Contemporary Political Reforms in a Multi Party Democracy

 Almost all Americans who are aware at all about politics have some kind of opinion about the issues of lobbying, interest groups, and campaign financing. As usual, it gets complicated, but there are some things to remember when thinking about how it might work in a multi party presidential republic. First, let's try defining some terms.  A lobbyist is a kind of person whose profession it is is to convince other people to support other things using the latter's power and authority. They usually for it for pay although sometimes do it pro bono, IE for free for some varying reason like personally being really interested in the subject, being able to put it on their resume in the future, or otherwise, although normally they would be paid if someone already had a good resume and didn't have a personal fascination or care for the topic. Lobbying is just the verb form of their profession, which some people might associate with the oldest profession.  An interest group is any gr...

 Americans often have pride in the idea of America being a federal state, one where sovereignty is directly vested from the people in both the federal and state governments and prize decentralization.  Given the true vastness of America, 330 million people, the fourth largest country in the world with 9.8 million square kilometres or 3.8 million square miles, fifty states, ranging from the population of Wyoming, to the median of about 4,558,234 people, and a median area of 151,953 sq km or 57,093 sq miles, each with so many different cultures, many with strong minority languages besides English, and their respective histories, this is likely for the best.  Good reforms have come at the state level, but often, people see their states anymore as politically competitive and have less trust that they will follow the will of their people. Ballotpedia has a map of trifectas, where the same party controls both houses of the state legislature (or the state senate in the...

In a system with political parties, you need candidates who are aligned with parties. Parties choose their candidates who, if not members, are at least generally in agreement with the party, will join their legislative group if elected to a legislative position, and will generally vote to advance the interests of the people who comprise the party.  Parties do this in a wide variety of means around the world.  Some can be literally appointed by their leader, which happens in Canada in some instances, particularly in the case of an early election caused by the collapse of legislative confidence in a parliamentary system, or in areas where the party is weak or their local branches are corrupt.  Some are chosen by a panel which acts for the purpose of considering candidates. New Zealand Labour uses this method using a few different selection groups to hold basically a job interview, advisory votes by the members, and the panel makes the final selection for each constituency, ...

Hopefully before you read this, you will have read the previous post, explaining the structure of revenue and spending of the American federal system. It is important to keep that context in mind.  Long before Britain was a parliamentary system, generally considered to be in place during the premiership of Robert Walpole and firmly established as independent of the will of the monarch by the time the Reform Act of 1832 was enacted, Britain did have relatively pluralistic inclusion of a parliament that could have strong power over the forces of the monarchy. For centuries, the power to spend and tax had to be approved by Parliament. The Parliament also happened to have the power to impeach and convict and ergo throw out royal ministers as well.  All around the world, even when the executive is legally independent of the legislature, as presidential republics are, their powers of taxing and spending are often significantly constrained.  As the Congress can create...

It's been a while. In a presidential republic, the president, or more specifically in the United States, the Federal Treasury and the Secretary of the Treasury spends money on behalf of the United States and borrows any money necessary to do this. But it is illegal to spend any money in the United States as part of the federal government unless authorized for by law. That doesn't necessarily mean that all spending comes to a close in any fiscal period provided for by a budget but they do need to be rooted in a statute. There is no way a president can collect without this. A few important constitutional caveats. Military spending expires at least once every two years, as per Article I Section 8, where the Congress can raise and support armies but appropriations of money to that use last no more than two years. The salaries of the Congresspeople themselves cannot be changed without an intervening election to the House of Representatives, as per the 27th amendment. The sal...

As you have no doubt been aware, the horrific murder of George Floyd, the murder of thousands of people by police in the decades leading up to this point, the despicable use of coercive forces by the Presidential administration to disperse peaceful protests just to get a photo opportunity with a Bible that isn't even his, without the approval of the administration of the church he used as a backdrop, have been deeply intertwined with how persistent racism, concentration of power behind executive authority, the limitation of civil rights, political polarization, and the difficulty with keeping police and the justice system in general behind democratic legitimacy. There are many different roots of this, from how America's political systems largely predate parliamentarianism as it developed in England and later the United Kingdom, leaving the legislatures with distinct separate authority to try and control the executive through trying to pass laws, trying to impeach the crown...

You may or may not be shocked to hear that we are in the middle of a pandemic that at the time of posting, has killed over one hundred thousand people in America alone and 374 thousand people across the entire world that have been confirmed, though with poor reporting from the PR of China and the Russian Federation, among others, in less than six months, almost a 9/11 every day. This disease is highly contagious (changing the R-Nought number from 1.3 like the common influenza, H1N1, to 2 like COVID-19, after ten rounds of people sharing it, makes it go from 56 people sick with influenza to 2047 people sick), is very dangerous to the elderly and anyone with things like pneumonia, spreads via airborne transmission, and made it's way from about 34 thousand dead in late March around the world to eleven times that much in just about 70 days. That's two and a half 9/11s every day. Of course, people are getting very freaked out, they can't see the enemy and so they literally c...