is all inten­tional. The Con­sti­tu­tion was writ­ten to utterly con­found the attempts of any per­son or group to get just about any­thing done in the US — hence not just two leg­isla­tive houses, but dif­fer­ent deter­mi­na­tions of rep­re­sen­ta­tion in each. Hence three co-​​independent branches. Hence the veto power, and the over­ride. The fil­i­buster, which devel­oped much later, only makes it that much worse. We are not meant to have a sin­gle uni­fied gov­ern­ment as the British do, and in times of cri­sis we find out why that can some­times be a bad thing.

(photo: ktyler­conk)