Earlier quoted context omitted.
Government needs to be more Agile.
Government needs to be less.
Government needs to be for all the people, and not just for the 1% with wealth and power. Not more or less.
Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years
171–180 of 413 posts
Re: Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
To play devil's advocate: Some people argue that the difficulty of passing laws in the United States is "a feature not a bug" b/c it prevents the US from creating laws too quickly. You could argue the House of Lords did the same: by vetoing bills, it acted as a "speed bump" to laws that might cause too much change too quickly.
Just in case someone gets the wrong end of the stick, the UK isn’t getting rid of the House of Lords, just the hereditary members (of which there aren’t many).
But almost all the remainder are political appointees.
It's disappointing that they didn't replace the hereditary peers with some other non-politically-appointed folks. There is a very great need to have people in the House of Lords who are not beholden to any of the political parties.
I personally favour a lottery system where random people get given the opportunity to join the House of Lords for the rest of their working lives.
Re: Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years
#173When Wellington thrashed Bonaparte, As every child can tell, The House of Peers, throughout the war, Did nothing in particular, And did it very well; Yet Britain set the world ablaze In good King George's glorious days! (from Iolanthe by Gilbert and Sullivan) Gather a group of the most powerful people in the land; give them ermine robes and manifold privileges; require of them nothing other than that they meet regula…
To play devil's advocate: Some people argue that the difficulty of passing laws in the United States is "a feature not a bug" b/c it prevents the US from creating laws too quickly. You could argue the House of Lords did the same: by vetoing bills, it acted as a "speed bump" to laws that might cause too much change too quickly.
It's only a speed bump for progressive laws while the most reactionary garbage gets fast tracked with their approvals.
Re: Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
And for many years now, even the remaining minority of hereditary peers in the chamber are elected to that job, albeit not by the general public. My guess is that all those who are actually useful will get "grandfathered in" by this legislation making them life peers so that they can keep doing the exact same job. Many life peers (who are all entitled to be there) rarely attend, so it would be kinda silly if Lord Sno…
> My guess is that all those who are actually useful will get "grandfathered in" by this legislation making them life peers The government made a political deal with the hereditary peers-drop their fight against this bill, and in exchange the government will grant a subset of them life peerages But that political deal is just an informal extralegal “understanding”, it isn’t actually in the text of the bill-having the…
> The government made a political deal with the hereditary peers-drop their fight against this bill, and in exchange the government will grant a subset of them life peerages
Wouldn't a "deal" theoretically benefit both sides? That one doesn't offer the hereditary peers anything they don't already have.
Re: Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years
#175Polybius might have an interesting opinion on this. Generally mixed forms of government are supposed to be more stable. If you make everything purely democratic, the structure weakens a bit.
Democracy had pretty good PR in the 20th century, but having institutional counterweights is never a bad idea.
Re: Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's really no way around the possibility that whatever you've written down in your constitution will be ignored in the heat of the moment, or become degraded over time.
But you don't need to put the military under the direct command of the civilian president like US does, if parliament can take military action against the civilian president and civilian action against the military leader then they have ways to deal with both. American president is too powerful to deal with since he controls both the civilian and the military side.
This is the one argument left for monarchy; that the military in the UK (and technically Australia) swear loyatly to the monarch, not the Prime Minister. In the event of an obviously-lunatic elected official ordering the troops into civilian areas to "pacify" civilian populations, the monarch could (in theory) countermand that order.
Re: Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d go further. To bypass the deadlocked congress, obama used executive orders in new and expansive ways. That ratcheted things up. Now trump is using executive orders even MORE expansively, to do things that are patently undemocratic and unconstitutional (federalizing who can vote, ilegal tariffs). The kludges and hacks are causing a crumbling of democracy, not just mediocre law.
> To bypass the deadlocked congress, obama used executive orders in new and expansive ways. That ratcheted things up. While I agree - this has been an issue long before Obama. Any reasonable country should be able to decide on the legality of abortion through the normal political process - the public deliberates, they elect representatives, the representatives hammer out the fine print and pass legislation. But in th…
Because that requires compromise and Americans are raging absolutists that need immediate results.
In 1791, abolitionists tried to end slavery in the British Empire but couldn't get it passed by the House of Commons. Henry Dundas changed the bill so it would be phased-in. Existing slaves wouldn't be emancipated but their children would be. That bill did pass. Slavery naturally ended over the following decades until the much smaller slave population was bought by the government and freed in 1833.
In the USA, nobody budged until a Civil War happened and then the slaves were freed by force in the 1850s without monetary compensation. But that time, emancipation happened immediately after they got full power, there was no need to give money to racists, and no moral compromises were required.
Re: Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d go further. To bypass the deadlocked congress, obama used executive orders in new and expansive ways. That ratcheted things up. Now trump is using executive orders even MORE expansively, to do things that are patently undemocratic and unconstitutional (federalizing who can vote, ilegal tariffs). The kludges and hacks are causing a crumbling of democracy, not just mediocre law.
The problem here isn't the temptation to bypass a system intended to require consensus before action can be taken. That temptation is present with any system that provides any checks on autocratic tyranny. The problem is that something like executive orders are being used to bypass that system instead of being prevented from doing so.
The problem is that the US constitution was written before people realized that the natural consequence of that type of constitution is a two party system. You cannot have a viable third party in the long run because it will necessarily weaken one or the other existing party and that party will then absorb it.
So no you have a situation where the government can have split brain: some parts of the legislative branch can be party A and other parts can be party B and the president isn’t tied to either.
From what I understand when the US “brings democracy” to another country we set up a parliamentary system and that system is widely seen as better. You cannot form an ineffective government by definition, though you can have a non-functioning government that is trying to form a coalition. These types of systems tend to find center because forming a coalition always requires some level of compromise. Our system oscillates between three states: party A does what they want, party B does what they want, and split brain and president does what he wants because Congress has no will to keep him accountable.
What I would like to try is a combination of parliamentary system, approval voting, and possibly major legislation passed by randomly selecting a jury of citizens and showing the the pros and cons of a bill. If you cannot convince 1000 random citizens that we should go to war, maybe it’s not a good idea.
Re: Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years
#179When Wellington thrashed Bonaparte, As every child can tell, The House of Peers, throughout the war, Did nothing in particular, And did it very well; Yet Britain set the world ablaze In good King George's glorious days! (from Iolanthe by Gilbert and Sullivan) Gather a group of the most powerful people in the land; give them ermine robes and manifold privileges; require of them nothing other than that they meet regula…
The purpose of an assembly is to reflect the actual distribution of power in society, not what we'd like it to be.
If interest groups do not feel represented by the system, they will destroy it.
Re: Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
You probably know this - but in most jurisdictions in the US, including federal, charges have to be approved by a grand jury of your peers. There’s an old adage “a prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich”* implying that the grand jury is easily mislead - but in my anecdotal experience of serving on a grand jury - this isn’t really true. We definitely said no to overreaches. And you can also see this happening in high…
I'm getting a lot of downvotes for the comment you're responding to so will likely withdraw from this discussion. But to be clear, I deliberately talked of prosecutors threatening charges, not actual indictments. Conviction through plea-bargaining is almost exclusively a phenomenon in the US. It just doesn't feature in the normal process of public prosecution in countries like Ireland, the UK or Australia. Also as an…
that's not true - it's also common in Canada and Japan