"Like salt in a soup, you sprinkle to taste."... Spoken like someone who hasn't watched our intrepid author *pour* a visible layer of salt on every hamburger he's ever eaten
One of the major drivers of centralization of power within the executive branch is the mass national election that provides the President with a democratic "mandate" to steal power from the other branches. That's one reason the rate of centralization has increased since the McGovern reforms. (Another reason is that subjecting the primaries to mob rule has drastically increased the demagoguery level successful presidential candidates need -- c.f. Trump & Obama.)
If you want decentralization, take away that mandate, take away the mob, cancel the election.
I'm not quite sure what your argument *is* here for corruption -- at least as compared to the current electoral college system and the concerns addressed in Federalist No. 68.
I don't think the electoral college is (or has been) corrupt, and I think the GEC is considerably less likely to be. Clearly, you think otherwise, but I don't want to simply imagine what your reasons might be and respond to those, because I would probably get your position wrong.
Since you pointed out there were pretty much no defenses of the current system, I'll reluctantly offer one. I'm not totally convinced by this, and I'd very much like for it to be wrong, but I'm more than half-convinced:
The current system fails in the least damaging way.
The people want to be the ones picking the President. If there're intermediate stages - the electoral college or anything else - choosing them will inevitably, in reality, become proxy votes for the Presidency. The state legislatures(!) became proxy votes for the Senate(!); with the Presidency more important than two Senate seats, it'll absolutely happen there too. Whichever office gets clobbered by being a proxy vote is going to suffer, because people will vote for it based on the Presidency not on local conditions. Again, we saw that with state legislatures in the 1800's.
So, given this reality, I sadly contend that the electoral college is the least damaging way. It's turned into a proxy popular vote, but anything would. At least this way, with the electors having no other duties, turning them into mere proxies doesn't harm anything outside the Presidency. Your idea would, I fear, turn gubernatorial races into proxy Presidential races, leaving us with a worse caliber of state governors in the bargain.
Breaking this iron law would require changing people's conceptions of the Presidency, or a republican government, in a very fundamental way. No, even more fundamentally than that phrase usually means: the Electoral College was already a proxy vote in 1800, before Jacksonian Democracy, let alone the New Deal growth in executive authority! South Carolina's state legislature did keep appointing electors through 1861 without their legislative elections becoming a second proxy vote, but then South Carolina had a stunted conception of republican government that we don't want to bring back.
Maybe we could break it by breaking the conception that people's vote will actually impact the Presidency? I'm remembering an idea someone (I forget who) proposed in the Constitutional Convention, where several Congressmen would be chosen at random to be the Electoral College. This (whether choosing from Congress, state legislatures, or anyone else) might keep the voting for them from being seen as a proxy race, because your individual Representative probably won't get tapped for the Electoral College. But then, it'd have a lot of other problems instead, such as random swings in political alignment based on who gets randomly chosen.
"On the other hand, maybe we don’t need to fear deadlock so much? The Twentieth Amendment exists. We know what to do if there’s no president-elect: the Speaker of the House resigns and becomes Acting President. Is that a disaster? Mayyyybe not."
Wouldn't this actually practically guarantee deadlock unless one party wins a supermajority of governors? If a deadlock means the Speaker becomes president, what incentive do governors of the Speaker's party have to compromise with the other party (or parties if there's actually more than two)? They can cause intentional deadlock, effectively win the presidency through the Speaker, and leave them as Acting President until the next election.
However, the governors can't dissolve the convention until they resolve their deadlock. They can't even physically leave, since the amendment demands they be "sequestered." If they are willing to spend four years of their lives sequestered in a deadlocked convention, they can probably pull this off, but I am skeptical that anyone ambitious enough to rise to the office of governor will be willing to be buried in a political black hole for four years, while their lieutenant governors are stuck running the actual state. Also, if Congress sequesters the governors the same way judges sequester juries (which I hope is what they would do), the governors also won't be allowed to see their families until they reach a decision. That's another strong motivator to reach some kind of decision.
Now that you mention it, though, I notice that the proposal gives the power to enforce the sequestration regulations to the House. Since the Speaker belongs to the House majority party, and is next in line to serve as President if the convention fails, it seems like it might be a bad idea to give the House majority party unilateral power to relax sequestration -- one of the key incentives for the governors to actually resolve their deadlock. Much as I love the House, perhaps it would be better to vest this power in the Senate... or, alternatively, take the Speaker out of the line of succession. (There have always been "officer of the United States" problems with succession to the Speaker anyway.)
Assuming sequestration is actually enforced, though, do you think that's strong enough incentive to assuage your concern?
"Now that you mention it, though, I notice that the proposal gives the power to enforce the sequestration regulations to the House. Since the Speaker belongs to the House majority party, and is next in line to serve as President if the convention fails, it seems like it might be a bad idea to give the House majority party unilateral power to relax sequestration -- one of the key incentives for the governors to actually resolve their deadlock. Much as I love the House, perhaps it would be better to vest this power in the Senate... or, alternatively, take the Speaker out of the line of succession."
Yes, the mention of the House being able to decide how to handle the governor convention was on my mind with the comment; the Speaker is the one who basically gets to decide it. There's nothing stopping them from setting the rules to let the governors all go home and do their governing while they nominally cast intentionally deadlocked votes every so often.
If we give the Senate the power to set the rules for the sequestering, that moves the issue away, but seems like it would result in the same issue half the time. I say this because if the Senate is controlled by the same party as the House, then they can just make the rules for the sequestering no rules at all, and have the same-party Speaker take office. It would only be when the Senate has a different party majority leader than the House that they'd have incentive to actually make the governors go and come up with a president.
In regards to removing Speaker of the House from the line of succession, that unfortunately only brings back the question of what happens if there is a deadlock and no President. (as a side note, I think the Speaker of the House shouldn't be third from the presidency anyway, and should be at the end of the line of succession; if the Speaker is of the opposite party of the President and both President and Vice President die, it'd be a ridiculously huge swing in partisan power)
I suppose one could try to overcome this by baking sequester requirements into the amendment itself, but that might be hard to do.
There is another thing in the article that I neglected to comment on before and want to do now:
"Of course, the single strongest argument for having Congress elect the President is that it’s so simple and obvious and the world has lots of experience with it. Nearly every other democracy you can think of has its legislative branch elect its chief executive! England! Hungary! Ireland! Canada! This list is too Anglocentric! Uh, Malta! India! Dammit!"
This is perhaps very nitpicky, but the chief *executive* in England and Canada is completely unelected, being the King/Queen. ALso, the chief executive of Ireland is popularly elected. That said, in those countries this role is largely ceremonial (particularly England/Canada), with the true power held by the prime minister.
One thing I have been thinking about is whether we actually need a President at all and could get by with just a congress or parliament. I am not aware of any democratic country that is ruled exclusively by a parliament, though. I initially thought of things like Japan, Canada, Australia, or Sweden, which have no President and put all power in parliament, but every "president-less" democracy I could think of is one that has a monarch, who therefore serves as the functional executive officer (albeit in all those cases, with no real power outside of at best an advisory role and the ability to get a lot of free money to live on). That said, even if they technically have a monarch in the role of President, their lack of any real power means they're functionally ruled entirely by the parliament. There are also countries that have a President with barely any power at all (like Ireland, as I understand it), but again they still have one, even if they really are a pure parliamentary system in terms of practice. Since countries with a powerless "president" can function, perhaps one could just cut that out and have no President? It would be a big step, but if countries can make do without a President or with a President that barely exists, it seems like it could work.
That said, the fact I've been unable to find any democratic country ruled purely by a parliament (without a President or monarch) does make me wonder if maybe there is some reason to have a "single ruler" of some kind, even if in a bunch of cases their main role is just to get paid a bunch of money and live in a palace.
Setting aside ruminations on whether one can get rid of the President, a much less extreme step would be to diminish their power. The problems involved in electing the President would be far less important if the President was less important. I think your suggested Constitutional amendment of weakening the veto power dramatically (https://decivitate.substack.com/p/geld-the-veto-some-constitutional-amendments-1) would be a less risky fix to the problems with the primaries, because even if it doesn't solve the issues of primaries directly, it at least makes them and the elections less important.
John Oliver is going through an effort of re-releasing old seasons of Last Week Tonight on YT and I was listening to them while mowing yesterday. The relevant one here (https://youtu.be/uRKIxgsi0pU?si=HnpPHpAhDX7VcUUp) was from 2015 and included a deep dive in to the Canadian Election Cycle. He glosses over it pretty early on but the general vibe is:
“Here are some goofy local ‘politicians’ and why their ability to win any election might actually matter. Canada’s PM is chosen based on the proportional seats parties get during local elections.”
He then goes on to only talk about the party leaders (and presumptive PMs) as if the local elections are really just proxy votes for these PM Candidates. Is this just Americanizing the story for his audience? Or do you think Canadians are really voting for ‘Hillbilly Jill’ because it gives their preferred PM a better shot at leadership?
In my experience it tends very much to be the case that people here are voting for a local candidate because they want the party leader to be Prime Minister. Independent candidates do win from time to time, but it is rare. (I'm reasonably certain that just the fact that Bernard Sanders has been elected as an independent to the US House or Senate since 1990, combined with Angus King's election to the Senate in 2012 as an independent and subsequent reelection, means that federal elections in the US over the last three decades have a higher rate of electing independent candidates than federal elections here do in the same timespan. On the other hand, the last time we had fewer than three political parties elect at least 12 MPs to the federal House of Commons was in 1958, and more elections than not after 1917 saw at least three parties reach that threshold.)
Our electoral system isn't proportional, it's first-past-the-post (just like the US and Oliver's own UK), and because of the confidence mechanism it's entirely possible for a party not winning a plurality of seats in a hung legislature to form government regardless. (It happened in BC after the 2017 provincial election and in Ontario after the 1985 provincial election, and it might have happened in 1972 at the federal level had the Liberals not ultimately received a narrow plurality. It might also have happened in 2009 at the federal level but Stephen Harper subverted constitutional conventions to prevent it.) I have an extremely lengthy rant about this elsewhere, but to try to make it shorter, it's not that Oliver is Americanising the story for his audience, it's that the traditional forms of a parliamentary system, particularly as regards the selection of party leader, have been replaced by forms more akin to those seen in the United States which do not work cleanly in the context of a parliamentary system and subvert its traditional mechanisms for checking power. (It is no coincidence that power began to be concentrated in the Prime Minister's Office here in the late 1960s under Pierre Trudeau at the same time as, or not long after, US Presidential nominating conventions started being televised widely, and as television became widely available, which many Canadians watched because Canada, from the standpoint of population distribution, is largely a long, thin rectangle along the southern border, and so can readily receive US broadcasts, which led to party leaders being selected by party members either directly or through conventions in order to have the same sort of spectacle, as opposed to the traditional means of selection by members of the parliamentary caucus, who had themselves been selected by local party members to stand for election and were victorious, which carried with it the threat of removal by that same caucus.)
So yes, in many cases Canadians are voting for "Hillbilly Jill" because she happens to be the candidate for the party whose leader that voter wants to be Prime Minister! (That said, there are voters who will look at the local partisan conditions in their riding, realise that their preferred party's candidate has no hope of winning, and even though they find any candidates who might win completely unpalatable from a policy and ideology standpoint will nonetheless vote for one of them--often the incumbent--because the person provides, or they think is likely to provide, good services to their constituents in the nonpartisan matters that MPs handle.) This also leads to outrage when MPs switch party affiliations--legally they may do so, of course, since it is the individual MP who has been elected to represent the riding, not the party or the leader--but since most voters base their vote primarily upon the party for which the candidate is standing, or who the leader of that party is, it leads voters in ridings where MPs do this to feel completely disenfranchised.
tl;dr Oliver is not Americanising for his audience; our system has been Americanised by popular demand and is vastly the worse for it. (The river of democracy, etc etc.)
Whoa! Thanks for the brilliant response! It sure feeeeeeeeels like this is a case study against moving to a “governor’s college” as proposed. They may be the least-bad-option now but only because they aren’t currently tied to choosing the president. As soon as that link is drawn it all goes out the window.
Also, that last comment you tossed in there is wild to me! For starters: “it is the individual MP who has been elected to represent the riding, not the party” I am shocked to learn it’s not more like the Speaker of the House which is always run by the leading party. If a candidate switched political parties after becoming Speaker of the House then the party in control would just kick them to the curb and start over with a new leader, not be stuck staring at an unloyal leader until the next elections come around… and then for seconds to learn that politicians switch parties with enough frequency that it’s even worth mentioning?! And not just some schmucky low-level politician but the PM?!? Yeah! I would say feeling disenfranchised by that is a completely reasonable reaction!
In the US it is also the local Representative (or Senator, or whatever term is used at the state level in your state) who is elected to represent the district, not the party! Party switches happen there, too; just in recent years politicians like Arlen Specter and Jeff Van Drew have switched party affiliation between the two major parties, while Jim Jeffords and Kyrsten Sinema decided to sit as an independent, and there has been constant talk about Joe Manchin deciding to sit as a Republican (and Angus King said he wasn't ruling out caucusing with them when he was asked about it in 2014). Even governors have switched parties from time to time, as Jim Justice did in West Virginia some years ago.
(If you recall, Jeffords's and Specter's affiliation changes were important, Jeffords's because he sat as an independent caucusing with the Democratic Party, which gave them the majority in the Senate for the first time since 1994, excepting a few weeks in early 2001 when Al Gore was still Vice President and broke the 50-50 tie, and Specter's because it gave the Democratic Party 60 votes in that body for a few months before Scott Brown's election to fill the vacancy left by Ted Kennedy's death, allowing them to pass legislation such as the Affordable Care Act without any votes from Republicans.)
Further, the Speaker of the US House doesn't always come from the majority party, or even the plurality party. In 1856, following the conclusion of all elections to the 234-seat House (Louisiana, Mississippi and Maryland didn't hold theirs until November 1855), the Democratic Party held 83 seats, the Whig Party 54 seats, the American Party (or the Know Nothings) 51 seats, with other various parties (including the nascent Republican Party) holding 46 seats between them. After 133 ballots spanning from December 3, 1855 to February 2, 1856 (yes, if you thought it took the House forever to elect Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson as Speaker, those were a breeze compared to this one!) it was Nathaniel Banks from the American Party who was ultimately selected, and that only once the House voted to elect the Speaker by plurality vote, rather than requiring an absolute majority. That said, what I don't know is how much control the Speaker had over the day-to-day operations of the House at the time, so I don't know how politically significant this really was. Later, Republican William Pennington would be elected Speaker after numerous ballots (though I am not sure how many) in 1860 when the Republican Party won a plurality, but not a majority, in the House. (The Republican Party also failed to win a plurality in the 1862-63 election, with the incumbent Speaker Galusha Grow losing reelection, but Schuyler Colfax was subsequently elected on the first ballot.) In 1923, with the Republican Party holding a thin majority of 225 seats of 435 in the House, it took nine ballots for Frederick Gillett to be elected Speaker, and then of course there was the 15-ballot election of Kevin McCarthy in January 2023 and the four-ballot election of Mike Johnson in October 2023.
I don't think a Prime Minister, at least in Canada, has ever switched parties. (I'd have to check whether a provincial premier ever has, at the provincial level.) Generally speaking, you aren't going to become party leader if you're thought of as someone who might switch parties. The closest example I can think of is Liberal Prime Minsters in the UK such as H. H. Asquith and David Lloyd George finding themselves in different factions of the splintered Liberal Party during the interwar years, while Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald served as Prime Minister in a Conservative-dominated coalition at the start of the Great Depression. (This led MacDonald to be reviled in Labour circles for decades afterward.) It does happen that provincial politicians who move to federal politics, or vice versa, will end up in a party with a different name, but this is because there is ideological disalignment between federal and provincial parties. The main examples that come to mind are BC New Democratic Premier Ujjal Dosanjh and Ontario New Democratic Premier Bob Rae both later serving as federal Liberal MPs (Rae served as interim federal Liberal leader for a time after the resignation of Michael Ignatieff and the election of Justin Trudeau). Quebec has seen a few examples of this as well (such as Thomas Mulcair, a federal New Democrat, and Jean Charest, a federal Progressive Conservative, both being Quebec Liberals, both of whom served in government in Quebec, Charest as Premier and Mulcair in Cabinet, both at some point serving as leader of their federal party, though Charest did so prior to serving provincially and Mulcair after), but this was at a time when Quebec politics was divided primarily between sovereigntist and federalist factions and the two major parties, the sovereigntist Parti Québécois and the federalist Liberals, were otherwise ideologically heterogeneous. The next-closest example that comes to mind is Pierre Trudeau, who admitted, as I recall, that his ideological views were closer to those of the New Democratic Party than the Liberal Party, but he chose to run as a Liberal since he felt (correctly, as events have proved, though the question of what might have happened in 2015 had Jack Layton not died of cancer in 2011 is one of the great what-ifs of the New Democrats) that the New Democratic Party had no possibility of forming government. There was, admittedly, Gordon Wilson in BC in the 1990s but that was at a time of significant realignment on the provincial centre-right.
(What I mentioned about 1972 is that it was a real possibility that the Progressive Conservatives could have won a plurality in that election, as ultimately the Liberals won 109 seats and the Progressive Conservatives 107 in the 264-member House. But the New Democrats won 31 seats and the Social Credit Party 15--there were also two independent candidates elected, one of which was a special case that I will address later--and David Lewis, the New Democratic leader, when asked on election night, ruled out supporting a Progressive Conservative minority even if they won a plurality. Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minister prior to the election, and thus could continue serving as such even if the Liberals did not receive a plurality, so long as he could form a government which commanded the confidence of the Commons, and the seat count meant that even if his Liberals had had a few less seats and the Progressive Conservatives a few more, the support of New Democratic MPs would have seen a Liberal government command majority support where a Progressive Conservative government could not. Later, however, after the Liberals deliberately lost a confidence vote to trigger an election by presenting a budget that Trudeau knew the New Democrats couldn't support, the Progressive Conservative leader Robert Stanfield--if you recognise the name, yes, he was the grandson of the founder of Stanfield's, which makes undergarments--was offered the opportunity to form a government, but he declined knowing that the New Democrats would not support him, and so Parliament was dissolved and an election held, in which the Liberals won a narrow majority.)
So it is usually regular MPs who switch parties, not leaders, but this has led to significant changes in the balance of power in the Commons. Notably Belinda Stronach, who was elected as a Conservative MP in 2004, chose to sit as a Liberal in 2005 which shored up the extremely thin working majority that Paul Martin's Liberal government had with the support of the New Democrats and, sometimes, independent MP Chuck Cadman (who had been a Conservative, lost a nominating contest but won reelection, and then notably voted for a New Democratic-demanded amendment to a Liberal budget because he felt it was in the best interests of his constituents rather than voting against it as a partisan matter had he still been a Conservative MP; it should be noted that the Conservatives supported the original budget, but the New Democrats demanded the amendment, which the Conservatives did not support, as the price of their support in future confidence votes. This also got entangled with the debate over the legalisation of same-sex marriage going on at the time but that's a discussion for another time, if ever). Stronach was, however, reelected as a Liberal candidate in 2006, and declined to stand for reelection in 2008, so her constituents might not have been all that angry about it. (It should be noted that Stronach won election in 2004 as a Conservative with a margin of less than one and a half percentage points over the Liberal Martha Hall Findlay, who did later serve for one Parliament representing a different riding, and was reelected with a margin of more than eight percentage points, though in 2008 the Conservative candidate Lois Brown won election by a margin of more than twelve percentage points over the Liberal candidate; since 2015 the Liberal candidate has won a narrow majority in each of the last three elections, so it is something of a swing riding.)
As for the Speaker, do keep in mind that the Speaker of the lower house in a Westminster system, at least, is a nonpartisan figure. In the UK, the Speaker and the Deputy Speakers by convention resign all party affiliations while serving as such. Going back to what I said about 1972, Lucien Lamoureux, who had been elected as member for Stormont and later Stormont-Dundas as a Liberal first in 1962 and then was chosen as Speaker in 1966 and continued to serve as such after the 1968 election, attempted to see Canada follow what was at the time the British practice of not standing candidates against the Speaker by running as an independent in 1968 and 1972; he did win reelection both times by substantial margins but the other parties (though not the Liberals, and not the Progressive Conservatives in 1968) nonetheless ran candidates against him, and no Speaker since has attempted to win reelection as an independent candidate.
In the UK this convention does still hold to an extent, in that the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democratic Parties do not stand candidates against the incumbent Speaker, though minor parties such as UKIP and the Greens have done so against both John Bercow and Lindsay Hoyle.
The Speaker has, however, in at least two notable instances come from the party not forming government. Peter Milliken, a Liberal MP first elected in 1988, ultimately was chosen as Speaker in 2001 in a secret ballot vote in a Liberal-majority House. (Previously the Speaker was typically chosen by the Prime Minister, but the rules were changed to make the election instead be by secret ballot using the Hare system.) He was later chosen as Speaker again in 2004, but then in the Conservative-plurality Houses elected following the 2006 and 2008 elections, he was again chosen as Speaker because MPs generally felt that his oversight of the House was extremely fair and impartial, and declined to stand for reelection in 2011. (His successor as Speaker, Andrew Scheer, on the other hand, later became Conservative House Leader and then party leader, which are among the most partisan positions one can hold.) As an addendum to this, because of the secret ballot vote, in 2019 Conservative MPs deliberately ranked Justin Trudeau's preferred candidate for Speaker, Geoff Regan (who had been Speaker in the previous Parliament), lower on their ballots in order to ensure that another candidate became Speaker, that ultimately being Anthony Rota. (If that name rings a bell, you may have heard of the scandal a while back where he invited a Ukrainian constituent of his to the Commons and honoured him for having fought against Russians in the Second World War, completely forgetting that this meant he was fighting on the side of the Nazis. We have always been at war with Eastasia, I guess.)
The other notable example occurred in BC after the 2017 election there. The Liberal Party (if you remember what I said about ideological disalignment, that party, now called BC United, is a centre-right coalition) won 43 seats, the New Democratic Party 41 and the Green Party 3, in the 87-member legislature. As the incumbent Premier, Christy Clark was entitled to attempt to form a government. She did so but the legislature, after electing a Liberal MLA as Speaker, voted no confidence in her government 44-42. She advised the Lieutenant governor that no party could form a government and requested a dissolution and another election, but New Democratic leader John Horgan, who had made a confidence-and-supply arrangement with the Greens had also made a deal with a Liberal MLA, Darryl Plecas, for Plecas to serve as Speaker, giving Horgan's New Democratic government a working 44-42 majority with Green support. The Liberals promptly kicked Plecas out of the party and he did not stand for reelection in 2020 when the New Democrats won a majority. (If a New Democratic MLA had been Speaker, then the legislature would otherwise have been tied 43-43. The Speaker of the lower house, or only house in a unicameral legislature such as in Canadian provinces, New Zealand, or some Australian states, in a Westminster system by law or strong convention never votes except to break ties, and then always in favour of the status quo or to prolong consideration of a bill. Hence the Speaker votes to pass legislation at first and second reading, and to defeat it or to remand it to committee at third reading, unless the vote is on a matter of confidence, in which case the Speaker votes in favour in order to preserve the status quo of the serving government. Clark felt, correctly, that a New Democratic MLA as Speaker in a tied legislature would have improperly compromised the impartiality of the position by demanding that they constantly vote with the New Democratic government in order to preserve the status quo, which is why Horgan made his arrangement with Plecas.)
As a further addendum to all of this, in Ireland, the Ceann Comhairle of Dáil Éireann, their title for the Speaker, is automatically reelected if they stand for reelection, but Ireland uses multi-member constituencies.
This is all an extraordinarily long-winded way of saying that there are very important differences that make the situations not exactly comparable. It is not that Prime Ministers switch parties; it is that individual MPs sometimes do and this can alter the balance of power in Parliament in a way that the constituents of that MP may find undesirable.
I would also add that I think, ultimately, the true issue underlying everything is the insistence that one person be elected to a given position. It is, quite simply, not possible for any one candidate to properly represent the ideological breadth of their area; in Canada at the federal level it is typically the case that around 50% of voters cast their vote for the candidate who is elected to represent their riding. (And as I've brought up before, remember the Bush-era "respect the President" vs "respect the office of the Presidency" argument?) If instead multiple members are elected to represent an area then the ideological diversity of it is far better represented. This is magnified to its greatest extreme when there is an insistence on selecting a single person to serve as chief executive for the entire country! And this is an issue in both presidential and parliamentary systems, of course, but the great advantage of a parliamentary system is that the choice of de facto chief executive (and this too is as opposed to a presidential system where the President is de jure chief executive) can be revisited at any time by ordinary procedure, whereas it is typically much more difficult to get rid of the chief executive in a presidential system. (And one need only look at the situation in Peru with the removal of Pedro Castillo and elevation of Dina Boluarte, and the subsequent massacres against pro-Castillo protesters which left 28 dead, to see what can happen if it is done.) It seems to me that Switzerland might have the right idea in having a collective seven-member chief executive in which, by convention, multiple parties are represented.
Edit: Once again I am far too long-winded for Substack.
Daniel's terrific and I'm endlessly pleased to see him leaving comments here.
(I've been neglectful of the other online space where we chat because I promised myself no more political arguments until I've got a Star Trek CCG deck ready for the July tournament in Sioux Falls.)
One note where I think you've become confused: Daniel was talking about MP's switching parties, not PM's -- that is, Members of Parliament, not Prime Ministers. Unless I'm much mistaken, a PM who abandoned his coalition would get chucked out much faster than a wayward House Speaker (unless the PM managed to convince a ton of MPs from his original party to go with him).
On the governor's college proposal: I couldn't agree more that there's a real risk of gubernatorial elections just becoming proxy presidential elections. My plan is that the great stature of the gubernatorial office (which carries MUCH more power and prestige and independent importance than MP for a small riding or state legislative position) will help shield them from becoming proxies. That is also why the proposal includes the express guarantee of gubernatorial freedom to vote, subjects them to congressional sequester, allows them to wield the secret ballot, and -- maybe the biggest of all -- time-shifts the election so that the presidential election is still two years away when they become designated electors. All these things SHOULD, I hope, greatly weaken the power the parties will have to try to turn governors' elections into presidential-elections-by-proxy.
But, as with all things constitutional, one can't be sure how it plays out until one tries.
Ah, and I see Daniel responded twice with long comments during the time it took me to type this short one. You can see why I love the man.
"One note where I think you've become confused: Daniel was talking about MP's switching parties, not PM's -- that is, Members of Parliament, not Prime Ministers. Unless I'm much mistaken, a PM who abandoned his coalition would get chucked out much faster than a wayward House Speaker (unless the PM managed to convince a ton of MPs from his original party to go with him)."
I already brought this up! It happened twice in the UK, both times in Conservative-dominated Houses with a Prime Minister from another party.
In the 1918 "coupon election" (so named because candidates who received the "coalition coupon" from the governing wartime coalition, which David Lloyd George at least wished to preserve in peace, won election in great numbers regardless of party affiliation) the Conservatives won an outright majority but the wartime coalition with at least part of the Liberal Party was retained, with Lloyd George continuing as Prime Minister. He would be replaced by Andrew Bonar Law (incidentally the only Prime Minister of the UK, to my knowledge, to be born outside the British Isles, having been born in New Brunswick when it was still a colony) not long after, however, and the other Liberal faction, led by H. H. Asquith, who had been Prime Minister before Lloyd George, did not join the coalition, at least in peacetime. (I am not entirely sure what the WWI coalition government looked like, particularly since it was in a House with a near-even split between the Liberals, with 272 seats, and the Conservatives, with 271, but from what I can tell the eventual final coalition saw Lloyd George as Prime Minister, supported primarily by Conservatives, and Asquith as Leader of the Opposition.) The Liberal Party would ultimately reunify under Asquith and later Lloyd George in the mid-1920s but would splinter again not long after.
That splintering would, in part, be caused by Asquith's decision to support a Labour minority government under Ramsay MacDonald after the 1923 election resulted in a hung Parliament. From what I've read, he did so because he wanted to put them in power to prove that they were incompetent and reestablish the Liberal Party as the natural alternative to the Conservatives; instead the Conservatives won a sweeping majority in 1924 due in part to the Zinoviev letter forgery, Labour won a plurality in 1929 under MacDonald, and then in 1931 the Conservatives again won a majority but the exigencies of the Depression had led to a multiparty coalition being formed with MacDonald at the head of a government formed by Conservatives along with splinter groups from Labour and the Liberals. This is why MacDonald, despite being Labour's first Prime Minister, was later, as I noted, reviled by Labour for decades. It was also potentially an example of monarchical interference in politics since reportedly MacDonald was George V's favourite Prime Minister.
Lloyd George's premiership with Conservative support led to the splintering and eventual irrelevance of the Liberal Party; neither that party nor its successors would be in government again until the Cameron-Clegg coalition formed after the 2010 election. (Which then itself made the Liberal Democrats electorally irrelevant all over again, except for possible vote-splitting, because with Conservatives and Liberal Democrats touting the same policies for five years, voters simply voted for Conservatives in 2015, giving them a majority while the Liberal Democrats, who won 57 seats in 2010 and had won 62 in 2005, and had hovered around 50 for the three elections prior, have not won more than 12 seats in any election since, though this may in part be due to the rise of the Scottish National Party as I am not sure how many seats the Liberal Democrats held in Scotland during that time.) MacDonald's premiership with Conservative support led to his banishment by Labour, but in contrast to the Liberal split where there were significant parts of the party in every splinter group, MacDonald's faction was comparatively small and the party ultimately unified around Arthur Henderson and Clement Attlee, the latter of whom would of course go on to serve as Deputy Prime Minister in Churchill's all-party coalition in the Second World War and then Prime Minister after the 1945 election*. (MacDonald has more recently been somewhat rehabilitated in Labour circles, by my understanding; after all, it was under him that the party first formed government and became the UK's second major party, replacing the Liberals.)
*Interestingly it is possible that the ascension of Labour after the war, while in part due to Churchill's campaigning gaffes (for instance, he claimed that a Labour government would have to enforce its policies via "some form of Gestapo", at a time when public awareness of the atrocities of the actual Gestapo was extremely high; certainly a gaffe even if you might agree with his underlying point) and a Labour manifesto that appealed to war-weary soldiers, was due to the death of Neville Chamberlain. Chamberlain died in late 1940, not long after resigning as Prime Minister, likely in part due to the stresses of the prewar period and the start of the war. (This also may be why George VI died relatively young at 56 in 1952, due to the stress of serving as King during the war, and his elder daughter Elizabeth succeeding him as Queen when she was only 25.) Churchill reportedly lamented that he had been counting on "poor Neville" to look after the "Home Front", and instead it was Labour MPs who largely did so while Churchill's focus was directed toward the war effort. This led to the British public becoming familiar with Labour ministers serving in government, and becoming comfortable with how they conducted their ministries, and Labour won its first parliamentary majority in 1945.
Edit: I am extremely embarrassed that I forgot about Boris Johnson, who was born in New York to British parents, and later became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
"That said, it still feels unnatural to disagree with Phil and I don’t like it."
LOL! maybe you shouldn't disagree!
Seriously, your objection that many good candidates would be eliminated if they had to be elected governor first, is certainly valid. Maybe, if other categories likely to produced good presidential candidates (say, retired four-star generals or admirals), that could be addressed (and that solves the problem of George Washington). But the point is that other, less qualifiede officials (like the horde of US Senators who run every four years)
Your other objection, about state workarounds, strikes me as less likely. A state might designate a ceremonial leader as “governor” to make him eligible. But language in the amendment to refer to a “state chief executive officer” should make that less likely. And I don’t see that states are going to rush to change the office of governor, turning it into a ceremonial office.
And that brings me back to my objecton to the “Governor’s Electoral College”. The only way that would ever be accepted by the American people, would be if the office of President becomes a ceremonial chief of state, like the Presidents of Germany, where the real power is in the hands of a premier or chancellor.
In any modern republic where the President (the chief executive by amy title) wields real power, that President is directly elected by the people. When France adopted their current Fifth Republic constitution that strengthened their President, initially that official was elected by an electoral college, but Charles de Daulle put through an amendment in 1962 that provided for the direct two-rpund election that France uses today. Other Presidentlal or semi-presidential republics, like South Korea, Taiwan, Mexico and Brazil use direct election. I see zero chance of the president of the United states not being elected by the people, even if mediated by the (current) Electoral College.
Sorry, James, I don’t see the GEC as anything but a pipe dream.
But therein lies the problem of a Presidential system in the first place: it is precisely because the President wields significant de jure and de facto power, along with a significant degree of permanence in office, that the People both must not be allowed to have direct input into the election to that position and will not accept not having such input.
And as always this brings me back around to my argument for the superiority of monarchy: the Prime Minister wields no de jure power and has (at least in theory) no permanence in office (in multiple ways, were the system working properly and had it not been poisoned by the democratic instinct in a distinctly American way), and this serves to check the very significant de facto power in the position.
And before you ask about directly electing the Prime Minister, Israel experimented with that for a while and did so three times, in 1996, 1999 and 2001. The problem was immediately apparent: there was no guarantee that the person elected Prime Minister would be able to form a government commanding the confidence of the Knesset.
"Like salt in a soup, you sprinkle to taste."... Spoken like someone who hasn't watched our intrepid author *pour* a visible layer of salt on every hamburger he's ever eaten
gotta bring out the flavor!
We already have a problem with government corruption and centralization, and you want to make it worse.
...those political instincts, they need improvement.
One of the major drivers of centralization of power within the executive branch is the mass national election that provides the President with a democratic "mandate" to steal power from the other branches. That's one reason the rate of centralization has increased since the McGovern reforms. (Another reason is that subjecting the primaries to mob rule has drastically increased the demagoguery level successful presidential candidates need -- c.f. Trump & Obama.)
If you want decentralization, take away that mandate, take away the mob, cancel the election.
Typical. Ignoring the corruption again.
I'm not quite sure what your argument *is* here for corruption -- at least as compared to the current electoral college system and the concerns addressed in Federalist No. 68.
I don't think the electoral college is (or has been) corrupt, and I think the GEC is considerably less likely to be. Clearly, you think otherwise, but I don't want to simply imagine what your reasons might be and respond to those, because I would probably get your position wrong.
Since you pointed out there were pretty much no defenses of the current system, I'll reluctantly offer one. I'm not totally convinced by this, and I'd very much like for it to be wrong, but I'm more than half-convinced:
The current system fails in the least damaging way.
The people want to be the ones picking the President. If there're intermediate stages - the electoral college or anything else - choosing them will inevitably, in reality, become proxy votes for the Presidency. The state legislatures(!) became proxy votes for the Senate(!); with the Presidency more important than two Senate seats, it'll absolutely happen there too. Whichever office gets clobbered by being a proxy vote is going to suffer, because people will vote for it based on the Presidency not on local conditions. Again, we saw that with state legislatures in the 1800's.
So, given this reality, I sadly contend that the electoral college is the least damaging way. It's turned into a proxy popular vote, but anything would. At least this way, with the electors having no other duties, turning them into mere proxies doesn't harm anything outside the Presidency. Your idea would, I fear, turn gubernatorial races into proxy Presidential races, leaving us with a worse caliber of state governors in the bargain.
Breaking this iron law would require changing people's conceptions of the Presidency, or a republican government, in a very fundamental way. No, even more fundamentally than that phrase usually means: the Electoral College was already a proxy vote in 1800, before Jacksonian Democracy, let alone the New Deal growth in executive authority! South Carolina's state legislature did keep appointing electors through 1861 without their legislative elections becoming a second proxy vote, but then South Carolina had a stunted conception of republican government that we don't want to bring back.
Maybe we could break it by breaking the conception that people's vote will actually impact the Presidency? I'm remembering an idea someone (I forget who) proposed in the Constitutional Convention, where several Congressmen would be chosen at random to be the Electoral College. This (whether choosing from Congress, state legislatures, or anyone else) might keep the voting for them from being seen as a proxy race, because your individual Representative probably won't get tapped for the Electoral College. But then, it'd have a lot of other problems instead, such as random swings in political alignment based on who gets randomly chosen.
"On the other hand, maybe we don’t need to fear deadlock so much? The Twentieth Amendment exists. We know what to do if there’s no president-elect: the Speaker of the House resigns and becomes Acting President. Is that a disaster? Mayyyybe not."
Wouldn't this actually practically guarantee deadlock unless one party wins a supermajority of governors? If a deadlock means the Speaker becomes president, what incentive do governors of the Speaker's party have to compromise with the other party (or parties if there's actually more than two)? They can cause intentional deadlock, effectively win the presidency through the Speaker, and leave them as Acting President until the next election.
This is a very good thing to worry about!
However, the governors can't dissolve the convention until they resolve their deadlock. They can't even physically leave, since the amendment demands they be "sequestered." If they are willing to spend four years of their lives sequestered in a deadlocked convention, they can probably pull this off, but I am skeptical that anyone ambitious enough to rise to the office of governor will be willing to be buried in a political black hole for four years, while their lieutenant governors are stuck running the actual state. Also, if Congress sequesters the governors the same way judges sequester juries (which I hope is what they would do), the governors also won't be allowed to see their families until they reach a decision. That's another strong motivator to reach some kind of decision.
Now that you mention it, though, I notice that the proposal gives the power to enforce the sequestration regulations to the House. Since the Speaker belongs to the House majority party, and is next in line to serve as President if the convention fails, it seems like it might be a bad idea to give the House majority party unilateral power to relax sequestration -- one of the key incentives for the governors to actually resolve their deadlock. Much as I love the House, perhaps it would be better to vest this power in the Senate... or, alternatively, take the Speaker out of the line of succession. (There have always been "officer of the United States" problems with succession to the Speaker anyway.)
Assuming sequestration is actually enforced, though, do you think that's strong enough incentive to assuage your concern?
"Now that you mention it, though, I notice that the proposal gives the power to enforce the sequestration regulations to the House. Since the Speaker belongs to the House majority party, and is next in line to serve as President if the convention fails, it seems like it might be a bad idea to give the House majority party unilateral power to relax sequestration -- one of the key incentives for the governors to actually resolve their deadlock. Much as I love the House, perhaps it would be better to vest this power in the Senate... or, alternatively, take the Speaker out of the line of succession."
Yes, the mention of the House being able to decide how to handle the governor convention was on my mind with the comment; the Speaker is the one who basically gets to decide it. There's nothing stopping them from setting the rules to let the governors all go home and do their governing while they nominally cast intentionally deadlocked votes every so often.
If we give the Senate the power to set the rules for the sequestering, that moves the issue away, but seems like it would result in the same issue half the time. I say this because if the Senate is controlled by the same party as the House, then they can just make the rules for the sequestering no rules at all, and have the same-party Speaker take office. It would only be when the Senate has a different party majority leader than the House that they'd have incentive to actually make the governors go and come up with a president.
In regards to removing Speaker of the House from the line of succession, that unfortunately only brings back the question of what happens if there is a deadlock and no President. (as a side note, I think the Speaker of the House shouldn't be third from the presidency anyway, and should be at the end of the line of succession; if the Speaker is of the opposite party of the President and both President and Vice President die, it'd be a ridiculously huge swing in partisan power)
I suppose one could try to overcome this by baking sequester requirements into the amendment itself, but that might be hard to do.
There is another thing in the article that I neglected to comment on before and want to do now:
"Of course, the single strongest argument for having Congress elect the President is that it’s so simple and obvious and the world has lots of experience with it. Nearly every other democracy you can think of has its legislative branch elect its chief executive! England! Hungary! Ireland! Canada! This list is too Anglocentric! Uh, Malta! India! Dammit!"
This is perhaps very nitpicky, but the chief *executive* in England and Canada is completely unelected, being the King/Queen. ALso, the chief executive of Ireland is popularly elected. That said, in those countries this role is largely ceremonial (particularly England/Canada), with the true power held by the prime minister.
One thing I have been thinking about is whether we actually need a President at all and could get by with just a congress or parliament. I am not aware of any democratic country that is ruled exclusively by a parliament, though. I initially thought of things like Japan, Canada, Australia, or Sweden, which have no President and put all power in parliament, but every "president-less" democracy I could think of is one that has a monarch, who therefore serves as the functional executive officer (albeit in all those cases, with no real power outside of at best an advisory role and the ability to get a lot of free money to live on). That said, even if they technically have a monarch in the role of President, their lack of any real power means they're functionally ruled entirely by the parliament. There are also countries that have a President with barely any power at all (like Ireland, as I understand it), but again they still have one, even if they really are a pure parliamentary system in terms of practice. Since countries with a powerless "president" can function, perhaps one could just cut that out and have no President? It would be a big step, but if countries can make do without a President or with a President that barely exists, it seems like it could work.
That said, the fact I've been unable to find any democratic country ruled purely by a parliament (without a President or monarch) does make me wonder if maybe there is some reason to have a "single ruler" of some kind, even if in a bunch of cases their main role is just to get paid a bunch of money and live in a palace.
Setting aside ruminations on whether one can get rid of the President, a much less extreme step would be to diminish their power. The problems involved in electing the President would be far less important if the President was less important. I think your suggested Constitutional amendment of weakening the veto power dramatically (https://decivitate.substack.com/p/geld-the-veto-some-constitutional-amendments-1) would be a less risky fix to the problems with the primaries, because even if it doesn't solve the issues of primaries directly, it at least makes them and the elections less important.
John Oliver is going through an effort of re-releasing old seasons of Last Week Tonight on YT and I was listening to them while mowing yesterday. The relevant one here (https://youtu.be/uRKIxgsi0pU?si=HnpPHpAhDX7VcUUp) was from 2015 and included a deep dive in to the Canadian Election Cycle. He glosses over it pretty early on but the general vibe is:
“Here are some goofy local ‘politicians’ and why their ability to win any election might actually matter. Canada’s PM is chosen based on the proportional seats parties get during local elections.”
He then goes on to only talk about the party leaders (and presumptive PMs) as if the local elections are really just proxy votes for these PM Candidates. Is this just Americanizing the story for his audience? Or do you think Canadians are really voting for ‘Hillbilly Jill’ because it gives their preferred PM a better shot at leadership?
In my experience it tends very much to be the case that people here are voting for a local candidate because they want the party leader to be Prime Minister. Independent candidates do win from time to time, but it is rare. (I'm reasonably certain that just the fact that Bernard Sanders has been elected as an independent to the US House or Senate since 1990, combined with Angus King's election to the Senate in 2012 as an independent and subsequent reelection, means that federal elections in the US over the last three decades have a higher rate of electing independent candidates than federal elections here do in the same timespan. On the other hand, the last time we had fewer than three political parties elect at least 12 MPs to the federal House of Commons was in 1958, and more elections than not after 1917 saw at least three parties reach that threshold.)
Our electoral system isn't proportional, it's first-past-the-post (just like the US and Oliver's own UK), and because of the confidence mechanism it's entirely possible for a party not winning a plurality of seats in a hung legislature to form government regardless. (It happened in BC after the 2017 provincial election and in Ontario after the 1985 provincial election, and it might have happened in 1972 at the federal level had the Liberals not ultimately received a narrow plurality. It might also have happened in 2009 at the federal level but Stephen Harper subverted constitutional conventions to prevent it.) I have an extremely lengthy rant about this elsewhere, but to try to make it shorter, it's not that Oliver is Americanising the story for his audience, it's that the traditional forms of a parliamentary system, particularly as regards the selection of party leader, have been replaced by forms more akin to those seen in the United States which do not work cleanly in the context of a parliamentary system and subvert its traditional mechanisms for checking power. (It is no coincidence that power began to be concentrated in the Prime Minister's Office here in the late 1960s under Pierre Trudeau at the same time as, or not long after, US Presidential nominating conventions started being televised widely, and as television became widely available, which many Canadians watched because Canada, from the standpoint of population distribution, is largely a long, thin rectangle along the southern border, and so can readily receive US broadcasts, which led to party leaders being selected by party members either directly or through conventions in order to have the same sort of spectacle, as opposed to the traditional means of selection by members of the parliamentary caucus, who had themselves been selected by local party members to stand for election and were victorious, which carried with it the threat of removal by that same caucus.)
So yes, in many cases Canadians are voting for "Hillbilly Jill" because she happens to be the candidate for the party whose leader that voter wants to be Prime Minister! (That said, there are voters who will look at the local partisan conditions in their riding, realise that their preferred party's candidate has no hope of winning, and even though they find any candidates who might win completely unpalatable from a policy and ideology standpoint will nonetheless vote for one of them--often the incumbent--because the person provides, or they think is likely to provide, good services to their constituents in the nonpartisan matters that MPs handle.) This also leads to outrage when MPs switch party affiliations--legally they may do so, of course, since it is the individual MP who has been elected to represent the riding, not the party or the leader--but since most voters base their vote primarily upon the party for which the candidate is standing, or who the leader of that party is, it leads voters in ridings where MPs do this to feel completely disenfranchised.
tl;dr Oliver is not Americanising for his audience; our system has been Americanised by popular demand and is vastly the worse for it. (The river of democracy, etc etc.)
Whoa! Thanks for the brilliant response! It sure feeeeeeeeels like this is a case study against moving to a “governor’s college” as proposed. They may be the least-bad-option now but only because they aren’t currently tied to choosing the president. As soon as that link is drawn it all goes out the window.
Also, that last comment you tossed in there is wild to me! For starters: “it is the individual MP who has been elected to represent the riding, not the party” I am shocked to learn it’s not more like the Speaker of the House which is always run by the leading party. If a candidate switched political parties after becoming Speaker of the House then the party in control would just kick them to the curb and start over with a new leader, not be stuck staring at an unloyal leader until the next elections come around… and then for seconds to learn that politicians switch parties with enough frequency that it’s even worth mentioning?! And not just some schmucky low-level politician but the PM?!? Yeah! I would say feeling disenfranchised by that is a completely reasonable reaction!
In the US it is also the local Representative (or Senator, or whatever term is used at the state level in your state) who is elected to represent the district, not the party! Party switches happen there, too; just in recent years politicians like Arlen Specter and Jeff Van Drew have switched party affiliation between the two major parties, while Jim Jeffords and Kyrsten Sinema decided to sit as an independent, and there has been constant talk about Joe Manchin deciding to sit as a Republican (and Angus King said he wasn't ruling out caucusing with them when he was asked about it in 2014). Even governors have switched parties from time to time, as Jim Justice did in West Virginia some years ago.
(If you recall, Jeffords's and Specter's affiliation changes were important, Jeffords's because he sat as an independent caucusing with the Democratic Party, which gave them the majority in the Senate for the first time since 1994, excepting a few weeks in early 2001 when Al Gore was still Vice President and broke the 50-50 tie, and Specter's because it gave the Democratic Party 60 votes in that body for a few months before Scott Brown's election to fill the vacancy left by Ted Kennedy's death, allowing them to pass legislation such as the Affordable Care Act without any votes from Republicans.)
Further, the Speaker of the US House doesn't always come from the majority party, or even the plurality party. In 1856, following the conclusion of all elections to the 234-seat House (Louisiana, Mississippi and Maryland didn't hold theirs until November 1855), the Democratic Party held 83 seats, the Whig Party 54 seats, the American Party (or the Know Nothings) 51 seats, with other various parties (including the nascent Republican Party) holding 46 seats between them. After 133 ballots spanning from December 3, 1855 to February 2, 1856 (yes, if you thought it took the House forever to elect Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson as Speaker, those were a breeze compared to this one!) it was Nathaniel Banks from the American Party who was ultimately selected, and that only once the House voted to elect the Speaker by plurality vote, rather than requiring an absolute majority. That said, what I don't know is how much control the Speaker had over the day-to-day operations of the House at the time, so I don't know how politically significant this really was. Later, Republican William Pennington would be elected Speaker after numerous ballots (though I am not sure how many) in 1860 when the Republican Party won a plurality, but not a majority, in the House. (The Republican Party also failed to win a plurality in the 1862-63 election, with the incumbent Speaker Galusha Grow losing reelection, but Schuyler Colfax was subsequently elected on the first ballot.) In 1923, with the Republican Party holding a thin majority of 225 seats of 435 in the House, it took nine ballots for Frederick Gillett to be elected Speaker, and then of course there was the 15-ballot election of Kevin McCarthy in January 2023 and the four-ballot election of Mike Johnson in October 2023.
I don't think a Prime Minister, at least in Canada, has ever switched parties. (I'd have to check whether a provincial premier ever has, at the provincial level.) Generally speaking, you aren't going to become party leader if you're thought of as someone who might switch parties. The closest example I can think of is Liberal Prime Minsters in the UK such as H. H. Asquith and David Lloyd George finding themselves in different factions of the splintered Liberal Party during the interwar years, while Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald served as Prime Minister in a Conservative-dominated coalition at the start of the Great Depression. (This led MacDonald to be reviled in Labour circles for decades afterward.) It does happen that provincial politicians who move to federal politics, or vice versa, will end up in a party with a different name, but this is because there is ideological disalignment between federal and provincial parties. The main examples that come to mind are BC New Democratic Premier Ujjal Dosanjh and Ontario New Democratic Premier Bob Rae both later serving as federal Liberal MPs (Rae served as interim federal Liberal leader for a time after the resignation of Michael Ignatieff and the election of Justin Trudeau). Quebec has seen a few examples of this as well (such as Thomas Mulcair, a federal New Democrat, and Jean Charest, a federal Progressive Conservative, both being Quebec Liberals, both of whom served in government in Quebec, Charest as Premier and Mulcair in Cabinet, both at some point serving as leader of their federal party, though Charest did so prior to serving provincially and Mulcair after), but this was at a time when Quebec politics was divided primarily between sovereigntist and federalist factions and the two major parties, the sovereigntist Parti Québécois and the federalist Liberals, were otherwise ideologically heterogeneous. The next-closest example that comes to mind is Pierre Trudeau, who admitted, as I recall, that his ideological views were closer to those of the New Democratic Party than the Liberal Party, but he chose to run as a Liberal since he felt (correctly, as events have proved, though the question of what might have happened in 2015 had Jack Layton not died of cancer in 2011 is one of the great what-ifs of the New Democrats) that the New Democratic Party had no possibility of forming government. There was, admittedly, Gordon Wilson in BC in the 1990s but that was at a time of significant realignment on the provincial centre-right.
(What I mentioned about 1972 is that it was a real possibility that the Progressive Conservatives could have won a plurality in that election, as ultimately the Liberals won 109 seats and the Progressive Conservatives 107 in the 264-member House. But the New Democrats won 31 seats and the Social Credit Party 15--there were also two independent candidates elected, one of which was a special case that I will address later--and David Lewis, the New Democratic leader, when asked on election night, ruled out supporting a Progressive Conservative minority even if they won a plurality. Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minister prior to the election, and thus could continue serving as such even if the Liberals did not receive a plurality, so long as he could form a government which commanded the confidence of the Commons, and the seat count meant that even if his Liberals had had a few less seats and the Progressive Conservatives a few more, the support of New Democratic MPs would have seen a Liberal government command majority support where a Progressive Conservative government could not. Later, however, after the Liberals deliberately lost a confidence vote to trigger an election by presenting a budget that Trudeau knew the New Democrats couldn't support, the Progressive Conservative leader Robert Stanfield--if you recognise the name, yes, he was the grandson of the founder of Stanfield's, which makes undergarments--was offered the opportunity to form a government, but he declined knowing that the New Democrats would not support him, and so Parliament was dissolved and an election held, in which the Liberals won a narrow majority.)
So it is usually regular MPs who switch parties, not leaders, but this has led to significant changes in the balance of power in the Commons. Notably Belinda Stronach, who was elected as a Conservative MP in 2004, chose to sit as a Liberal in 2005 which shored up the extremely thin working majority that Paul Martin's Liberal government had with the support of the New Democrats and, sometimes, independent MP Chuck Cadman (who had been a Conservative, lost a nominating contest but won reelection, and then notably voted for a New Democratic-demanded amendment to a Liberal budget because he felt it was in the best interests of his constituents rather than voting against it as a partisan matter had he still been a Conservative MP; it should be noted that the Conservatives supported the original budget, but the New Democrats demanded the amendment, which the Conservatives did not support, as the price of their support in future confidence votes. This also got entangled with the debate over the legalisation of same-sex marriage going on at the time but that's a discussion for another time, if ever). Stronach was, however, reelected as a Liberal candidate in 2006, and declined to stand for reelection in 2008, so her constituents might not have been all that angry about it. (It should be noted that Stronach won election in 2004 as a Conservative with a margin of less than one and a half percentage points over the Liberal Martha Hall Findlay, who did later serve for one Parliament representing a different riding, and was reelected with a margin of more than eight percentage points, though in 2008 the Conservative candidate Lois Brown won election by a margin of more than twelve percentage points over the Liberal candidate; since 2015 the Liberal candidate has won a narrow majority in each of the last three elections, so it is something of a swing riding.)
As for the Speaker, do keep in mind that the Speaker of the lower house in a Westminster system, at least, is a nonpartisan figure. In the UK, the Speaker and the Deputy Speakers by convention resign all party affiliations while serving as such. Going back to what I said about 1972, Lucien Lamoureux, who had been elected as member for Stormont and later Stormont-Dundas as a Liberal first in 1962 and then was chosen as Speaker in 1966 and continued to serve as such after the 1968 election, attempted to see Canada follow what was at the time the British practice of not standing candidates against the Speaker by running as an independent in 1968 and 1972; he did win reelection both times by substantial margins but the other parties (though not the Liberals, and not the Progressive Conservatives in 1968) nonetheless ran candidates against him, and no Speaker since has attempted to win reelection as an independent candidate.
In the UK this convention does still hold to an extent, in that the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democratic Parties do not stand candidates against the incumbent Speaker, though minor parties such as UKIP and the Greens have done so against both John Bercow and Lindsay Hoyle.
The Speaker has, however, in at least two notable instances come from the party not forming government. Peter Milliken, a Liberal MP first elected in 1988, ultimately was chosen as Speaker in 2001 in a secret ballot vote in a Liberal-majority House. (Previously the Speaker was typically chosen by the Prime Minister, but the rules were changed to make the election instead be by secret ballot using the Hare system.) He was later chosen as Speaker again in 2004, but then in the Conservative-plurality Houses elected following the 2006 and 2008 elections, he was again chosen as Speaker because MPs generally felt that his oversight of the House was extremely fair and impartial, and declined to stand for reelection in 2011. (His successor as Speaker, Andrew Scheer, on the other hand, later became Conservative House Leader and then party leader, which are among the most partisan positions one can hold.) As an addendum to this, because of the secret ballot vote, in 2019 Conservative MPs deliberately ranked Justin Trudeau's preferred candidate for Speaker, Geoff Regan (who had been Speaker in the previous Parliament), lower on their ballots in order to ensure that another candidate became Speaker, that ultimately being Anthony Rota. (If that name rings a bell, you may have heard of the scandal a while back where he invited a Ukrainian constituent of his to the Commons and honoured him for having fought against Russians in the Second World War, completely forgetting that this meant he was fighting on the side of the Nazis. We have always been at war with Eastasia, I guess.)
The other notable example occurred in BC after the 2017 election there. The Liberal Party (if you remember what I said about ideological disalignment, that party, now called BC United, is a centre-right coalition) won 43 seats, the New Democratic Party 41 and the Green Party 3, in the 87-member legislature. As the incumbent Premier, Christy Clark was entitled to attempt to form a government. She did so but the legislature, after electing a Liberal MLA as Speaker, voted no confidence in her government 44-42. She advised the Lieutenant governor that no party could form a government and requested a dissolution and another election, but New Democratic leader John Horgan, who had made a confidence-and-supply arrangement with the Greens had also made a deal with a Liberal MLA, Darryl Plecas, for Plecas to serve as Speaker, giving Horgan's New Democratic government a working 44-42 majority with Green support. The Liberals promptly kicked Plecas out of the party and he did not stand for reelection in 2020 when the New Democrats won a majority. (If a New Democratic MLA had been Speaker, then the legislature would otherwise have been tied 43-43. The Speaker of the lower house, or only house in a unicameral legislature such as in Canadian provinces, New Zealand, or some Australian states, in a Westminster system by law or strong convention never votes except to break ties, and then always in favour of the status quo or to prolong consideration of a bill. Hence the Speaker votes to pass legislation at first and second reading, and to defeat it or to remand it to committee at third reading, unless the vote is on a matter of confidence, in which case the Speaker votes in favour in order to preserve the status quo of the serving government. Clark felt, correctly, that a New Democratic MLA as Speaker in a tied legislature would have improperly compromised the impartiality of the position by demanding that they constantly vote with the New Democratic government in order to preserve the status quo, which is why Horgan made his arrangement with Plecas.)
As a further addendum to all of this, in Ireland, the Ceann Comhairle of Dáil Éireann, their title for the Speaker, is automatically reelected if they stand for reelection, but Ireland uses multi-member constituencies.
This is all an extraordinarily long-winded way of saying that there are very important differences that make the situations not exactly comparable. It is not that Prime Ministers switch parties; it is that individual MPs sometimes do and this can alter the balance of power in Parliament in a way that the constituents of that MP may find undesirable.
I would also add that I think, ultimately, the true issue underlying everything is the insistence that one person be elected to a given position. It is, quite simply, not possible for any one candidate to properly represent the ideological breadth of their area; in Canada at the federal level it is typically the case that around 50% of voters cast their vote for the candidate who is elected to represent their riding. (And as I've brought up before, remember the Bush-era "respect the President" vs "respect the office of the Presidency" argument?) If instead multiple members are elected to represent an area then the ideological diversity of it is far better represented. This is magnified to its greatest extreme when there is an insistence on selecting a single person to serve as chief executive for the entire country! And this is an issue in both presidential and parliamentary systems, of course, but the great advantage of a parliamentary system is that the choice of de facto chief executive (and this too is as opposed to a presidential system where the President is de jure chief executive) can be revisited at any time by ordinary procedure, whereas it is typically much more difficult to get rid of the chief executive in a presidential system. (And one need only look at the situation in Peru with the removal of Pedro Castillo and elevation of Dina Boluarte, and the subsequent massacres against pro-Castillo protesters which left 28 dead, to see what can happen if it is done.) It seems to me that Switzerland might have the right idea in having a collective seven-member chief executive in which, by convention, multiple parties are represented.
Edit: Once again I am far too long-winded for Substack.
Daniel's terrific and I'm endlessly pleased to see him leaving comments here.
(I've been neglectful of the other online space where we chat because I promised myself no more political arguments until I've got a Star Trek CCG deck ready for the July tournament in Sioux Falls.)
One note where I think you've become confused: Daniel was talking about MP's switching parties, not PM's -- that is, Members of Parliament, not Prime Ministers. Unless I'm much mistaken, a PM who abandoned his coalition would get chucked out much faster than a wayward House Speaker (unless the PM managed to convince a ton of MPs from his original party to go with him).
On the governor's college proposal: I couldn't agree more that there's a real risk of gubernatorial elections just becoming proxy presidential elections. My plan is that the great stature of the gubernatorial office (which carries MUCH more power and prestige and independent importance than MP for a small riding or state legislative position) will help shield them from becoming proxies. That is also why the proposal includes the express guarantee of gubernatorial freedom to vote, subjects them to congressional sequester, allows them to wield the secret ballot, and -- maybe the biggest of all -- time-shifts the election so that the presidential election is still two years away when they become designated electors. All these things SHOULD, I hope, greatly weaken the power the parties will have to try to turn governors' elections into presidential-elections-by-proxy.
But, as with all things constitutional, one can't be sure how it plays out until one tries.
Ah, and I see Daniel responded twice with long comments during the time it took me to type this short one. You can see why I love the man.
"One note where I think you've become confused: Daniel was talking about MP's switching parties, not PM's -- that is, Members of Parliament, not Prime Ministers. Unless I'm much mistaken, a PM who abandoned his coalition would get chucked out much faster than a wayward House Speaker (unless the PM managed to convince a ton of MPs from his original party to go with him)."
I already brought this up! It happened twice in the UK, both times in Conservative-dominated Houses with a Prime Minister from another party.
In the 1918 "coupon election" (so named because candidates who received the "coalition coupon" from the governing wartime coalition, which David Lloyd George at least wished to preserve in peace, won election in great numbers regardless of party affiliation) the Conservatives won an outright majority but the wartime coalition with at least part of the Liberal Party was retained, with Lloyd George continuing as Prime Minister. He would be replaced by Andrew Bonar Law (incidentally the only Prime Minister of the UK, to my knowledge, to be born outside the British Isles, having been born in New Brunswick when it was still a colony) not long after, however, and the other Liberal faction, led by H. H. Asquith, who had been Prime Minister before Lloyd George, did not join the coalition, at least in peacetime. (I am not entirely sure what the WWI coalition government looked like, particularly since it was in a House with a near-even split between the Liberals, with 272 seats, and the Conservatives, with 271, but from what I can tell the eventual final coalition saw Lloyd George as Prime Minister, supported primarily by Conservatives, and Asquith as Leader of the Opposition.) The Liberal Party would ultimately reunify under Asquith and later Lloyd George in the mid-1920s but would splinter again not long after.
That splintering would, in part, be caused by Asquith's decision to support a Labour minority government under Ramsay MacDonald after the 1923 election resulted in a hung Parliament. From what I've read, he did so because he wanted to put them in power to prove that they were incompetent and reestablish the Liberal Party as the natural alternative to the Conservatives; instead the Conservatives won a sweeping majority in 1924 due in part to the Zinoviev letter forgery, Labour won a plurality in 1929 under MacDonald, and then in 1931 the Conservatives again won a majority but the exigencies of the Depression had led to a multiparty coalition being formed with MacDonald at the head of a government formed by Conservatives along with splinter groups from Labour and the Liberals. This is why MacDonald, despite being Labour's first Prime Minister, was later, as I noted, reviled by Labour for decades. It was also potentially an example of monarchical interference in politics since reportedly MacDonald was George V's favourite Prime Minister.
Lloyd George's premiership with Conservative support led to the splintering and eventual irrelevance of the Liberal Party; neither that party nor its successors would be in government again until the Cameron-Clegg coalition formed after the 2010 election. (Which then itself made the Liberal Democrats electorally irrelevant all over again, except for possible vote-splitting, because with Conservatives and Liberal Democrats touting the same policies for five years, voters simply voted for Conservatives in 2015, giving them a majority while the Liberal Democrats, who won 57 seats in 2010 and had won 62 in 2005, and had hovered around 50 for the three elections prior, have not won more than 12 seats in any election since, though this may in part be due to the rise of the Scottish National Party as I am not sure how many seats the Liberal Democrats held in Scotland during that time.) MacDonald's premiership with Conservative support led to his banishment by Labour, but in contrast to the Liberal split where there were significant parts of the party in every splinter group, MacDonald's faction was comparatively small and the party ultimately unified around Arthur Henderson and Clement Attlee, the latter of whom would of course go on to serve as Deputy Prime Minister in Churchill's all-party coalition in the Second World War and then Prime Minister after the 1945 election*. (MacDonald has more recently been somewhat rehabilitated in Labour circles, by my understanding; after all, it was under him that the party first formed government and became the UK's second major party, replacing the Liberals.)
*Interestingly it is possible that the ascension of Labour after the war, while in part due to Churchill's campaigning gaffes (for instance, he claimed that a Labour government would have to enforce its policies via "some form of Gestapo", at a time when public awareness of the atrocities of the actual Gestapo was extremely high; certainly a gaffe even if you might agree with his underlying point) and a Labour manifesto that appealed to war-weary soldiers, was due to the death of Neville Chamberlain. Chamberlain died in late 1940, not long after resigning as Prime Minister, likely in part due to the stresses of the prewar period and the start of the war. (This also may be why George VI died relatively young at 56 in 1952, due to the stress of serving as King during the war, and his elder daughter Elizabeth succeeding him as Queen when she was only 25.) Churchill reportedly lamented that he had been counting on "poor Neville" to look after the "Home Front", and instead it was Labour MPs who largely did so while Churchill's focus was directed toward the war effort. This led to the British public becoming familiar with Labour ministers serving in government, and becoming comfortable with how they conducted their ministries, and Labour won its first parliamentary majority in 1945.
Edit: I am extremely embarrassed that I forgot about Boris Johnson, who was born in New York to British parents, and later became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
"I already brought this up!"
Yes, you did! We were typing at the same time.
"That said, it still feels unnatural to disagree with Phil and I don’t like it."
LOL! maybe you shouldn't disagree!
Seriously, your objection that many good candidates would be eliminated if they had to be elected governor first, is certainly valid. Maybe, if other categories likely to produced good presidential candidates (say, retired four-star generals or admirals), that could be addressed (and that solves the problem of George Washington). But the point is that other, less qualifiede officials (like the horde of US Senators who run every four years)
Your other objection, about state workarounds, strikes me as less likely. A state might designate a ceremonial leader as “governor” to make him eligible. But language in the amendment to refer to a “state chief executive officer” should make that less likely. And I don’t see that states are going to rush to change the office of governor, turning it into a ceremonial office.
And that brings me back to my objecton to the “Governor’s Electoral College”. The only way that would ever be accepted by the American people, would be if the office of President becomes a ceremonial chief of state, like the Presidents of Germany, where the real power is in the hands of a premier or chancellor.
In any modern republic where the President (the chief executive by amy title) wields real power, that President is directly elected by the people. When France adopted their current Fifth Republic constitution that strengthened their President, initially that official was elected by an electoral college, but Charles de Daulle put through an amendment in 1962 that provided for the direct two-rpund election that France uses today. Other Presidentlal or semi-presidential republics, like South Korea, Taiwan, Mexico and Brazil use direct election. I see zero chance of the president of the United states not being elected by the people, even if mediated by the (current) Electoral College.
Sorry, James, I don’t see the GEC as anything but a pipe dream.
But therein lies the problem of a Presidential system in the first place: it is precisely because the President wields significant de jure and de facto power, along with a significant degree of permanence in office, that the People both must not be allowed to have direct input into the election to that position and will not accept not having such input.
And as always this brings me back around to my argument for the superiority of monarchy: the Prime Minister wields no de jure power and has (at least in theory) no permanence in office (in multiple ways, were the system working properly and had it not been poisoned by the democratic instinct in a distinctly American way), and this serves to check the very significant de facto power in the position.
And before you ask about directly electing the Prime Minister, Israel experimented with that for a while and did so three times, in 1996, 1999 and 2001. The problem was immediately apparent: there was no guarantee that the person elected Prime Minister would be able to form a government commanding the confidence of the Knesset.