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It's Time to End the Presidency [1]
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Date: 2025-06-23
No, this is not a comment on Trump’s presidency, though if anyone wants to get working on either the 25th Amendment or an impeachment, I wish them God’s speed. No, this in reference to the office of the presidency itself. It is a failed experiment, and it needs to be ended.
This is not, of course, a novel opinion. Political scientists have been saying for as long as I can remember, certainly since I was taking poly sci classes in college, that presidential systems are failures waiting to happen. There is a reason that the US government, when setting up new “democracies” almost never uses the presidential model — it is simply too broken to support a democracy. By splitting popular legitimacy amongst several elected bodies, by splitting the power among several elected bodies, presidential system creates situations where the people voted in to affect a policy cannot but cannot for unclear reasons. The separation of execution from legislation, the numerous veto points, means that it is difficult for voters to appropriately place blame. Members of the government can also lean into that, deliberately obfuscating their role in the inability to effect policies desired by the voters. It is also difficult to resolve unclear conflicts, even when the bodies do wish to come into conflict, as multiple bodies can claim electoral legitimacy.
It also means that people intent on effecting a given policy will tend to try and collect power in the executive, since that is the easiest to control and the easiest to work from. Trump and the GOP want to gut health care spending, education spending, and the welfare state in general. But such changes are unpopular and unlikely to pass legislatively. Trump is effecting those changes via the power of the executive branch, illegally based on his string of losses in the courts. But he is doing damage via those actions, and there is nothing to stop him.
Presidential systems cannot handle political parties well. The assumption of a presidential system is that each branch would defend their own prerogatives. This ignores pretty much all of human history. People of the same party are quite happy to see their policy preferences put in place by the other branch, even if the execution of the implementation is not entirely kosher. And they have zero incentive to damage their own brand, so to speak, by disciplining the other branches controlled by their partisans. And so, we have today — when a President can attack another country with no authorization from Congress, despite such actions being forbidden in black and white terms in the Constitution.
The failure of American democracy (and a country that has, on the executive’s orders, masked men randomly kidnapping immigrants, legal residents, and citizens from the streets is a failing democracy) has many parents. The House is too small. The Supreme Court is captured by justices dedicated to specific policy goals rather than the Constitution. The Senate gives outsized influence to a small minority that is unrepresentative of the larger population. The operation of the Senate thwarts execution of small-d democratic will. Some of these can be fixed — the Courts can be reformed, the House can be enlarged, the procedures in the Senate can be democratized, all vi legislation or by the institutions themselves. But the problems of the split in legislation and execution cannot be overcome without structural change. It is time for the presidency to end.
Parliamentary governments are not perfect. Sometimes you end up with a government too divided to achieve anything — but that is a problem of persuasion, because those parliaments generally reflect real divides in the opinions of the populace. In the main, having the parliament responsible for executing the legislative vision means that people get what they vote for and know who to blame when policies are implemented. They also have means of forcing the governments into early elections when they go too far from what voters thought they were getting, and they harness human nature to do so. Legislatures may want to trigger an election, even if their party will lose, in order to stop the bleeding and perhaps save themselves. The incentives in parliamentary systems are more aligned, then, with democracy rather than with power.
I have no illusions that ending the presidency in America will be easy. The combination of politician’s self-interest, the difficulty in changing the Constitution, and the almost religious reverence for the Constitution in this country, make such change a difficult, to say the least, climb. But that is why we need to start now.
We need to start denigrating the idea of presidential power and demanding that all power resides in the legislature. We need to start pushing politicians to pledge to vote for the amendments needed to transform the country. We need to have those amendments written and ready to go. We need to relentlessly persuade people in all parts of the country that the President as an office ignores them and takes power away from them. We need a movement, in other words. If we want an actual democracy, if we can survive the next four years without completely giving into autocracy, we need to neuter the presidency so that it cannot be used against us every again.
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