Being a resident (both of the nation and one of its States) I think that your observation that this dysfunction favors a libertarian perspective is most apt. Our State legislature in New Mexico meets for only one month (or so) every year, which is enough to cause enough trouble with bad ideas that have to be undone the next year. The brilliance of our forefathers was in setting up a system where there is (basically) a stalemate between branches, and not much can get done, given the poor decision making process of humans in the moment (and inherent selfishness). While we are all very interested in the goings on of politics in America, in reality the Federal Reserve is pulling most of the strings (in setting interest rates - on loans, cars, houses, etc. - and, downstream, stock market prices). That effects our daily lives here on the ground; not abortion, not the war in Ukraine (or Israel), not climate catastrophizing. Our system of checks and balances is brilliant, and increasingly makes national politics unworkable (i.e., libertarian). This pushes politics down to the State level, and (hopefully) more local. Nice job.
One might be tempted to say that the most important amendment to the American (or any) constitution one could implement is one that prolongs the recess period.
I agree. It’s a solution to the question: do we want more markets or more public choice? Markets work better than government with good enough people (i.e., smart and cooperative), in which case it’s best to leave as little a role for public choice as possible.
Our forefathers set up a system that could not operate as intended in the presence of organized parties, said so extensively at the time, and within their lifetimes wrote that the primitive party system then emerging was counter to their intentions and headed toward disaster, which of course was at that point merely a few decades away.
The canard that we exist in a Madisonian political system is just an occasionally useful lie. Our strange beast of a government has its pluses and minuses, but it wears a Madisonian halloween costume at the very most.
Judge our institutions on their fitness for purpose. Maybe on their durability over time. But the intentions of the founders became a dead letter within their lifetimes, it's total fiction to use that as a touchstone, and the ruling ideology of the SCOTUS is a fiction within that fiction.
It was a brilliant attempt, but it has been unfit to keep those in power from doing what they want to do. This was one of Lysander Spooner's key insights: either we've been following the constitution and it's led us to the point we're at, or it's been helpless to stop this expansion. Unless you have a long-term method of ensuring adherence to the constitution in the latter case, it's hard not to admit that the constitution is unfit for what it was intended to do. This isn't even a deficiency of the constitution in particular. Rather, it's an inevitability with every political document, and for that argument I would point you towards Hasnas' The Myth of the Rule of Law. I generally agree with Dave Smith (from Part of the Problem) that the US government is the largest and most powerful political institution in human history, not to mention a de facto empire.
Seeing as this is Emil's blog where he often enough discusses intelligence, it seems apt to point out that the obstacles put in place by the founding fathers against centralization of power are exactly the kind of thing which would, given time, tend to favor de facto technocratic rule. Ultimately you just need people who have the problem-solving acumen and persuasiveness that so often comes with intelligence to twist public opinion and institutional procedure towards their own ends. Of course the federal reserve has a massive influence on what the state can get away with as well as on the time preference of the population, but considerations of who will inhabit the elite are also important.
Regardless, I completely agree that we should favor a more decentralized approach to governance as well as stronger community social institutions to make nullification more viable, if not even secession in particular cases. Unfortunately too many are slaves to the purse of Washington, but I'm hopeful that future generations will get so fed up with the status quo that they'll forge something new to find meaning and purpose.
> The brilliance of our forefathers was in setting up a system where there is (basically) a stalemate between branches, and not much can get done
They tried to do that. They based their approach on the system they knew, in which political power was held by families. This provided an automatic mechanism for power centers to seek to suppress the power of other power centers.
But they also abolished titles of nobility, and power in the United States is held by political parties instead. This nullifies the separation of powers; nothing is stopping one party from coordinating with itself across different "separated" power structures.
Our political parties have become very, very weak. To see the result(s) of this, look no further than the upcoming Presidential election where a doddering old, incompetent, fool (Biden) will take on an incurious, narcissistic, amoral, fool (Trump). Back in the day, the parties would have rooted out the completely evident incompetency/incurious/amorality and smothered it/them in its bed.
The things we have which once resembled parties in the European sense more and more resemble "factions" as the Federalists understood them.
Factions operating across branches and across states was the failure mode of the American system. They weren't stupid, they knew the weak points of the government they were starting.
> Our political parties have become very, very weak. To see the result(s) of this, look no further than the upcoming Presidential election where a doddering old, incompetent, fool (Biden) will take on an incurious, narcissistic, amoral, fool (Trump).
This is a sign of party strength, not weakness. If the same people didn't have party affiliation, their campaigns would fail.
Conservative lawyer here! SCOTUS is indeed irksome -- the usurpation -- but we could end it all by merely depriving them of discretionary cert., which would require only an act of Congress (simple majority + POTUS signature). Probably would be good to maximally exploit a temporary 5-4 advantage to abolish inferior courts, undo Warren Court / progressive era / 1980s+ precedents, and then pull up the ladder by packing the court and yanking discretionary cert., rendering SCOTUS toothless as a supralegislative body.
If you're interested in the subject you should check out Robert Bork's books -- bit dated but Temping of America still has the most cogent explanation of why, for example, Shelley v. Kraemer is BS.
This is the first I've heard of this argument. Is there a good essay-length treatment of it somewhere (and the role of discretionary cert.) outside of reading entire books by Bork?
A country like Belgium-without-a-government still has a vast permanent administrative bureaucracy. So it still has a government really. So much so that in many Western countries in modern times it matters surprisingly little who gets voted in at election time. The 'democratic pluralism' idea that you get what you vote for has long been a fairlytale.
There is government and there is government. One meaning refers to those elected (or appointed by elected) people that have roles like president, prime ministers, secretaries of defense and whatever. These people are not there when there's no government. But yes, the deep state government is running.
Right. I call western-style regimes as bureaucratic oligarchies. Elections are a means of giving legitimacy to the bureaucracy, diffuse political passions, deflect attention and provide entrainment.
A lot of this goes back to the activist New Deal courts, who were acting under the gun of President Roosevelt (who threatened to just add a bunch of his people and dilute the voting power of then-sitting judges). Some of the most famous cases read like the judges are just making stuff up, with Wickard v Filburn being the apex of made up ridiculousness. In that case they declared that a man growing wheat on his own property to feed his own livestock affected interstate commerce, and was therefore subject to regulation from the federal government.
Linda Greenhouse is an infamous leftwing advocate who posed as a journalist covering the Court for many years . The term “ The Greenhouse Effect” was coined to refer to the leftward trend of conservative jurists over time, as they curried the favor of Greenhouse . She isn’t particularly learned and certainly not remotely objective . If you want to understand the Court read the law review articles of Lino Graglia, who famously posed the question —Why should the American people allow a committee of 9 unelected lawyers decide important issues of public policy, in areas about which they have no special expertise.
Greenhouse has been particularly useful to the broad agenda of neutering the founding ethnicities of the United States. Emil presents clear evidence of the illogical and anti-social nature of post-1950 Court rulings, but this is not simply random craziness. It is orchestrated demolition of a functional nation, so that another ethnic group can rule it.
Yes, I agree with a lot of this. Some observations:
The Constitution doesn't specify how many justices there are on the court, which was a gigantic omission if it was meant to be so powerful. (The court packing idea comes up from time to time.)
The states were evidently intended to have much more power initially. However because of slavery and the Civil War, the power of the states was delegitimized. (Also, nowadays many states are very dependent on federal funding, again increasing the power of the federal government.)
This leads to a particularity of American politics, that whereas in Europe (e.g. the UK) local government can be seen as somehow better (more democratic) than the national government, in America the "states rights" position is contaminated by the slavery/Civil War legacy. This I think is part of the reason why "legislating" by the Supreme Court is seen as legitimate (because it is supposedly a continuation of the process of protecting people's rights from the state governments).
This is off topic, but I always thought it was weird how Woodrow Wilson went to Europe after the First World War to negotiate the Treaty of Versailles but was unable to get it ratified in the Senate (the Constitution requires an unrealistic 2/3's majority to ratify a treaty). This bizarrely means that the person who negotiates treaties for the US can't know whether the US will accept them.
Potentially, but it would be less likely to be a problem in a parliamentary system because a Prime Minister and cabinet have been selected by the Parliament in the first place, and are more likely to know what their parties are going to accept. (Also a two-thirds majority is much more than a simple majority.)
Versailles was initially rejected by an absolute majority of Senators. Wilson (who ran as a "peace candidate") lost the midterms and then decided to ignore and insult the Senate rather than exhibit bipartisanship and incorporate Senators into the negotiating process, and then *surprised-Pikachu* his treaty got rejected. Then while trying to salvage the situation, he had a stroke.
It might be that lesser countries can't get away with this arrangement, but from the standpoint of America the hyperpower (which doesn't really HAVE to sign any treaties it doesn't want to), there are negotiating advantages to it. It raises the minimum acceptable offer; you have to please both the Democrats and the Republicans if you want us to look at your treaty, regardless of which party is in power.
given the deeply unsettling effects of the Court’s decision to eliminate the constitutional right to abortion.
There is no constitutional right to an abortion. If the country wants a federal abortion bill, then they need to create one and run it through congress, get it passed, and have the president sign it into law.
Otherwise, it's a state's rights issue. Texas may not want abortions, but Oklahoma does.
By the way, Texas has an abortion law. No abortions after 6 weeks, with several exceptions.
The law criminalizes performing an abortion from the moment of fertilization unless the pregnant patient faces “a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy.”
If I were writing an abortion bill, I'd set the limit at 12 weeks, and have medical exemptions, as well as rape and incest. The law would reflect that only doctors can make a medical decision, and abortions should be done in a hospital or outpatient surgical center, not an abortion clinic.
Judgecracy also happens in other civilized countries: The constitutional tribune have the power to interpret constitutionality as they want only need a majority votes from them to approve something constitutional, so you're final point is that Ancapistan is the way?
The United States is too political to have a Supreme Court. It should only be decided to be composed immediately of the eldest (by service, not age) ten judges able to pass 130 on an annual IQ test. The judges can only be removed by the majority of the others.
These gridlocks in Belgium and the US affect very little of the functioning of the state, at least if they only last as long as they have so far. The education system, the Welfare State, the regulatory agencies, the tax collection and the police/courts/established procedures for resolving disputes, basically continue to function as if nothing had happened. Partly because many of these functions are in the hands of local governments, but partly because the central government's primary function tends to be collecting and dispensing money and this is done mostly automatically. Although in the case of the US, Congress needs to pass a budget every year plus raise the debt ceiling, which for most countries is not a real problem, but this has been a problem in the US due to partisan polarization.
The US system was designed to have multiple vetoes, and even more vetoes were created over time. Some informal things like the filibuster in the Senate and the need to approve government interest payments are pretty absurd. When you think about it, it's amazing that the US system works as well as it does, especially with recent political polarization.
The thing that I find funny about the Belgium situation, is that you just know that if Belgium were a poor country, the difficulty in forming a government due to ethnic or linguistic differences, would be pointed out as the cause of the country's poverty. Of course, linguistic differences are a problem, and Switzerland seems to have been one of the only ones to create a good method of solving this with a mixture of high local autonomy, direct democracy and consensus federal government. Despite its political problems, Belgium is a very rich country, whose quality of life problems are really about third world immigration, which goes to show the greater importance of human capital and social cooperation/organization once again.
The US system of elections -- first past the post, gerrymandering, and the electoral college -- have a benefit of reducing the value of electoral fraud, and thus its incidence. Electoral fraud is common throughout the world and history, so it makes sense to have a system that is robust against it. Gerrymandering, in particular, is great at segmenting voters so that there are only a few competitive races.
I would say that the problem with US elections is our primaries. They encourage extremism and I don’t see any countervailing benefit.
On our judicial system, life appointment is a way of insulating judges from the kids of influence we see all the time with our legislators. Our judges don’t need to think about their next job. The only place that is dysfunctional is at the Supreme Court. So let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. There’s a well developed proposal to turn service on the Supreme Court into a term-limited service (18 years, I think), but the judges go back to a district court or court of appeals after that, if they want.
Many, many US states have their legislatures meet once every two years for a fixed time. The governor can summon a special session if needed. To paraphrase the famous quote, no one’s life, liberty, and property are safe when the legislature is in session. More prosaically, the limited duration of the session keeps minds focused on things that are likely to pass, along with critical business. Along those lines, many states also have rules that systematically prioritize the passage of a budget. For example, the budget might have to be the first bill filed. It’s a great shame that we don’t give each Congress 180 days to pass laws, then send the House of Representatives home, allowing the Senate to handle appointments.
Modern Western countries don't have any electoral fraud, so it doesn't matter if that point is true. The US system is archaic because it is, well, old. I expect the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact will pass sometime this century, Metaculus says 18% chance of happening before 2030. Seems a bit too optimistic, but I'd say it is 70% chance of happening this century.
The national electoral compact will make electoral fraud a significantly worse problem if not combined with other effective measures of preventing fraud. Our electoral system if fundamentally run at the local level. We would have to nationalize election management for it not to do so, maybe along Australian lines. I’m not against that -- but I am against the national electoral compact without it.
The Supreme Court is really only supposed to make sure Congress doesn't pass a law that the Constitution forbids. The Bill of Rights and the Constitution are the only laws that should matter, and they were put in place for the people. If you look at how the system was set up, you will see that the Federal government was only supposed to make laws to protect citizens God-giben rights. This is the difference between what Democrats (Federal government big and in your daily life) vs Conservatives (states rights and small government) want in theory. However, everyone loves power, so we have a government that creates problems from nothing, refuses to solves those problems in a common sense way so that we "need" them to fix the new problems they created. We also elect representatives to be our voice in Congress, but as you can easily see, most of us are not represented. Congress does what it wants, not what the people want.
Being a resident (both of the nation and one of its States) I think that your observation that this dysfunction favors a libertarian perspective is most apt. Our State legislature in New Mexico meets for only one month (or so) every year, which is enough to cause enough trouble with bad ideas that have to be undone the next year. The brilliance of our forefathers was in setting up a system where there is (basically) a stalemate between branches, and not much can get done, given the poor decision making process of humans in the moment (and inherent selfishness). While we are all very interested in the goings on of politics in America, in reality the Federal Reserve is pulling most of the strings (in setting interest rates - on loans, cars, houses, etc. - and, downstream, stock market prices). That effects our daily lives here on the ground; not abortion, not the war in Ukraine (or Israel), not climate catastrophizing. Our system of checks and balances is brilliant, and increasingly makes national politics unworkable (i.e., libertarian). This pushes politics down to the State level, and (hopefully) more local. Nice job.
One might be tempted to say that the most important amendment to the American (or any) constitution one could implement is one that prolongs the recess period.
I agree. It’s a solution to the question: do we want more markets or more public choice? Markets work better than government with good enough people (i.e., smart and cooperative), in which case it’s best to leave as little a role for public choice as possible.
Our forefathers set up a system that could not operate as intended in the presence of organized parties, said so extensively at the time, and within their lifetimes wrote that the primitive party system then emerging was counter to their intentions and headed toward disaster, which of course was at that point merely a few decades away.
The canard that we exist in a Madisonian political system is just an occasionally useful lie. Our strange beast of a government has its pluses and minuses, but it wears a Madisonian halloween costume at the very most.
Judge our institutions on their fitness for purpose. Maybe on their durability over time. But the intentions of the founders became a dead letter within their lifetimes, it's total fiction to use that as a touchstone, and the ruling ideology of the SCOTUS is a fiction within that fiction.
It was a brilliant attempt, but it has been unfit to keep those in power from doing what they want to do. This was one of Lysander Spooner's key insights: either we've been following the constitution and it's led us to the point we're at, or it's been helpless to stop this expansion. Unless you have a long-term method of ensuring adherence to the constitution in the latter case, it's hard not to admit that the constitution is unfit for what it was intended to do. This isn't even a deficiency of the constitution in particular. Rather, it's an inevitability with every political document, and for that argument I would point you towards Hasnas' The Myth of the Rule of Law. I generally agree with Dave Smith (from Part of the Problem) that the US government is the largest and most powerful political institution in human history, not to mention a de facto empire.
Seeing as this is Emil's blog where he often enough discusses intelligence, it seems apt to point out that the obstacles put in place by the founding fathers against centralization of power are exactly the kind of thing which would, given time, tend to favor de facto technocratic rule. Ultimately you just need people who have the problem-solving acumen and persuasiveness that so often comes with intelligence to twist public opinion and institutional procedure towards their own ends. Of course the federal reserve has a massive influence on what the state can get away with as well as on the time preference of the population, but considerations of who will inhabit the elite are also important.
Regardless, I completely agree that we should favor a more decentralized approach to governance as well as stronger community social institutions to make nullification more viable, if not even secession in particular cases. Unfortunately too many are slaves to the purse of Washington, but I'm hopeful that future generations will get so fed up with the status quo that they'll forge something new to find meaning and purpose.
> The brilliance of our forefathers was in setting up a system where there is (basically) a stalemate between branches, and not much can get done
They tried to do that. They based their approach on the system they knew, in which political power was held by families. This provided an automatic mechanism for power centers to seek to suppress the power of other power centers.
But they also abolished titles of nobility, and power in the United States is held by political parties instead. This nullifies the separation of powers; nothing is stopping one party from coordinating with itself across different "separated" power structures.
Our political parties have become very, very weak. To see the result(s) of this, look no further than the upcoming Presidential election where a doddering old, incompetent, fool (Biden) will take on an incurious, narcissistic, amoral, fool (Trump). Back in the day, the parties would have rooted out the completely evident incompetency/incurious/amorality and smothered it/them in its bed.
The things we have which once resembled parties in the European sense more and more resemble "factions" as the Federalists understood them.
Factions operating across branches and across states was the failure mode of the American system. They weren't stupid, they knew the weak points of the government they were starting.
> Our political parties have become very, very weak. To see the result(s) of this, look no further than the upcoming Presidential election where a doddering old, incompetent, fool (Biden) will take on an incurious, narcissistic, amoral, fool (Trump).
This is a sign of party strength, not weakness. If the same people didn't have party affiliation, their campaigns would fail.
Conservative lawyer here! SCOTUS is indeed irksome -- the usurpation -- but we could end it all by merely depriving them of discretionary cert., which would require only an act of Congress (simple majority + POTUS signature). Probably would be good to maximally exploit a temporary 5-4 advantage to abolish inferior courts, undo Warren Court / progressive era / 1980s+ precedents, and then pull up the ladder by packing the court and yanking discretionary cert., rendering SCOTUS toothless as a supralegislative body.
If you're interested in the subject you should check out Robert Bork's books -- bit dated but Temping of America still has the most cogent explanation of why, for example, Shelley v. Kraemer is BS.
Will read it. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10803782-the-tempting-of-america Last edition as of 1990, but these changes are nothing new, so probably not too bad if it's -- checks notes -- 33 years out of date.
This is the first I've heard of this argument. Is there a good essay-length treatment of it somewhere (and the role of discretionary cert.) outside of reading entire books by Bork?
The argument I'm making was conveyed to me by Judge Frank Easterbrook in a seminar. I'd be happy to expand if there is interest.
A country like Belgium-without-a-government still has a vast permanent administrative bureaucracy. So it still has a government really. So much so that in many Western countries in modern times it matters surprisingly little who gets voted in at election time. The 'democratic pluralism' idea that you get what you vote for has long been a fairlytale.
There is government and there is government. One meaning refers to those elected (or appointed by elected) people that have roles like president, prime ministers, secretaries of defense and whatever. These people are not there when there's no government. But yes, the deep state government is running.
Right. I call western-style regimes as bureaucratic oligarchies. Elections are a means of giving legitimacy to the bureaucracy, diffuse political passions, deflect attention and provide entrainment.
A lot of this goes back to the activist New Deal courts, who were acting under the gun of President Roosevelt (who threatened to just add a bunch of his people and dilute the voting power of then-sitting judges). Some of the most famous cases read like the judges are just making stuff up, with Wickard v Filburn being the apex of made up ridiculousness. In that case they declared that a man growing wheat on his own property to feed his own livestock affected interstate commerce, and was therefore subject to regulation from the federal government.
There are too many awful decisions to count.
Linda Greenhouse is an infamous leftwing advocate who posed as a journalist covering the Court for many years . The term “ The Greenhouse Effect” was coined to refer to the leftward trend of conservative jurists over time, as they curried the favor of Greenhouse . She isn’t particularly learned and certainly not remotely objective . If you want to understand the Court read the law review articles of Lino Graglia, who famously posed the question —Why should the American people allow a committee of 9 unelected lawyers decide important issues of public policy, in areas about which they have no special expertise.
Greenhouse has been particularly useful to the broad agenda of neutering the founding ethnicities of the United States. Emil presents clear evidence of the illogical and anti-social nature of post-1950 Court rulings, but this is not simply random craziness. It is orchestrated demolition of a functional nation, so that another ethnic group can rule it.
Yes, I agree with a lot of this. Some observations:
The Constitution doesn't specify how many justices there are on the court, which was a gigantic omission if it was meant to be so powerful. (The court packing idea comes up from time to time.)
The states were evidently intended to have much more power initially. However because of slavery and the Civil War, the power of the states was delegitimized. (Also, nowadays many states are very dependent on federal funding, again increasing the power of the federal government.)
This leads to a particularity of American politics, that whereas in Europe (e.g. the UK) local government can be seen as somehow better (more democratic) than the national government, in America the "states rights" position is contaminated by the slavery/Civil War legacy. This I think is part of the reason why "legislating" by the Supreme Court is seen as legitimate (because it is supposedly a continuation of the process of protecting people's rights from the state governments).
This is off topic, but I always thought it was weird how Woodrow Wilson went to Europe after the First World War to negotiate the Treaty of Versailles but was unable to get it ratified in the Senate (the Constitution requires an unrealistic 2/3's majority to ratify a treaty). This bizarrely means that the person who negotiates treaties for the US can't know whether the US will accept them.
>This bizarrely means that the person who negotiates treaties for the US can't know whether the US will accept them.
Isn't the same thing the case in basically any country that isn't a dictatorship?
Potentially, but it would be less likely to be a problem in a parliamentary system because a Prime Minister and cabinet have been selected by the Parliament in the first place, and are more likely to know what their parties are going to accept. (Also a two-thirds majority is much more than a simple majority.)
In practice, I think this very seldom happens. I found this list of rejected treaties: 4 times since the end of WW2.
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/RejectedTreaties.htm
Versailles was initially rejected by an absolute majority of Senators. Wilson (who ran as a "peace candidate") lost the midterms and then decided to ignore and insult the Senate rather than exhibit bipartisanship and incorporate Senators into the negotiating process, and then *surprised-Pikachu* his treaty got rejected. Then while trying to salvage the situation, he had a stroke.
It might be that lesser countries can't get away with this arrangement, but from the standpoint of America the hyperpower (which doesn't really HAVE to sign any treaties it doesn't want to), there are negotiating advantages to it. It raises the minimum acceptable offer; you have to please both the Democrats and the Republicans if you want us to look at your treaty, regardless of which party is in power.
given the deeply unsettling effects of the Court’s decision to eliminate the constitutional right to abortion.
There is no constitutional right to an abortion. If the country wants a federal abortion bill, then they need to create one and run it through congress, get it passed, and have the president sign it into law.
Otherwise, it's a state's rights issue. Texas may not want abortions, but Oklahoma does.
By the way, Texas has an abortion law. No abortions after 6 weeks, with several exceptions.
The law criminalizes performing an abortion from the moment of fertilization unless the pregnant patient faces “a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy.”
If I were writing an abortion bill, I'd set the limit at 12 weeks, and have medical exemptions, as well as rape and incest. The law would reflect that only doctors can make a medical decision, and abortions should be done in a hospital or outpatient surgical center, not an abortion clinic.
Judgecracy also happens in other civilized countries: The constitutional tribune have the power to interpret constitutionality as they want only need a majority votes from them to approve something constitutional, so you're final point is that Ancapistan is the way?
The United States is too political to have a Supreme Court. It should only be decided to be composed immediately of the eldest (by service, not age) ten judges able to pass 130 on an annual IQ test. The judges can only be removed by the majority of the others.
These gridlocks in Belgium and the US affect very little of the functioning of the state, at least if they only last as long as they have so far. The education system, the Welfare State, the regulatory agencies, the tax collection and the police/courts/established procedures for resolving disputes, basically continue to function as if nothing had happened. Partly because many of these functions are in the hands of local governments, but partly because the central government's primary function tends to be collecting and dispensing money and this is done mostly automatically. Although in the case of the US, Congress needs to pass a budget every year plus raise the debt ceiling, which for most countries is not a real problem, but this has been a problem in the US due to partisan polarization.
The US system was designed to have multiple vetoes, and even more vetoes were created over time. Some informal things like the filibuster in the Senate and the need to approve government interest payments are pretty absurd. When you think about it, it's amazing that the US system works as well as it does, especially with recent political polarization.
The thing that I find funny about the Belgium situation, is that you just know that if Belgium were a poor country, the difficulty in forming a government due to ethnic or linguistic differences, would be pointed out as the cause of the country's poverty. Of course, linguistic differences are a problem, and Switzerland seems to have been one of the only ones to create a good method of solving this with a mixture of high local autonomy, direct democracy and consensus federal government. Despite its political problems, Belgium is a very rich country, whose quality of life problems are really about third world immigration, which goes to show the greater importance of human capital and social cooperation/organization once again.
I like the "courts should do x".
Thats like saying "government should be effecient".
Coercive monopolies cannot do what is effecient or right.
The tuth is in the incentives of such organizatuons.
Those who think they should simply be reformed and updated every once in a while should consider the immense costs such efforts usually incur.
Several points --
The US system of elections -- first past the post, gerrymandering, and the electoral college -- have a benefit of reducing the value of electoral fraud, and thus its incidence. Electoral fraud is common throughout the world and history, so it makes sense to have a system that is robust against it. Gerrymandering, in particular, is great at segmenting voters so that there are only a few competitive races.
I would say that the problem with US elections is our primaries. They encourage extremism and I don’t see any countervailing benefit.
On our judicial system, life appointment is a way of insulating judges from the kids of influence we see all the time with our legislators. Our judges don’t need to think about their next job. The only place that is dysfunctional is at the Supreme Court. So let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. There’s a well developed proposal to turn service on the Supreme Court into a term-limited service (18 years, I think), but the judges go back to a district court or court of appeals after that, if they want.
Many, many US states have their legislatures meet once every two years for a fixed time. The governor can summon a special session if needed. To paraphrase the famous quote, no one’s life, liberty, and property are safe when the legislature is in session. More prosaically, the limited duration of the session keeps minds focused on things that are likely to pass, along with critical business. Along those lines, many states also have rules that systematically prioritize the passage of a budget. For example, the budget might have to be the first bill filed. It’s a great shame that we don’t give each Congress 180 days to pass laws, then send the House of Representatives home, allowing the Senate to handle appointments.
Modern Western countries don't have any electoral fraud, so it doesn't matter if that point is true. The US system is archaic because it is, well, old. I expect the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact will pass sometime this century, Metaculus says 18% chance of happening before 2030. Seems a bit too optimistic, but I'd say it is 70% chance of happening this century.
The national electoral compact will make electoral fraud a significantly worse problem if not combined with other effective measures of preventing fraud. Our electoral system if fundamentally run at the local level. We would have to nationalize election management for it not to do so, maybe along Australian lines. I’m not against that -- but I am against the national electoral compact without it.
The Supreme Court is really only supposed to make sure Congress doesn't pass a law that the Constitution forbids. The Bill of Rights and the Constitution are the only laws that should matter, and they were put in place for the people. If you look at how the system was set up, you will see that the Federal government was only supposed to make laws to protect citizens God-giben rights. This is the difference between what Democrats (Federal government big and in your daily life) vs Conservatives (states rights and small government) want in theory. However, everyone loves power, so we have a government that creates problems from nothing, refuses to solves those problems in a common sense way so that we "need" them to fix the new problems they created. We also elect representatives to be our voice in Congress, but as you can easily see, most of us are not represented. Congress does what it wants, not what the people want.