Letters to the Editor
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"The downside," yeah
What we are witnessing is the downside of the stability built into the American political system -- the inability of a four-year presidential administration to fall of its own weight. If this were a parliamentary system, all it would take would be a no-confidence vote in Congress to bring on a new presidential election. And probably even a significant minority of Republicans would support such a heave-ho motion. But instead -- keeping in mind that incompetence is not an impeachable offense -- we are saddled with Bush and Dick Cheney for another two years.
Right, the downside. And the upside is...... what, again?
Unfortunately the Framers can't be impeached for incompetence either, because they're all dead. But there is virtually nothing to recommend our current system, and the Bush Administration is close to a slam-dunk argument against it. Bush took power without winning the people's votes, and he's sustained in power now only by an eighteenth-century Rube Goldberg constitutional system unlike any in use in any other advanced democracy. In a parliamentary system, it wouldn't even have taken a no-confidence vote -- his own party would have responded to the damage he was doing to them by yanking him, as Thatcher was deposed intra-party in 1990. And if they didn't, control of the Executive would automatically have flipped as soon as the other party won an election and took over the legislature.
Even so, Thatcher was prime minister for 11 years, John Major for nearly 7, and Tony Blair is now going on 10. So there's nothing about a parliamentary system that necessarily gives you instability in the Executive (as long as its rules are set to prevent the legislature from fragmenting into many tiny parties). Put simply, the American system achieves stability by ignoring how the people voted, or at least greatly devaluing this. It was designed by a bunch of guys who (literally) thought that "democracy" was a bad word.