shavenferret said:
SanAndreasX said:
In a perfect world, the impeachment process should be scrapped and replaced with confidence votes in the House ONLY. There is no reason it should be this difficult to fire a member of the executive branch for being bad at their job. If that means periods of replacing the president on an annual basis, so be it. Japan went through an eight year period where they changed prime ministers anually (bookended on both ends by Shinzo Abe). Maybe if the presidency was considered more of a replaceable position, the American people wouldn't constantly be at each other's throats over the office. |
Absolutely. For a position of such importance, one would think that there would be a way that would have fewer ways to fail. But in playing the devils advocate, would it be plausible if and when we have a more streamlined impeachment process, if they would more frequently and almost routinely remove president's if there is an opposing House majority? Either way, it seems like a good thing that there aren't many super evil businessmen that also have Trump's charisma. He literally was gifted the white House bc of that and his storied life. Most of the CEOs nowadays just stay I their office and make $$$$, so being president probably wouldn't even be considered. My point is that someone like Trump is a once in a century type of bad anomaly. We'll get a better replacement when he leaves. |
Japan had a seven-year period where the Prime Minister was rotated out on an annual basis in the late 2000s, after Junichiro Koizumi stepped down. The first of these "annual" PMs was Shinzo Abe, then Yasuo Fukuda, and so on, until Abe got back in, finally hit upon the right economic formula and stayed in office for the longest term of any Prime Minister, which, I believe, is still shorter than two full presidential terms. To the Japanese, the PM is not considered a matter of life-and-death. A prime minister can be replaced with relatiive ease. The deputy prime minister is not an automatic replacement in the way that the vice president is; they have to call elections again. They aren't stuck with an administration in a rigid four-year cycle where the entirety of the fourth year (or the entire term in Trump's case) is spent campaigning for re-election. Therefore, it isn't an existential crisis for people of one persuasion when a prime minister of the opposing party gets in.
Japan's post-war politics have been heavily dominated by the Liberal Democratic Party, which, despite the connotation of its name in the U.S., is a center right party with occasional nationalist overtones; the current LDP PM, Sanae Takaichi, Japan's first female PM, seems to signal a return to visiting the controversial Yasukuni Shrine by PMs after the practice fell off under pressure from Korea, China, and the United States. The parliamentary system is not perfect either; Hungary is a parliamentary republic where Orban seems destined to be the PM until he dies, especially now that he has MAGA money backing him up. Still, Shinzo Abe's assassination came as a complete shock to the Japanese people, and you don't see them driving around with huge flags endorsing one candidate or another plaastered all over their cars.
