Collegiality: The Solution To Our Presidential Problems

[originalpckelly]

Our nation has problems:

1. People in either party are xenophobic, and do not talk to each other. To find solutions to our disagreements, we must first understand what those disagreements are; this cannot happen if we don't talk to each other. Finding solutions to disagreements that please both sides reduces tensions, and is the way America used to and is supposed to work. Plus, we get what we want.

2. Even when people still listened to each other there were tensions. This was because people would come to agreements, but would break them because they never had any weight.

3. In the past few years our nation has become politically unstable. Here's what I mean by that:
(a) Congress and Presidency more frequently change hands.
(b) Individuals are more willing to use options of last resort to gain political power. This is well demonstrated by the impeachment of President Clinton.
(c) Dissent has been greatly criticized inter-party and has lead to some calling dissenter unpatriotic. This is extremely dangerous in a Republic because it alienates dissenters. In the most extreme cases this alienation can lead to terrorism.
(d) Individuals are less willing to dissent intra-party because they are afraid of presenting a weak face to the opponent.
(e) Parrot culture, repeating the party line and not individually thinking about an issue, has thrived because of the latter problem.
The reduction of dissatisfaction would increase the stability of our nation. If power was invested in the hands of both parties in some way, people would have less resentment and dissent would be taken seriously.

4. There has been an awful abuse of power by the current President, and this is because there was no real responsibility to the American people or the Democrats. This abuse has continued on and on, and threatens to destroy America. This has been rarely challenged by members of the President's own party because he and the RNC control campaign funding. That is in addition to the aforementioned.

The solution to this problem is bittersweet: power sharing, or as the Romans would say, collegiality.

Here is a Wikipedia article one this Roman principle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collegiality#Roman_collegiality

Here is how we could go about this:

1. All Committees in Congress should have equal numbers of each of the two largest parties. This could be implemented in a simple law, but since that might be overturned easily, it might be wiser to use a Constitutional Amendment. I don't think we should put in the Constitution, however, unless we have tried it in law and find it to work well. (I admit there may be some unforeseen difficulties.)

2. After we have tried the Congressional system, and we find that it works well, and then we should put Collegiality in the Executive Branch. To do this we must rework the number of people who are appointed politically. As we all witnessed during Hurricane Katrina, political appointments do not always have the best experience to handle a situation. This requires that we make all positions in the Executive Branch experience based where possible.

We could take two different approaches to this:
(a) We could make all the people in the Executive Departments up to and including the Secretaries merit based. We could give the President the ability to appoint high liaisons and advisers, whom would deal with the agencies directly and assist the President in making policy decisions.
(b) We could make everyone up to but not including the Secretaries merit based, and let the President still choose Secretaries.
I think the former is better than the latter because in Katrina it was the secretary as well as an agency director who were incompetent. Merit based positions at the Secretary level would almost certainly alleviate this problem.

All of that was just the foundation for collegiality; collegiality demands more than a single person of different political factions to have equal power. There should be two Presidents, two Vice Presidents, and two of any other political position (that is why we would have to reform political appointments. If we didn't and we implemented collegiality the government would be dramatically larger.)

We could do this by having a Constitutional Amendment:

There shall be two Presidents. The Presidents shall be the two candidates who receive the first and second largest amount of Electoral College votes (or should there be popular vote counts, the first two with the most popular votes.) Should there be a tie between two or more candidates for any place, the House of Representatives shall decide the election. The Presidents may appoint advisers as the see fit. They will be able to veto each other's actions.

We could implement this system with either version of the civil service reform. The Presidents would be able to choose their own Secretaries or advisers. They would (hopefully) share power and come to consensus. They would have to agree on nominees to the Supreme Court.

This collegiality in addition to the Congressional Committee collegiality would remove politics from the Supreme Court. Even if the Executive reforms were not implemented, Supreme Court nominees who are extremely partisan would not make it out of the Senate Committee on The Judiciary.

It is the goal of these reforms to better our system. I know it is controversial and here are the things that I feel we all would dislike about this:

1. No one wants to share their power: This I get completely, but it has a flip side. If we shared power, the other side would have to share power too. We would never be out of power. We would always have say in the affairs of the country. I think that this is the overriding factor for any criticism.

2. Too complex: This I understand as well. I think the complexity will be a good thing. Our government is not as efficient as other governments, but this is a good thing. A government that is powerful and efficient is powerful and efficient in every matter including its use against the people. The American system was designed inefficiently to encourage compromise. It worked until political parties came along. We need to restore that driving force behind compromise.

3. Why even do this? Well I think I gave some pretty good reasons earlier, but here is the most important.

You may not realize it, but our nation is headed towards a civil war. I don't mean to say this as threat or anything, but it is the truth. People cannot continue like this for long without coming to blows. I don't think Democrats would do anything violent, but the Republicans are very militant. I think it is when, rather than if, a politically motivated incident of violence takes place. This will either go on as terrorism, which would drive a further loss of liberty and increase the amount of totalitarianism. Or erupt into a full on civil war with possibly tragic amounts of casualties. I mean this, listen to me, I really mean it. This is worrying me. It should worry all Americans.

We could avert it if we implement reforms. I think we should do it, what do you think?

[originalpckelly]

1. kick and pray that people read it and take it seriously (n/t)

[originalpckelly]

2. Oh my! (n/t)

[originalpckelly]

3. Kick for the morning crowd.(n/t)