(Bloomberg) - House Speaker Kevin McCarthy proposed a deal to temporarily avert a US government shutdown, with demands including an 8% spending cut for domestic agencies and a resumption of border wall construction.
(Bloomberg) - House Speaker Kevin McCarthy proposed a deal to temporarily avert a US government shutdown, with demands including an 8% spending cut for domestic agencies and a resumption of border wall construction.
As an outsider, the combination of this and the Republicans’ contrived attempt to impeach Biden really serve to illustrate the knife-edge on which the US political system seems to have been built.
In countries that use a parliamentary system, the ability to get a budget through parliament is pretty much synonymous with executive power - a government that can’t pass its budget resigns and then either somebody else attempts to form a government or, failing that, new elections are held. The US however operates a presidential system but leaves the budget to its parliament. That’s an arrangement that can only be sustainable if the parliament is either under the control of politicians who are aligned with the president’s agenda, or if there is a political culture and set of norms that values cooperation and the national interest over partisanship.
It’s impressive that the US system has lasted as long as it has, but it’s abundantly clear that the Republicans in Congress are no longer a party that can cooperate with their opponents in the national interest - those norms no longer exist, and they seem not to have existed for some time now. In such circumstances, I don’t see how a presidential system can be sustainable in the long-term.
It truly is a deeply flawed system.
The problems, I think, start with the fact the entire thing was built on compromises with the slave states in the South who basically wanted a guarantee they could veto something they didn’t like - even if they didn’t have a majority.
How the US Founding Fathers failed to consider this type of extreme partisanship would grind the US to a halt is also somewhat baffling. George Washington even warned of the dangers of political parties in his farewell address, and he was clearly aware that partisanship would be a huge issue. Yet the system they put in place is poorly equipped to deal with it.
It really feels like almost everything wrong with the system stems from those concessions made at the nation’s founding. But I don’t see how any changes will be made. A parliamentary system would be much better, especially from a budget perspective.