Trump administration considers new tariffs on gaming hardware

[Shadow1980]

SanAndreasX said:

Nebraska has a unicameral legislature composed of 49 Senators, and as a "senate," they have the filibuster.

One big issue is the difficulty of removing a defective president from office. Instead of the elaborate impeachment process that the Senate apparently can choose to ignore if their leader chooses, the president should be subject to the confidence only of the House. If that means an annual churn of presidents (as happened in Japan for a six-year period bookended on both ends by Shinzo Abe's terms as PMs), so be it. Part of the problem with the presidency is that we're locked into an administration for four years. Maybe Americans wouldn't be at each other's throats about the presidency if the president was a more replaceable position. I also think about how South Korea only escaped dictatorship because of mass protests after the Korean legislature nearly refused to do anything about Yoon... and in the US, a lot of Southern and Midwestern voters would die to protect Trump.

That's another thing I've been big on for the past few years: having a parliamentary system instead of a full presidential system. Every single nation with a full presidential system has, without fail, descended into some form of autocracy at some point in their history, where the president just does as they wish with impunity. While it might have seen like a good idea back in the 1780s, it turns out that having an officer who is both head of state and head of government is a bad idea. The goal of the Framers might have been to maintain separation of powers, but I guess they didn't count on the office of president amassing ever greater power for itself, as it always does in every country with an executive president (and leaders seeking power may push their nation to become one with a full-presidential system, as is the case with Erdogan in Turkey).

That's why the office of president should be a largely ceremonial office, as it is in most functional democratic republics. As in those nations, the executive branch should consist of a prime minister as head of government alongside their cabinet, and the executive branch would be accountable to the legislature. It might take people a while to get used to things like votes of no confidence or snap elections, but all the most stable democracies in the world have a parliamentary system. Having a parliamentary system isn't an absolute deterrent against autocracy (see Hungary when Orban was PM), but it does seem to more consistently create a more functional and stable system.

The problem with that is that, like trying to abolish the Electoral College, this would require a constitutional amendment, which would never happen in our current political climate. The best we can hope for is that a sane Congress reigns in the presidency and curtails its power back to what it was supposed to be, and that we also get other governmental reforms that wouldn't require a constitutional amendment, like implementing proportional representation and banning private money from politics.