Gridlock movie 20139/23/2023 that can get their business done,” Miliband said in an interview. “I think it is important to have governments with majorities. That is because he hopes for the same clean lines of power if he becomes prime minister. Nonetheless, Miliband, the Harvard-educated Labor leader who hopes to become prime minister after the 2015 election, said he prefers the British system even if it leaves him only on the losing side of most legislative battles for now. The Labor Party became the opposition, with little chance for getting any of its initiatives enacted into law - or of blocking legislation put forward by the Cameron government. That coalition, in turn, selected Cameron as the prime minister, enabling him to get his program through Parliament. Unwilling to strike a deal with Labor, he struck one with the third-ranking vote getter, the Liberal Democrat Party, which was given five out of 22 Cabinet minister positions and an agreement to have part of its agenda adopted by Conservatives. Cameron’s Conservative Party, for example, failed to win an outright majority. In Britain, such coalitions are formed at the outset of a parliamentary session. That, in turn, might have led to a more moderate Congress and avoided the shutdown and other elements of gridlock. In order to meet the 60 percent threshold, House Republicans might have had to jettison the Tea Party backers and strike a bargain with a bloc of moderate Democrats, and Senate Democrats would have had to work with center-leaning Republicans. Under such a proposal, for example, Republicans wouldn’t have had enough votes to elect John Boehner as their speaker, and Democrats would not have had the votes to select Harry Reid as Senate majority leader. In the United States, where Tea Party supporters have played an outsized role in steering the direction of the Republican Party, “We don’t have a governing coalition because you have your congressional leadership in thrall to a faction of their party.” “The advantage of a parliamentary system is that there is, ipso facto from the beginning, a coalition that can pass things,” Kamarck said in an interview. While a ruling coalition of 60 percent wouldn’t guarantee legislation would be passed - given that members can vote their own way on individual bills - it would emulate the parliamentary idea that coalitions can be an essential part of governance. (Democrats and independents now have 55 seats out of 100 in the Senate, while Republicans control 54 percent of the House membership.) Here, such an approach would likely require an upfront coalition of Republicans and Democrats. While there is no such 60 percent requirement in the British system, the proposal is designed to emulate the way parliamentary systems operate with a majority power base broad enough to get things done. One of the most intriguing proposals, put forward by Harvard University’s Elaine Kamarck and the Brookings Institution’s William Galston, is to require that a congressional leader such as the House speaker garner support from 60 percent of the chamber membership. Many of the world’s democracies hew closer to a parliamentary system, with or without the royal trappings.Īs a result, as partisan extremism has made it difficult to pass even routine congressional legislation, a growing number of political scientists are suggesting that Washington look to America’s former colonial rulers to see if there are some elements of the parliamentary system that could be adapted to end congressional gridlock. Indeed, relatively few other countries mirror the American model. But that threat has long since vanished and today such a system facilitates gridlock by establishing competing lines of authority.īritain, meanwhile, has a system that ensures that a majority government mostly gets what it wants, but does so knowing that if it goes too far it could swiftly lose power entirely. The Constitution created a separation of powers that was designed to avoid a return to monarchial control. The differences between the two systems go back to the founding of America. But when it comes to the search for solutions to the gridlock in Congress, many scholars say there is much to be learned from the inherent efficiencies of a parliamentary system.
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