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mrmitchell
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quote:
Seems to me a person that is tied to a particular region would be more likely to hand out pork than someone freed from that burden. |
Is that really a bad thing?
Everyone talks about "pork," but no one's going to say why it's so bad. It gives money to local communities and at the national level it isn't the straw that breaks the camel's back.
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Dracon II
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Communist Party of Apolyton
Jan 1970
time: 15:34
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quote:
It is. Dracon's not mentioned any reason why the Prime Minister might have more power over his nation than the President. If you include his cabinet then possibly, but that's not a fair comparison, as the cabinet is 13 people, not concentrated in one person, like the President. |
You're confusing what I am saying. I'm talking about the respective executive branches... not the number of people in each of them. The executive in Westminster has more power than in the USA. Why? Because they are selected from the majority party in the legislature... which means they have direct control over the bills that are put before parliament. The fact that they are always drawn from the majority (dependence on coalition governments are fairly rare, at least in the UK) means these bills, once proposed are likely to be passed. The executive only has to convince its own party, and that is relatively easy given the culture of party discipline in Westminster systems. In the US, the President has much more of an uphill battle. He has no more power over legislation than that which the legislature affords him, and the extent to which he can use public opinion. The executive in Westminster systems have direct control over legislation. Private member's bills are not considered very normal.
quote:
In both systems any laws have to be passed by two houses, so I don't really see a difference in terms of that - the legislative side. |
Functional equivalence - you see two houses of government in both systems therefore you assume they're identical. Wrong.
The House of Lords is much less powerful than the Senate... to name just one difference.
quote:
The only difference is that our executive decisions, who gets to decide what's put before parliament/congress, is that we have a 13 man cabinet and the US has a single President. Hence the power is more concentrated in the US. |
The real difference is the functional relationship between the executive and legislature... the numerical composition between the respective executives is pertinent only to the concentration of power within the executive branch itself... the relationship between this branch and the legislature is much more important in observing the extent to which the executive can get its bills onto the legislature's agenda, and from there, to pass said bills. Being the core leadership of the majority of the legislature, a Westminster Cabinet has remarkable legislative power by default. There are still checks on their power, but these are much less than that on the President. The President has no formal power over determining the Congress's agenda; he can veto bills passed by congress, but the congress has the power to overrule this veto if they have sufficient will to do so.
The power of the executive branch in the USA is concentrated in one man, yes. But you ignore the extent to which the constitution of the United States, in its enumeration of the powers and functions of each branch of Government, was designed to limit the power of one man over Government.
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16-06-2005 12:12
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