[hash872]

From an institutional engineering POV (warning- I am a grouchy old former political scientist), it would be interesting to come up with institutional solutions for some of the problems America is facing right now. Specifically I think I'd remove the Attorney General role from the President's authority and give it to Senate, to nominate & confirm exclusively. Let's say 51 votes to confirm and 55 votes to impeach. Even among presidential systems, the US cabinet is unusually presidential-centric. I'm not a big LatAm expert, but I think they typically separate the public prosecutor from the president's nomination capacity.

Of course I would strongly prefer to not be a presidential system at all. But if we're discussing post-Trump constitutional reforms that could plausibly pass, I think removing the Attorney General/DOJ from the president's purview and also placing some checks on the pardon power seem doable

[nabbed]

>Of course I would strongly prefer to not be a presidential system at all.

Having grown up in the US and having blinders on, I always thought all those parliamentary systems seemed unstable and sometimes comical. But now I see the value in it. Once a leader has demonstrated he is not up to the task, has grown out-of-touch, or has descended into madness, he can be replaced by his party, and if that didn't happen, a no-confidence vote could trigger an election. No guarantee either of those things would happen, but the option exists. The fixed four-year term idea now seems artificial and inflexible.

I suspect the current US leader and maybe even the previous US leader (maybe in his 4th year) would have suddenly found himself a back-bencher.

[rsynnott]

Also, the ‘leader’ in a parliamentary system is simply a lot less powerful. The executive is the cabinet, not the PM. The PM usually appoints it, but the ministers don’t get to fall back on ‘just following orders’; they are very much using their own authority. And again there’s always the threat of replacement of PM and re-alignment. Realistically, the threat is more important than the thing itself.

[acoustics]

I'm not sure if it's true that the leader is less powerful.

In many countries, it seems that the leader has near total control over candidate selection, and dissent is punished ruthlessly.

In the US, it's easier for a member of Congress to openly dissent against the President's agenda. This was a major thorn in the side for e.g. Joe Biden.

Some Republicans today fear dissenting (though of course, most are enthusiastically on board), but I'm not sure that it would be any different in a place like Canada or the UK.

[Marsymars]

> Having grown up in the US and having blinders on, I always thought all those parliamentary systems seemed unstable and sometimes comical.

There are so many different variables between countries, and plain luck, that it's tough to extrapolate too much, but this just jumped out a bit for me as a Canadian - the average Canadian PM term has historically been marginally longer than the average American Presidential time in office.

[dionian]

This would give congress much more power over the Executive branch. The justice department is run by the Executive branch. Congress's job is to legislate, not prosecute crimes. A president can be voted out or impeached if they do something bad.

[mindslight]

It's not like campaigning and running elections are terribly hard these days. The AG (and other heads of independent executive departments) should be each their own races voted on by the public. (Yes, this obviously requires repudiating this new innovative brain damage called sparkling autocracy theory^W^W^W unitary executive theory.)

We also need Ranked Pairs voting so we end this two party duopoly bullshit. Primaries can remain, but voters should be able to vote in all parties' primaries (rather than having to pick just one).

We also need some sort of recall mechanism, either periodic option to vote no confidence (twice a year when elections/primaries are already held?), or something triggered when signatures/polling get high enough.

Since I'm making my Christmas list, we also need to drastically neuter sovereign and qualified immunity - remove their applicability for any action not explicitly authorized by the legislature (and Constitution). No more general "agents of the government" who unilaterally act with impunity, with only narrow legal ways of recovering damages.

But part of the difficulty that has precipitated our current situation is the absolute gridlock in Congress for the past twenty+ years. That's what pushed more and more power into the executive and executive agencies. I don't know if Ranked Pairs would be enough to fix that with fresh blood, or we need more direct democracy (voters can override their sen/rep vote on a bill?), or what. Maybe triple the number of sen/reps from each district so that voters won't feel they're losing their experienced politicians if they vote out the worst of the three.

[insane_dreamer]

I believe that if Trumpism is overthrown (because that's probably what it will take) there will be considerable effort to change the rules and set up strong constraints on the executive branch that cannot just be worked around by blowing past the guardrails. Trump exposed how weak the balance of powers actually is and how much it relies on (somewhat) good actors.