The rejection of monarchical pomp and circumstance is one of the best things that makes America unique though. The President shouldn’t do that stuff either. Let athletes or coaches do the opening ceremony. Make the image of Independence Day the average Joe grilling in his backyard. We should be a country of ordinary people without trappings of royalty.
I dunno. I think you need someone to do it on a permanent, predictable basis. You need a head of state, in other words. But it should be a completely apolitical, disempowered office. For the life of me I don't understand why a few countries even have actual elections to choose their ceremonial presidents. Why let electoral politics in at all if the office is ceremonial?
I think *all* countries in the EU have elections to elect their Presidents. For example, here are the results of the first vote for Mattarella, who was referenced in the article:
Just as Prime Ministers are not directly elected (maybe there’s an exception to that somewhere in Europe), but are selected by the legislature, the same happens with Presidents, as far as I know.
Ireland directly elects their ceremonial President. Amazingly, their last few presidents have mostly been independents with interesting backgrounds:
Mary Robinson was a notable lawyer who brought a series of cases in favour of gender equality
Mary McAleese was also a lawyer, who had campaigned on abortion rights and legalising homosexuality, even while being a member of the most Catholic of Ireland's parties.
Michael D Higgins was a poet who was later a TD (elected member of the parliament) and briefly minister for culture.
Catherine Connolly was yet another lawyer, but notably /very/ left-wing and very pacifist (IIRC, she called for Ukraine to non-violently resist the Russian invasion).
I meant that every country elects its Presidents one way or another (either directly or indirectly) as opposed to having a President totally detached from politics, but yeah, I didn’t write it very clearly.
PS: Calling for Ukraine to non-violently resist is what the Putinists in my home country are also calling for! They just want peace, you see…
Oh, she's not a Putinist. She's just the sort of weird leftie who thinks that not having an army and being neutral means you don't get invaded. Proof: Ireland wasn't invaded in WWII.
(yes, this is utterly ludicrous. Fortunately, she's President of Ireland, which is a tiny and militarily irrelevant country and her role there has zero military significance)
Ah, yes, the Putinists in my home country also don’t openly support Putin. They just want the innocent Ukrainians to live in peace and not be forced to fight on behalf of NATO. They’re just doing it because they’re pacifists, of course!
>I think *all* countries in the EU have elections to elect their Presidents<
Right. Portugal had an election a week or two ago. It puzzles me this system isn't questioned a bit more. If the goal is a truly ceremonial presidency, why not remove the office *completely* from politics? IIRC in the Portuguese election, the campaign between the two candidates got pretty...political and a bit vituperative. Which I think means the incoming president will obviously be viewed as a rather partisan figure, no matter what the constitution may stipulate. But I'm no expert on Portuguese politics, maybe that's wrong (I happened to catch a news story about the election on, I think, Reuters).
Of course, some (most?) "ceremonial" presidencies (just like plenty of monarchies) *do* retain some residual powers. That fact and the aforementioned intrusion of electoral politics makes me think: a lot of these offices aren't really so purely ceremonial. But IMHO they ought to be! Hence my preference for dispensing with elections...
(IIRC Israel has gone about as far as you can go to make the Presidency highly, purely ceremonial in nature.)
I think the idea is to give the person public legitimacy. It's not really true that these are purely ceremonial roles- the president in a parliamentary system is involved in creating & dissolving governments. Technically the parties that have successfully formed a coalition and will meet with him/her for permission to create a government. This is high-stakes stuff, just behind the scenes
I think that the problem is that you can’t get the politics out of politics! Just as the apolitical Supreme Court in the US might potentially have some partisan inclinations (that’s what my American friends tell me), apolitical positions in the EU aren’t apolitical either. The funny thing is that AFAIK the desire to directly elect the ceremonial President is supported by saying that this will make the position LESS political than giving that right to the political parties in the legislature. (Also good point about the fact that usually the President has some power on paper that just mostly refuses to use.) If you have a direct election for President, then the people can select their favorite actor or singer or football player. Elections from the legislature tend to not do that.
>I think that the problem is that you can’t get the politics out of politics!<
Not completely, that's true. I guess I'd say we can try to minimize the political element, though. Some institutional structures are better at that than others.
>Just as the apolitical Supreme Court<
A body with as much power as SCOTUS could never be remotely apolitical. That's just a fantasy. But it seems to me an office whose sole purpose is giving toasts at state banquets and presiding over important ceremonies is a very different animal.
>AFAIK the desire to directly elect the ceremonial President is supported by saying that this will make the position LESS political than giving that right to the political parties in the legislature.<
Sure. That makes sense. What I'm thinking of isn't a parliamentary process but something more automatic. Like, in the American context, imagine if we had a body called "The Presidential College." Federal judges could join upon reaching the age of 60. The most senior member of this College under 80 years old becomes Vice President when a vacancy arises (he/she must leave the judiciary), and the VP succeeds to the White House when the President leaves office. One year term. Non-interference in politics is part of the deal. Senate can remove a President by simple majority vote for any reason (ie, corruption scandal, infirmity, political activity). Or whatever. There are a million different versions of ideas like this.
> imagine if we had a body called "The Presidential College."
You should consider working in fantasy or science fiction. Institutional world-buliding as good as this doesn't grow on trees. It adds great depth and generates hooks for great plot points.
“A body with as much power as SCOTUS could never be remotely apolitical. That's just a fantasy. But it seems to me an office whose sole purpose is giving toasts at state banquets and presiding over important ceremonies is a very different animal.”
I agree with this, but I think that the problem is that even a totally powerless President still has a lot of prestige. The winning political parties want to reward some of their long-serving members, and that is an incentive for politicization. In a US context, even if the President had no real power, people would still want to be the person representing the country on its 250th birthday, for example.
I also think that part of what’s happening here is that people don’t think that much about the President in a ceremonial EU context, so there isn’t a strong incentive to spend time thinking about a less political process. There are usually more pressing problems to worry about.
"Elections" yes but not necessarily with the whole electorate--the Wikipedia article you link to, for example, explains that "[o]nly members of Italian Parliament and regional delegates are entitled to vote." The President of Germany is elected similarly.
Yes but the Bundestag is deliberately supposed to reflect the broad opinions of the German electorate via proportional representation. The Bundesvammerlung (the body that elects the president of Germany) is deliberately not broadly representative of the electorate, but of the institutions of state, to reduce his legitimacy to exercise power.
The actual problem with state dinners is we hold them for heads of state and not heads of government. So King Charles, who is an unimportant person in world policy, receives one, but the British Prime Minister, one of the most powerful people in the world, does not.
Or we can be normal and have a ceremonial President and executive…um… I like Chancellor for a title. President continues to be elected by the Electoral College, but the electors *must* be elected by the lower house of the state legislature.
I wrote an EXTENSIVE Quora post back in the day about all this…
Basically, my conclusion was that the best way to resolve the design contradictions between the Senate, House, EC, and presidency, was to convert the EC into a coalition-building exercise within a multiparty environment created by RCV for Senate seats and STV for an enlargedHouse with a min-max of 3-5 seats per district — likewise, the EC would be semi-proportionalized along these same lines.
This gets you an EC that HAS to elect a President, but with usually no one party able to wield a pure majority.
The advantage here is that due to quirks of how the Constitution is written, it doesn’t really require any amendments to be passed. But admittedly, it would take a bit of getting-used to, and I never got around to figuring out a transitional solution.
Beat me to it. The avatar of a country should never be held by only one person, and it should never be held regularly, because all humans are flawed, and will always have disagreements with each other over many things.
The whole thing about the 250th becoming a celebration of the Donald is really bumming me out. Yes, I get that it shouldn't be that way. Yes, I am patriotic; I literally taught American history for years. Yes, I get that I should ignore the Donald and view this as a celebration of America.
But it doesn't feel that way to me. Maybe I'll feel differently when July rolls around.
I live in Philly, so we’re probably going to go hard on Ben Franklin and Independence Hall. Hopefully they stick with fireworks over the art museum, and Orange stays in DC.
It’ll also happen right smack in the middle of the World Cup which is amazing to think about. So the 250th will be happening with games going on literally that day. So the entire world’s eyes will be on the US that day.
And it’s basically the ultimate dream for Trump; to be the host of the world’s biggest tv show. I can’t see how he doesn’t try to make the entire thing all about him.
I actually hope I’m wrong about this but I think we underrate the possibility how much the World Cup is a real Trumpism coming to its ultimate conclusion moment.
The dual role of the President is a problem, but it would be much less of a problem if we hadn’t let the presidency become so much more powerful than the other branches of government.
This is really the core issue. The Executive has way too much power and Congress today has very little interest in protecting its institutional role, so does nothing to rein it in.
But all of the other developed countries have very powerful executives too. The British & Canadian PM is arguably more powerful than the US President.
The real issue is allowing an unqualified loon to win the Presidency via primaries. I'd say I'm pro-strong executive otherwise, and anyways 'weak executive but strong Congress' isn't really how any developed country works
It’s a different kind of power in a parliamentary system with different checks and restraints. Executives in parliamentary systems aren’t independently elected, nor do they have separate powers untouchable by the legislature. Parties are stronger and can replace who leads them. Parliamentary coalitions can form to bring down a government and replace a bad PM. Usually, a Prime Minister will have to keep a coalition together. Etc.
The PMs in those countries are elected by the parliament, and can be removed by a simple majority vote. It doesn’t happen frequently but one must assume that this also constrains the executive.
I think our problem arose out of the early partisanization of the Presidency. It seems tht the original idea was more of a "city manager" type relation carrying out Congress's policies. And does a PM do that any more than the President. Is the conflation of the head of state head of government really a problem? It is not more that Congress cannot legislate and the Presidents expands power to fill the vaacum?
Parliamentary systems ALSO lack the filibuster jamming them up, AND tend to have multiparty systems that provide multiple degrees of freedom for coalition formation.
IMO it’s not exactly that the presidency is broken; Congress was always broken FIRST.
The individual members do still abdicate their responsibilities to the government. But this means that legislation is passed unscrutinised, rather than not being passed at all. This means that governments - able to pass whatever laws they like - are inclined to confine themselves within their legal powers.
>> This means that governments - able to pass whatever laws they like - are inclined to confine themselves within their legal powers
That doesn’t make a lick of sense.
1. It’s not that legislation is being passed COMPLETELY unscrutinized, but that it’s being written by specific actors — usually either one with power or one with domain expertise, and/or their staff actually doing the writing — and then getting passed either through Secret Congress or overt partisan politics.
2. This doesn’t “incline [them] to confine” themselves, it does quite the opposite — the drafter knows they can sneak in some amount of hidden loopholes for themselves with few others being the wiser, or worse, being IN on it.
I think you’re confused about which country I was writing about. Parliamentary governments (unlike presidential ones) can pass whatever laws they want because they have a majority in their pocket.
Parliamentary governments are able to pass more or less whatever legislation they like, unlike presidential governments. As a result, when exercising powers, they tend to follow the law - because if they don’t like it, they can just change it.
If they lose in court, they’ll just announce that they’ll change the law to overturn the verdict.
You can see that in the original constitutional scheme where the guy who lost the election for president (but came in second) got to be the vice president. Those guys were surprisingly naive about certain things and we're still dealing with the legacy of that. They fixed some things but only in an ad hoc way.
If that was the original idea, they wouldn't have made George Washington the first president. He was not a guy devoted to the idea of just carrying out Congress's policies.
I think in context of a small republic only tenuously free of the former colonial power, surrounded by hostile native tribes and other still formidable enough European empires it makes a kind of sense to centralize defense and diplomacy in a coequal branch of government like the constitution does. The sense only starts breaking down in the mid 20th century then becomes a real problem with the combination of total Congressional dereliction of duty both via the administrative state and for reasons of partisan gamesmanship, plus a modern mass media environment where a single person can set an agenda in a way a larger deliberative body struggles to.
Lots of parliaments have shitty democratic outcomes and governance. The move towards a more imperial presidency has been bad for the U.S., but I don’t know if a parliamentary system would be any better in the U.S.
I think the absolute best case scenario is it pretty close to the status quo. Our hypothetical imperial prime minister would be no less empowered and we'd be in a constant state of unpredictable leadership flux. Even if we became multi-party due to the different structure we could still end up in a state of near paralysis like many European parliaments.
I strongly disagree. The US is going the way of Latin America banana republic presidencies because we're allowing a demagogue to build a direct connection with the voters and then advance that into almost unlimited political power. Our unique twist on it is that we use primaries to remove what should be the fundamental strength of political parties- picking their own nominees and boxing demagogues out. Just being frank- voters should not be allowed to pick the executive, it's too demagogic power in one place. And then, the President is too hard to remove once in office.
Parliaments are superior because they remove picking the head of the party from the voters, and then the executive can be removed at any time if they look wonky. It's a fundamentally superior political system. Parliaments are a social technology that works, it's an advancement in the way that tractors are superior at their job to horses
I hear you but I think what's really going on is downstream of technological and economic changes. The UK has had, what, 6 prime ministers in the last 10 years? Germany which is probably closer to what a parliamentary system would look like in the US has been stuck in a state of paralysis and ineffectual leadership as the post war mainstream fights increasingly hard to contain far right political insurgency. All of these countries are using illiberal mechanisms to prevent even more illiberal leaders and parties from taking power.
This isn't to say that our system is beyond reproach or couldn't be improved but there are limits to what proceduralism can guarantee in any system. At a certain point the people have to believe in liberalism (or at least republicanism or whatever) and the system has to deliver the goods. It's also far from clear to me that a different system would contain Trump. Anyone who has MAGA level support would be a factor in politics and could potentially form a government.
And the thing is that our system worked quite well for a long time and has resulted in largely stable governance. That has broken down, but I think it’s more realistic to try to get back to what worked before instead dream about a parliamentary system.
"We lack someone who plays a national role rather than a partisan one."
Not quite -- traditionally, we have foisted that role at least partly onto the First Lady, who, though technically partisan, was often expected to be nice to everyone and do all the smiling event stuff. But it's a half-baked solution at the best, as we have seen that some of them are great at it, some bad, and some completely indifferent or arguably even hostile to the role.
Anywho, I'm all for taking executive power away from the President and giving to to a head of government -- the Speaker of the House could be probably be tweaked to be what's needed. Keep an elected President who lives in the White House for the state stuff (like Ireland and Italy), but hold the election only every ten years or so and enact strong limits on campaign finance and on how long the election can last. I for one would have welcomed Presidents Tom Hanks and Dolly Parton.
Also the first lady position is sexist. One piece of good that Melania has done is resist the notion that being married to the President requires her to be a 1950's housewife who runs the house's social calendar. The President's spouse should do whatever they want, including a full time career.
Depends on what the career is. Ginny Thomas is bad not just because of evil beliefs but because Clarence can be bribed through her work for think tanks or whatever.
I mean, being First Lady IS a full-time career. I also think it comes with a lot of soft power that can be wielded quite effectively.
There is certainly a sexist element to it, but I don't think we should make the similarly sexist mistake of discounting its actual power and influence, for those women who can manage it well.
I would actually argue that in many ways, Melania is the First Lady who most closely resembles being a 1950s housewife. All the others merely projected that image, while otherwise being quite busy with events, charities, boards, schmoozing, etc. They all also clearly had causes that they choose to adopt and actually made good progress promoting, and I think that's meaningful.
But what does Melania care about other than looking like a model? Nothing, as far as I can tell. I have no clue what she does with her days, other than hang out in the WH and periodically cooperate with some project or another (like the recent documentary, which no, I have not seen).
The best that can be said about her is that she's fashionable and keeps quiet (mostly). Seems similar to the stereotype of a 1950s housewife to me.
Arguably, we were fortunate that the 200th anniversary was presided over by president who nobody had voted for, nobody had voted against, and was not particularly well-liked by his own party.
"Too late, too late, too bad, too bad," the poor liberal cried as the goon from the newly founded Beliefs Bureau of the Department of Homeland Security grabbed his collar and flung him out of the open helicopter door over the Gulf of America. "Parliamentary system, please," he moaned, unheard, as he plunged towards the cold, choppy waters . . . .
I'd be more convinced if we could point to parliamentary democracies being better run. In theory there are no limits on the British Parliament other than the King. If they want to build more housing and solve their biggest problem they easily could and with no judicial review. They just...don't.
in theory you're right but in practice it seems - not so much.
Yes, I feel like American fans of parliamentary government (including our host) really need to grapple more with the sheer level of dysfunction that has developed in the British parliamentary system in recent decades.
The US is the most politically unstable developed country man! I don't love everything about the British system, but they're not backsliding into Peronism. There are only 3 developed countries with a President (US/South Korea/Taiwan), and SK just had a coup attempt last year. Seems notable that the only semi-presidential developed country in France is also in terrible shape.
Parliaments clearly have a better track record than presidencies among rich countries in the 21st century, and it isn't close
What is the point of writing articles like this, about how our presidentialism isn't a good system, that never seem to be backed up or followed through with support for some of the more logical, achievable measure to reduce presidential power and make the President a less important figure, relative to a Congress and and State governments?
As someone who had this happen to me a few days ago, I want to go on the record and say it's really shitty and dismissive for semi-representatives of Slow Boring to go into the comments telling people "relax" over completely reasonable, non-hysterical statements.
The community discussion is one of the big value adds here, and if you or Milan or whomever go around shitting on any ideas you don't like or that you think challenge Matt in an unfair way, I'm going to start having second thoughts about whether this is the best use of my $80.
I’ve been moderating for a while now and I have always tried to foster an environment that allows for healthy disagreement with the daily post. I found this comment to be pretty silly because, as this post notes, it’s a holiday and slow boring either reruns other posts or publishes shorter more relaxed content on those days.
I’m not saying I’m going to ban this person for this silly comment. I’m just pushing back because I don’t think it disagrees with the article in a helpful way. Obviously, it would be very hard to shift away from our current presidential system!
I disagree with Matt pretty often in the comments, and sometimes with Ben directly, but the moderators have never been an issue. I think the actual comment was the problem, not the disagreement.
It is good epistemics to separate diagnosis and solutions, because you risk adjusting the diagnosis to support solutions you support, especially if there is a chance of an unsolvable problem.
I've been asking for a post on what Democrats agenda should be to rein in Presidential power that Trump's abuses have so exposed. Matt will say end the filibuster but what else?
What Matt's addressing here is the fact that a future Republican Congress can easily undo restrictions on Republican Presidents and pass new restrictions on Democratic Presidents. We've seen examples of this behavior in Wisconsin and North Carolina. In the US system, there's no long-term change to Presidential power without Constitutional change.
There's a major analytical difference between "presidentialism is bad" and "the president should have less power." Both might be true but the point is that you should have a prime minister to do the executive power things and a president to take on the ceremonial role. The conflation of roles isn't a problem you can solve by strengthening Congress at the president's expense, and there are realistic limits on how far you can go with that.
Sure, but we're a little beyond "identifying the problem" as being a novel or useful advancement of the public discourse -- it's simply saying the obvious, in a year when unilateral presidential power has upended global trade, slapped tarrifs on friendly neighbor for running a TV commercial critical of the president, sent armed forces into a city to disturb the peace, totally rewritten legislation on car emissions standards, etc, etc, etc.
The problems with "reducing Presidential power" are (1) Presidents have power to expand their powers as heads of a coequal branch, and (2) Congress can lift past restraints when the majority party wins the Presidency.
In a parliamentary system, the legislature runs the Government, not the head of state.
'The legislature' does not run the government in the UK, Canada, Australia, Japan etc. The Prime Minister does, and the PM is quite a bit more powerful than any US President- they tell their party in parliament how they're going to vote on legislation, and it mostly just gets done. I'm unaware of any country, developed or otherwise, that allows Congress to just run things.
Not to pick on you but there's a lot of confusion here in the comments between people who want a parliamentary system but also somehow a weaker executive. Parliaments have a stronger and less constrained executive, not the other way around
I don't feel picked on, maybe in part because your comment seems to miss the key point. In a parliamentary system, the PM is a member of the legislature and is elected by the legislature. This means the PM is almost always the leader of the party holding (directly or in coalition) the majority of parliamentary seats.
The point is not to have a "weaker" executive, but to have a unitary accountable government responsible for making and implementing legislation and policy. In a parliamentary system there is no separation between the legislative and executive functions, so there is no conflict between "coequal" branches of government: the PM is a member of the legislature and can be removed by a simple majority of the legislature at any time. The PM, unlike the Chief Executive in a Presidential system, has no independent constitutional power. As the presumed leader of the party in power, the PM does indeed have great power to drive legislation and policy.
I think we're kind of in agreement, but I just want to note- the British/Canadian/Australian/Japanese PMs dominate their legislature. Frankly, they give orders about what legislation is to be passed. It's a relationship utterly unlike the US system, where individual legislators can choose to defy their party on any vote they want. And removing your PM generally triggers early elections, which no one is eager to do. When these PMs are removed it's generally by a senior committee of their own party.
The PM can be removed by a simple majority, but what I think you're missing is that they can remove an individual legislator from the party far easier. Trudeau ejected 2 members of his own party for defying him during a scandal, Starmer is blocking a rival from running for office in his district, etc. Again it's a hierarchical relationship where the Prime Minister tells the legislature what's going to be passed
The fact that Lincoln and Washington don’t have their own days off is wild to me to this day. Just sort of the umpteenth example of the downstream consequences of the South being a one party authoritarian dictatorship for so long given what power that gave to “Dixiecrats” in Congress*.
Also, I’ve said a number of times I’m absolutely on board with the idea there should be at least one Federal holiday every month. The fact there is no Federal holidays from Presidents’ Day to Memorial Day is nuts to me (part of why my wife has convinced me that March not February is actually the worst month given March is usually still pretty cold and “wintery” and we don’t really see consistently warmer weather until mid April. At least where I live). Like I feel like there are plenty of candidates for holidays. Also, if we’re brainstorming easy “Populist” ways for Dems to appeal to swing or rural voters that they are no longer the party that caters to “They/Them” first then I’d say coming out for making the day after Easter a Federal holiday seems an easy win for me.
* The thing that gives me hope and worry about this Trumpy moment is that we already have experienced having an authoritarian dictatorship in our borders. I’m going to be the upteenth person to point out that the U.S. was not a true free and fair democracy until 1965. So my “hope” is that this country was actually able to survive and become a true democracy after 100 years of an authoritarian terror campaign. My “worry” is the “Stephen Miller element” (as I call it) clearly have a playbook in mind they want to recapture. I actually don’t think Milller (and Musk who’s part of this “element”) represents anywhere close to a majority of the America public but he does represent a more significant minority than too many people want to admit (and based on polling a disturbingly high percentage of Republicans). So yeah my worry is we clearly as a country came to accept a world of actual authoritarianism in a large part of our country as just sort of the way things were in our past.
I have to say while I am no fan of (and did not ever vote for) Trump, I would actively hurl myself off of my balcony before I sat through a 250th anniversary celebration Mc'd by Kamala Harris.
The other benefit of a parliamentary system is that it's more difficult for the Government as a whole to deflect responsibility and indefinitely defer action. The Chief Executive would be a member of Congress, along with the entire Cabinet.
Such a system would also make it more difficult for Heads of Government to expand their powers unconstitutionally because they are also members of the legislative branch.
A parliamentary system might work better with multi-representative districts with proportional representation.
They don't have to be members of the parliament - the Netherlands bans ministers from also being in parliament (albeit, parliamentarians choose a deputy on appointment as a minister) but the requirement to be an MP and the use of the parliament to scrutinise the ministers as individuals is specifically a British phenomenon, inherited by the other Westminister systems (ie Australia, New Zealand, India, Canada, etc).
Question Time - where ministers answer questions about their departments acting both as MP and as minister simultaneously - is a particular example of this, as it isn't possible for a minister who is not in parliament to be scrutinised during Question Time.
While most of the Commonwealth parliaments have a version of this (albeit without the UK's 1961 reforms that separated Prime Minister's Questions from Departmental Questions), it's very unusual in the rest of Europe, where parliamentary scrutiny of the executive is more often done by committees, much like how the US does it (though they will drag the PM before committees much more often than the President is questioned by a House or Senate committee).
The rejection of monarchical pomp and circumstance is one of the best things that makes America unique though. The President shouldn’t do that stuff either. Let athletes or coaches do the opening ceremony. Make the image of Independence Day the average Joe grilling in his backyard. We should be a country of ordinary people without trappings of royalty.
I dunno. I think you need someone to do it on a permanent, predictable basis. You need a head of state, in other words. But it should be a completely apolitical, disempowered office. For the life of me I don't understand why a few countries even have actual elections to choose their ceremonial presidents. Why let electoral politics in at all if the office is ceremonial?
It's symbolism for a symbolic role. The president is the head of state for a democratic republic so is chosen democratically.
I think *all* countries in the EU have elections to elect their Presidents. For example, here are the results of the first vote for Mattarella, who was referenced in the article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergio_Mattarella#Presidency_(2015%E2%80%93present)
Just as Prime Ministers are not directly elected (maybe there’s an exception to that somewhere in Europe), but are selected by the legislature, the same happens with Presidents, as far as I know.
Ireland directly elects their ceremonial President. Amazingly, their last few presidents have mostly been independents with interesting backgrounds:
Mary Robinson was a notable lawyer who brought a series of cases in favour of gender equality
Mary McAleese was also a lawyer, who had campaigned on abortion rights and legalising homosexuality, even while being a member of the most Catholic of Ireland's parties.
Michael D Higgins was a poet who was later a TD (elected member of the parliament) and briefly minister for culture.
Catherine Connolly was yet another lawyer, but notably /very/ left-wing and very pacifist (IIRC, she called for Ukraine to non-violently resist the Russian invasion).
I meant that every country elects its Presidents one way or another (either directly or indirectly) as opposed to having a President totally detached from politics, but yeah, I didn’t write it very clearly.
PS: Calling for Ukraine to non-violently resist is what the Putinists in my home country are also calling for! They just want peace, you see…
Oh, she's not a Putinist. She's just the sort of weird leftie who thinks that not having an army and being neutral means you don't get invaded. Proof: Ireland wasn't invaded in WWII.
(yes, this is utterly ludicrous. Fortunately, she's President of Ireland, which is a tiny and militarily irrelevant country and her role there has zero military significance)
Ah, yes, the Putinists in my home country also don’t openly support Putin. They just want the innocent Ukrainians to live in peace and not be forced to fight on behalf of NATO. They’re just doing it because they’re pacifists, of course!
>I think *all* countries in the EU have elections to elect their Presidents<
Right. Portugal had an election a week or two ago. It puzzles me this system isn't questioned a bit more. If the goal is a truly ceremonial presidency, why not remove the office *completely* from politics? IIRC in the Portuguese election, the campaign between the two candidates got pretty...political and a bit vituperative. Which I think means the incoming president will obviously be viewed as a rather partisan figure, no matter what the constitution may stipulate. But I'm no expert on Portuguese politics, maybe that's wrong (I happened to catch a news story about the election on, I think, Reuters).
Of course, some (most?) "ceremonial" presidencies (just like plenty of monarchies) *do* retain some residual powers. That fact and the aforementioned intrusion of electoral politics makes me think: a lot of these offices aren't really so purely ceremonial. But IMHO they ought to be! Hence my preference for dispensing with elections...
(IIRC Israel has gone about as far as you can go to make the Presidency highly, purely ceremonial in nature.)
I think the idea is to give the person public legitimacy. It's not really true that these are purely ceremonial roles- the president in a parliamentary system is involved in creating & dissolving governments. Technically the parties that have successfully formed a coalition and will meet with him/her for permission to create a government. This is high-stakes stuff, just behind the scenes
I think that the problem is that you can’t get the politics out of politics! Just as the apolitical Supreme Court in the US might potentially have some partisan inclinations (that’s what my American friends tell me), apolitical positions in the EU aren’t apolitical either. The funny thing is that AFAIK the desire to directly elect the ceremonial President is supported by saying that this will make the position LESS political than giving that right to the political parties in the legislature. (Also good point about the fact that usually the President has some power on paper that just mostly refuses to use.) If you have a direct election for President, then the people can select their favorite actor or singer or football player. Elections from the legislature tend to not do that.
>I think that the problem is that you can’t get the politics out of politics!<
Not completely, that's true. I guess I'd say we can try to minimize the political element, though. Some institutional structures are better at that than others.
>Just as the apolitical Supreme Court<
A body with as much power as SCOTUS could never be remotely apolitical. That's just a fantasy. But it seems to me an office whose sole purpose is giving toasts at state banquets and presiding over important ceremonies is a very different animal.
>AFAIK the desire to directly elect the ceremonial President is supported by saying that this will make the position LESS political than giving that right to the political parties in the legislature.<
Sure. That makes sense. What I'm thinking of isn't a parliamentary process but something more automatic. Like, in the American context, imagine if we had a body called "The Presidential College." Federal judges could join upon reaching the age of 60. The most senior member of this College under 80 years old becomes Vice President when a vacancy arises (he/she must leave the judiciary), and the VP succeeds to the White House when the President leaves office. One year term. Non-interference in politics is part of the deal. Senate can remove a President by simple majority vote for any reason (ie, corruption scandal, infirmity, political activity). Or whatever. There are a million different versions of ideas like this.
> imagine if we had a body called "The Presidential College."
You should consider working in fantasy or science fiction. Institutional world-buliding as good as this doesn't grow on trees. It adds great depth and generates hooks for great plot points.
“A body with as much power as SCOTUS could never be remotely apolitical. That's just a fantasy. But it seems to me an office whose sole purpose is giving toasts at state banquets and presiding over important ceremonies is a very different animal.”
I agree with this, but I think that the problem is that even a totally powerless President still has a lot of prestige. The winning political parties want to reward some of their long-serving members, and that is an incentive for politicization. In a US context, even if the President had no real power, people would still want to be the person representing the country on its 250th birthday, for example.
I also think that part of what’s happening here is that people don’t think that much about the President in a ceremonial EU context, so there isn’t a strong incentive to spend time thinking about a less political process. There are usually more pressing problems to worry about.
"Elections" yes but not necessarily with the whole electorate--the Wikipedia article you link to, for example, explains that "[o]nly members of Italian Parliament and regional delegates are entitled to vote." The President of Germany is elected similarly.
This is correct, but the Chancellor of Germany is also elected by the Bundestag, not the whole electorate.
Yes but the Bundestag is deliberately supposed to reflect the broad opinions of the German electorate via proportional representation. The Bundesvammerlung (the body that elects the president of Germany) is deliberately not broadly representative of the electorate, but of the institutions of state, to reduce his legitimacy to exercise power.
And off with the whole diplomatic protocols, red carpets, state dinners, turkey pardons, and other assorted dog and pony shows.
Why no state dinners? It seems like a pretty low cost effort of showing respect for another nation you’re trying to make diplomatic moves on.
The actual problem with state dinners is we hold them for heads of state and not heads of government. So King Charles, who is an unimportant person in world policy, receives one, but the British Prime Minister, one of the most powerful people in the world, does not.
I think we should reallocate most of these functions to the Speaker of the House, as the most direct representative of the people.
Or we can be normal and have a ceremonial President and executive…um… I like Chancellor for a title. President continues to be elected by the Electoral College, but the electors *must* be elected by the lower house of the state legislature.
https://tinyurl.com/yz2uhncp
I wrote an EXTENSIVE Quora post back in the day about all this…
Basically, my conclusion was that the best way to resolve the design contradictions between the Senate, House, EC, and presidency, was to convert the EC into a coalition-building exercise within a multiparty environment created by RCV for Senate seats and STV for an enlargedHouse with a min-max of 3-5 seats per district — likewise, the EC would be semi-proportionalized along these same lines.
This gets you an EC that HAS to elect a President, but with usually no one party able to wield a pure majority.
The advantage here is that due to quirks of how the Constitution is written, it doesn’t really require any amendments to be passed. But admittedly, it would take a bit of getting-used to, and I never got around to figuring out a transitional solution.
The 12th Amendment requires that the President be elected by a raw majority of EC votes- not a plurality. That's why PR for the EC doesn't work
The operating costs for Air Force One almost certainly exceed those of Buckingham Palace. We have not rejected pomp and circumstance.
Beat me to it. The avatar of a country should never be held by only one person, and it should never be held regularly, because all humans are flawed, and will always have disagreements with each other over many things.
The whole thing about the 250th becoming a celebration of the Donald is really bumming me out. Yes, I get that it shouldn't be that way. Yes, I am patriotic; I literally taught American history for years. Yes, I get that I should ignore the Donald and view this as a celebration of America.
But it doesn't feel that way to me. Maybe I'll feel differently when July rolls around.
An important consequence of the 2024 election but I never saw anyone talk about it.
I live in Philly, so we’re probably going to go hard on Ben Franklin and Independence Hall. Hopefully they stick with fireworks over the art museum, and Orange stays in DC.
>The whole thing about the 250th becoming a celebration of the Donald is really bumming me out.<
Don't worry, the year after next Trump gets to preside over the LA Olympics. Yipee!
You're welcome to come to Boston, where we'll be celebrating a bunch of long-dead founding fathers, not Trump
It’ll also happen right smack in the middle of the World Cup which is amazing to think about. So the 250th will be happening with games going on literally that day. So the entire world’s eyes will be on the US that day.
And it’s basically the ultimate dream for Trump; to be the host of the world’s biggest tv show. I can’t see how he doesn’t try to make the entire thing all about him.
I actually hope I’m wrong about this but I think we underrate the possibility how much the World Cup is a real Trumpism coming to its ultimate conclusion moment.
There's an opportunity for a stroke to do the funniest thing ever.
I patriotically volunteer to serve the people of the United States as their disempowered Head of State.
The dual role of the President is a problem, but it would be much less of a problem if we hadn’t let the presidency become so much more powerful than the other branches of government.
This is really the core issue. The Executive has way too much power and Congress today has very little interest in protecting its institutional role, so does nothing to rein it in.
But all of the other developed countries have very powerful executives too. The British & Canadian PM is arguably more powerful than the US President.
The real issue is allowing an unqualified loon to win the Presidency via primaries. I'd say I'm pro-strong executive otherwise, and anyways 'weak executive but strong Congress' isn't really how any developed country works
It’s a different kind of power in a parliamentary system with different checks and restraints. Executives in parliamentary systems aren’t independently elected, nor do they have separate powers untouchable by the legislature. Parties are stronger and can replace who leads them. Parliamentary coalitions can form to bring down a government and replace a bad PM. Usually, a Prime Minister will have to keep a coalition together. Etc.
The PMs in those countries are elected by the parliament, and can be removed by a simple majority vote. It doesn’t happen frequently but one must assume that this also constrains the executive.
I think our problem arose out of the early partisanization of the Presidency. It seems tht the original idea was more of a "city manager" type relation carrying out Congress's policies. And does a PM do that any more than the President. Is the conflation of the head of state head of government really a problem? It is not more that Congress cannot legislate and the Presidents expands power to fill the vaacum?
In a parliamentary system the head of government has support in the legislature and sits in it so it is much easier to actually pass things.
Parliamentary systems ALSO lack the filibuster jamming them up, AND tend to have multiparty systems that provide multiple degrees of freedom for coalition formation.
IMO it’s not exactly that the presidency is broken; Congress was always broken FIRST.
And much harder for the legislature to abdicate its responsibilities.
The individual members do still abdicate their responsibilities to the government. But this means that legislation is passed unscrutinised, rather than not being passed at all. This means that governments - able to pass whatever laws they like - are inclined to confine themselves within their legal powers.
>> This means that governments - able to pass whatever laws they like - are inclined to confine themselves within their legal powers
That doesn’t make a lick of sense.
1. It’s not that legislation is being passed COMPLETELY unscrutinized, but that it’s being written by specific actors — usually either one with power or one with domain expertise, and/or their staff actually doing the writing — and then getting passed either through Secret Congress or overt partisan politics.
2. This doesn’t “incline [them] to confine” themselves, it does quite the opposite — the drafter knows they can sneak in some amount of hidden loopholes for themselves with few others being the wiser, or worse, being IN on it.
I think you’re confused about which country I was writing about. Parliamentary governments (unlike presidential ones) can pass whatever laws they want because they have a majority in their pocket.
Parliamentary governments are able to pass more or less whatever legislation they like, unlike presidential governments. As a result, when exercising powers, they tend to follow the law - because if they don’t like it, they can just change it.
If they lose in court, they’ll just announce that they’ll change the law to overturn the verdict.
Ahh okay. I stand corrected.
You can see that in the original constitutional scheme where the guy who lost the election for president (but came in second) got to be the vice president. Those guys were surprisingly naive about certain things and we're still dealing with the legacy of that. They fixed some things but only in an ad hoc way.
That wasn’t intentional; it was just a mathematical error they hadn’t thought too hard about.
If that was the original idea, they wouldn't have made George Washington the first president. He was not a guy devoted to the idea of just carrying out Congress's policies.
I think in context of a small republic only tenuously free of the former colonial power, surrounded by hostile native tribes and other still formidable enough European empires it makes a kind of sense to centralize defense and diplomacy in a coequal branch of government like the constitution does. The sense only starts breaking down in the mid 20th century then becomes a real problem with the combination of total Congressional dereliction of duty both via the administrative state and for reasons of partisan gamesmanship, plus a modern mass media environment where a single person can set an agenda in a way a larger deliberative body struggles to.
Lots of parliaments have shitty democratic outcomes and governance. The move towards a more imperial presidency has been bad for the U.S., but I don’t know if a parliamentary system would be any better in the U.S.
I think the absolute best case scenario is it pretty close to the status quo. Our hypothetical imperial prime minister would be no less empowered and we'd be in a constant state of unpredictable leadership flux. Even if we became multi-party due to the different structure we could still end up in a state of near paralysis like many European parliaments.
The Dutch apparently tax unrealized capital gains. Parliaments can still support bad policies and aren’t a panacea.
I strongly disagree. The US is going the way of Latin America banana republic presidencies because we're allowing a demagogue to build a direct connection with the voters and then advance that into almost unlimited political power. Our unique twist on it is that we use primaries to remove what should be the fundamental strength of political parties- picking their own nominees and boxing demagogues out. Just being frank- voters should not be allowed to pick the executive, it's too demagogic power in one place. And then, the President is too hard to remove once in office.
Parliaments are superior because they remove picking the head of the party from the voters, and then the executive can be removed at any time if they look wonky. It's a fundamentally superior political system. Parliaments are a social technology that works, it's an advancement in the way that tractors are superior at their job to horses
I hear you but I think what's really going on is downstream of technological and economic changes. The UK has had, what, 6 prime ministers in the last 10 years? Germany which is probably closer to what a parliamentary system would look like in the US has been stuck in a state of paralysis and ineffectual leadership as the post war mainstream fights increasingly hard to contain far right political insurgency. All of these countries are using illiberal mechanisms to prevent even more illiberal leaders and parties from taking power.
This isn't to say that our system is beyond reproach or couldn't be improved but there are limits to what proceduralism can guarantee in any system. At a certain point the people have to believe in liberalism (or at least republicanism or whatever) and the system has to deliver the goods. It's also far from clear to me that a different system would contain Trump. Anyone who has MAGA level support would be a factor in politics and could potentially form a government.
And the thing is that our system worked quite well for a long time and has resulted in largely stable governance. That has broken down, but I think it’s more realistic to try to get back to what worked before instead dream about a parliamentary system.
I think our problems are fundamentally cultural and less about specific institutional structures.
We should have an official Uncle Sam who does the ceremonial stuff
Rotate him with Auntie Sam for maximum effect.
Samuel L. Jackson, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
Sounds good to me. Only risk I can see is if some take his classic line of "English, motherfucker, do you speak it?" too extremely.
Definitely a top-tier choice, but my personal vote would be for Snoop Dogg
I was taking the name a little more literally. Sam Elliott would also be good.
Sam Worthington crying on his giant pile of Avatar money while he waits for a phone call
Sam Darnold, a true American comeback story.
"We lack someone who plays a national role rather than a partisan one."
Not quite -- traditionally, we have foisted that role at least partly onto the First Lady, who, though technically partisan, was often expected to be nice to everyone and do all the smiling event stuff. But it's a half-baked solution at the best, as we have seen that some of them are great at it, some bad, and some completely indifferent or arguably even hostile to the role.
Anywho, I'm all for taking executive power away from the President and giving to to a head of government -- the Speaker of the House could be probably be tweaked to be what's needed. Keep an elected President who lives in the White House for the state stuff (like Ireland and Italy), but hold the election only every ten years or so and enact strong limits on campaign finance and on how long the election can last. I for one would have welcomed Presidents Tom Hanks and Dolly Parton.
Also the first lady position is sexist. One piece of good that Melania has done is resist the notion that being married to the President requires her to be a 1950's housewife who runs the house's social calendar. The President's spouse should do whatever they want, including a full time career.
Depends on what the career is. Ginny Thomas is bad not just because of evil beliefs but because Clarence can be bribed through her work for think tanks or whatever.
Clarence Thomas developed his beliefs long before he even met Virginia Lamp. He's wrong about a lot but he isn't bought and paid for.
I mean, being First Lady IS a full-time career. I also think it comes with a lot of soft power that can be wielded quite effectively.
There is certainly a sexist element to it, but I don't think we should make the similarly sexist mistake of discounting its actual power and influence, for those women who can manage it well.
Is Melania really exceptional in that regard, though?
I would actually argue that in many ways, Melania is the First Lady who most closely resembles being a 1950s housewife. All the others merely projected that image, while otherwise being quite busy with events, charities, boards, schmoozing, etc. They all also clearly had causes that they choose to adopt and actually made good progress promoting, and I think that's meaningful.
But what does Melania care about other than looking like a model? Nothing, as far as I can tell. I have no clue what she does with her days, other than hang out in the WH and periodically cooperate with some project or another (like the recent documentary, which no, I have not seen).
The best that can be said about her is that she's fashionable and keeps quiet (mostly). Seems similar to the stereotype of a 1950s housewife to me.
Arguably, we were fortunate that the 200th anniversary was presided over by president who nobody had voted for, nobody had voted against, and was not particularly well-liked by his own party.
"Too late, too late, too bad, too bad," the poor liberal cried as the goon from the newly founded Beliefs Bureau of the Department of Homeland Security grabbed his collar and flung him out of the open helicopter door over the Gulf of America. "Parliamentary system, please," he moaned, unheard, as he plunged towards the cold, choppy waters . . . .
I'd be more convinced if we could point to parliamentary democracies being better run. In theory there are no limits on the British Parliament other than the King. If they want to build more housing and solve their biggest problem they easily could and with no judicial review. They just...don't.
in theory you're right but in practice it seems - not so much.
Yes, I feel like American fans of parliamentary government (including our host) really need to grapple more with the sheer level of dysfunction that has developed in the British parliamentary system in recent decades.
The US is the most politically unstable developed country man! I don't love everything about the British system, but they're not backsliding into Peronism. There are only 3 developed countries with a President (US/South Korea/Taiwan), and SK just had a coup attempt last year. Seems notable that the only semi-presidential developed country in France is also in terrible shape.
Parliaments clearly have a better track record than presidencies among rich countries in the 21st century, and it isn't close
When I read the headline, I was sure we were in for another Juan Linz retrospective, but this was nice too.
What is the point of writing articles like this, about how our presidentialism isn't a good system, that never seem to be backed up or followed through with support for some of the more logical, achievable measure to reduce presidential power and make the President a less important figure, relative to a Congress and and State governments?
Relax, this is a short themed take on a holiday from a newsletter that takes holidays off and provides content twice a day 5 days a week.
As someone who had this happen to me a few days ago, I want to go on the record and say it's really shitty and dismissive for semi-representatives of Slow Boring to go into the comments telling people "relax" over completely reasonable, non-hysterical statements.
The community discussion is one of the big value adds here, and if you or Milan or whomever go around shitting on any ideas you don't like or that you think challenge Matt in an unfair way, I'm going to start having second thoughts about whether this is the best use of my $80.
I’ve been moderating for a while now and I have always tried to foster an environment that allows for healthy disagreement with the daily post. I found this comment to be pretty silly because, as this post notes, it’s a holiday and slow boring either reruns other posts or publishes shorter more relaxed content on those days.
I’m not saying I’m going to ban this person for this silly comment. I’m just pushing back because I don’t think it disagrees with the article in a helpful way. Obviously, it would be very hard to shift away from our current presidential system!
I disagree with Matt pretty often in the comments, and sometimes with Ben directly, but the moderators have never been an issue. I think the actual comment was the problem, not the disagreement.
Calm down, bro.
He doesn't have to pretend problems are solvable.
It is good epistemics to separate diagnosis and solutions, because you risk adjusting the diagnosis to support solutions you support, especially if there is a chance of an unsolvable problem.
So again, what is the point?
Is it necessary for a post to have a solution? Just naming a solution doesn't make it happen.
It's okay to acknowledge that some things are both suboptimal and intractable.
Because it was an interesting read, to spark debate, to vent his views on pointless holidays or a Straussian call for the US to install a king.
I've been asking for a post on what Democrats agenda should be to rein in Presidential power that Trump's abuses have so exposed. Matt will say end the filibuster but what else?
What Matt's addressing here is the fact that a future Republican Congress can easily undo restrictions on Republican Presidents and pass new restrictions on Democratic Presidents. We've seen examples of this behavior in Wisconsin and North Carolina. In the US system, there's no long-term change to Presidential power without Constitutional change.
There's a major analytical difference between "presidentialism is bad" and "the president should have less power." Both might be true but the point is that you should have a prime minister to do the executive power things and a president to take on the ceremonial role. The conflation of roles isn't a problem you can solve by strengthening Congress at the president's expense, and there are realistic limits on how far you can go with that.
Matt may not have a solution, but identifying the problem encourages other smart people to think about how to solve the issue.
Sure, but we're a little beyond "identifying the problem" as being a novel or useful advancement of the public discourse -- it's simply saying the obvious, in a year when unilateral presidential power has upended global trade, slapped tarrifs on friendly neighbor for running a TV commercial critical of the president, sent armed forces into a city to disturb the peace, totally rewritten legislation on car emissions standards, etc, etc, etc.
The problems with "reducing Presidential power" are (1) Presidents have power to expand their powers as heads of a coequal branch, and (2) Congress can lift past restraints when the majority party wins the Presidency.
In a parliamentary system, the legislature runs the Government, not the head of state.
'The legislature' does not run the government in the UK, Canada, Australia, Japan etc. The Prime Minister does, and the PM is quite a bit more powerful than any US President- they tell their party in parliament how they're going to vote on legislation, and it mostly just gets done. I'm unaware of any country, developed or otherwise, that allows Congress to just run things.
Not to pick on you but there's a lot of confusion here in the comments between people who want a parliamentary system but also somehow a weaker executive. Parliaments have a stronger and less constrained executive, not the other way around
I don't feel picked on, maybe in part because your comment seems to miss the key point. In a parliamentary system, the PM is a member of the legislature and is elected by the legislature. This means the PM is almost always the leader of the party holding (directly or in coalition) the majority of parliamentary seats.
The point is not to have a "weaker" executive, but to have a unitary accountable government responsible for making and implementing legislation and policy. In a parliamentary system there is no separation between the legislative and executive functions, so there is no conflict between "coequal" branches of government: the PM is a member of the legislature and can be removed by a simple majority of the legislature at any time. The PM, unlike the Chief Executive in a Presidential system, has no independent constitutional power. As the presumed leader of the party in power, the PM does indeed have great power to drive legislation and policy.
I think we're kind of in agreement, but I just want to note- the British/Canadian/Australian/Japanese PMs dominate their legislature. Frankly, they give orders about what legislation is to be passed. It's a relationship utterly unlike the US system, where individual legislators can choose to defy their party on any vote they want. And removing your PM generally triggers early elections, which no one is eager to do. When these PMs are removed it's generally by a senior committee of their own party.
The PM can be removed by a simple majority, but what I think you're missing is that they can remove an individual legislator from the party far easier. Trudeau ejected 2 members of his own party for defying him during a scandal, Starmer is blocking a rival from running for office in his district, etc. Again it's a hierarchical relationship where the Prime Minister tells the legislature what's going to be passed
The fact that Lincoln and Washington don’t have their own days off is wild to me to this day. Just sort of the umpteenth example of the downstream consequences of the South being a one party authoritarian dictatorship for so long given what power that gave to “Dixiecrats” in Congress*.
Also, I’ve said a number of times I’m absolutely on board with the idea there should be at least one Federal holiday every month. The fact there is no Federal holidays from Presidents’ Day to Memorial Day is nuts to me (part of why my wife has convinced me that March not February is actually the worst month given March is usually still pretty cold and “wintery” and we don’t really see consistently warmer weather until mid April. At least where I live). Like I feel like there are plenty of candidates for holidays. Also, if we’re brainstorming easy “Populist” ways for Dems to appeal to swing or rural voters that they are no longer the party that caters to “They/Them” first then I’d say coming out for making the day after Easter a Federal holiday seems an easy win for me.
* The thing that gives me hope and worry about this Trumpy moment is that we already have experienced having an authoritarian dictatorship in our borders. I’m going to be the upteenth person to point out that the U.S. was not a true free and fair democracy until 1965. So my “hope” is that this country was actually able to survive and become a true democracy after 100 years of an authoritarian terror campaign. My “worry” is the “Stephen Miller element” (as I call it) clearly have a playbook in mind they want to recapture. I actually don’t think Milller (and Musk who’s part of this “element”) represents anywhere close to a majority of the America public but he does represent a more significant minority than too many people want to admit (and based on polling a disturbingly high percentage of Republicans). So yeah my worry is we clearly as a country came to accept a world of actual authoritarianism in a large part of our country as just sort of the way things were in our past.
I'd go a step further and say that one day off for everyone who's served as president (two days off for non-consecutive terms) would be cool.
I have to say while I am no fan of (and did not ever vote for) Trump, I would actively hurl myself off of my balcony before I sat through a 250th anniversary celebration Mc'd by Kamala Harris.
The other benefit of a parliamentary system is that it's more difficult for the Government as a whole to deflect responsibility and indefinitely defer action. The Chief Executive would be a member of Congress, along with the entire Cabinet.
Such a system would also make it more difficult for Heads of Government to expand their powers unconstitutionally because they are also members of the legislative branch.
A parliamentary system might work better with multi-representative districts with proportional representation.
They don't have to be members of the parliament - the Netherlands bans ministers from also being in parliament (albeit, parliamentarians choose a deputy on appointment as a minister) but the requirement to be an MP and the use of the parliament to scrutinise the ministers as individuals is specifically a British phenomenon, inherited by the other Westminister systems (ie Australia, New Zealand, India, Canada, etc).
Question Time - where ministers answer questions about their departments acting both as MP and as minister simultaneously - is a particular example of this, as it isn't possible for a minister who is not in parliament to be scrutinised during Question Time.
While most of the Commonwealth parliaments have a version of this (albeit without the UK's 1961 reforms that separated Prime Minister's Questions from Departmental Questions), it's very unusual in the rest of Europe, where parliamentary scrutiny of the executive is more often done by committees, much like how the US does it (though they will drag the PM before committees much more often than the President is questioned by a House or Senate committee).