tjelen
Member
- Joined
- Aug 23, 2013
- Messages
- 87
- Reaction score
- 18
- Location
- Nevada
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Libertarian - Left
After reading the Federalist Papers in school and many of them recently, I have realized that the government the Founders set out to create has been a failure compared to how governments in Europe function. The Founders wanted a country that had many political groups that had a say in the political system rather than the two we have. The two are basically five parties pretending to be two, but are really just the same parties with slight differences. All European governments have at least three political parties that have to build coalitions to run the legislative branch of government. It also surprised me that the politician say we are the best government in the world, even though the most copied governmental structure since 1989 is the French Fifth Republic.
My idea is to replicate to some extent the modern French government. We should also have the states create multi-member districts or use proportional representation on a party list vote to elect our House members. Both of these proposed changes will make us have to expand the size of the House because multi-member districts need to have three representatives. The French government has separation of powers like ours does, but some powers are divided differently. In France, the lower house of the legislative branch runs the daily functions of the government and is led by a Prime Minister. The President appoints the Prime Minister out of the majority of the lower house or the predominate ideology. The President then can't fire the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister must come from the predominant ideology because the lower house doesn't have to accept the Prime Minister if the appointee can't gain a majority. The President and Prime Minister then work together to build the rest of the cabinet. I know this sound very foreign, but any change in elector procedures, whether it be proportional representation, multi-member districts or both, we would need to have the House of Representative run the day to day functions to give them incentive to work with each other and the President to keep the government functioning. This prevents the current intransigence of the House because the government on the whole wouldn't work without some cooperation with the President.
In this system, the President will still have veto power, but can't dissolve the cabinet and House on his own. The House could dissolve itself if the leadership lost the confidence of the majority of the House as a whole. The President would also have the ability to propose legislation directly. The Senate would also lose the ability to stop cabinet appointments because this would become the House's problem. It should also be ingrained in the Constitution that the Senate only pass bills on a simple majority and also make a majority in the House 55% as a compromise. Also the election date would need to be allowed to float for the House because the majority could collapse before the next election. In this system, the House term would have to be extended to a maximum of four years. I propose that we move the elections to Saturday.The term of the President would remain fixed and the election date would remain the same, other than moving the election date to a Saturday in November instead of Tuesday. Also in these proposed changes, only Article 1 and 2 need to be changed, the rest of the Constitution will remain untouched.
I know that most conservative won't like any changes to the Constitution, but the Founders envisioned a county and our current state isn't what was envisioned. We should change the Constitution to reflect what they Founders wanted, even if we have to model our government after a republic in Europe. We may have done many innovative things in the 1790's, be we need to look at what the rest of the world has done to innovate and make a more representative government. Just because we were the first true republic since Rome founded by some of the best political minds of the time, doesn't mean that we shouldn't change to become more democratic and stable like the governments in France and Poland.
My idea is to replicate to some extent the modern French government. We should also have the states create multi-member districts or use proportional representation on a party list vote to elect our House members. Both of these proposed changes will make us have to expand the size of the House because multi-member districts need to have three representatives. The French government has separation of powers like ours does, but some powers are divided differently. In France, the lower house of the legislative branch runs the daily functions of the government and is led by a Prime Minister. The President appoints the Prime Minister out of the majority of the lower house or the predominate ideology. The President then can't fire the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister must come from the predominant ideology because the lower house doesn't have to accept the Prime Minister if the appointee can't gain a majority. The President and Prime Minister then work together to build the rest of the cabinet. I know this sound very foreign, but any change in elector procedures, whether it be proportional representation, multi-member districts or both, we would need to have the House of Representative run the day to day functions to give them incentive to work with each other and the President to keep the government functioning. This prevents the current intransigence of the House because the government on the whole wouldn't work without some cooperation with the President.
In this system, the President will still have veto power, but can't dissolve the cabinet and House on his own. The House could dissolve itself if the leadership lost the confidence of the majority of the House as a whole. The President would also have the ability to propose legislation directly. The Senate would also lose the ability to stop cabinet appointments because this would become the House's problem. It should also be ingrained in the Constitution that the Senate only pass bills on a simple majority and also make a majority in the House 55% as a compromise. Also the election date would need to be allowed to float for the House because the majority could collapse before the next election. In this system, the House term would have to be extended to a maximum of four years. I propose that we move the elections to Saturday.The term of the President would remain fixed and the election date would remain the same, other than moving the election date to a Saturday in November instead of Tuesday. Also in these proposed changes, only Article 1 and 2 need to be changed, the rest of the Constitution will remain untouched.
I know that most conservative won't like any changes to the Constitution, but the Founders envisioned a county and our current state isn't what was envisioned. We should change the Constitution to reflect what they Founders wanted, even if we have to model our government after a republic in Europe. We may have done many innovative things in the 1790's, be we need to look at what the rest of the world has done to innovate and make a more representative government. Just because we were the first true republic since Rome founded by some of the best political minds of the time, doesn't mean that we shouldn't change to become more democratic and stable like the governments in France and Poland.