As you probably already saw, the Canadian government yesterday actually fell.
And I can’t help but think that this seems to be such a useful tool that could be exported to America. If publicly elected officials doesn’t have “confidence” in one’s government officials, the superstructure is simply disbanded and the rest of the organizational institution continues to run smoothly – its social, security, defense, communication, leadership and cultural programs work fine without a Parliamentary structure in tact. In fact, there’s something very self-sacrificing about the no-confidence vote held in Ottawa, Canada’s capital; Ministers of Parliament not only actively disband the government’s policy producing body but they also send themselves home to be re-elected by the populace.
Fascinating. In part, it’s because of its apocalyptic nature to me. In the States, if the Government fell, funding would stop immediately, the overall leadership structure would collapse, state governments would have to take over and there would be lawlessness and localized military and militia control. (Elected officials in the U.S. are, by default and now more than ever, intimately entwined with everything the nation does or can do; the gap between elected officials and bureaucrats in the Government has been closing. We saw a glimpse of this back in the mid-1990s when budgets wouldn’t get passed and the country was essentially held hostage by new Republican legislators. Gee, remember that?
As one friend noted, it’s odd that the Parliamentary system appears so much more advanced than the American system. I remember learning over and over in Junior High and HIgh School that the federal system we had in the U.S. was an advancement over that of our British ancestors – that our system of checks and balances among the Executive, Judicial, and Legislataive branches would keep any one set of people from gaining too much power or privilege.
As anyone can tell from recent polls on the Presidency, a clear majority of Americans now think that the current Executive branch has too much concentrated power which has, in turn, lead to major mistakes, lies and criminal acts. The closest we got in recent memory to “felling” the U.S. Government was when Mr. Clinton was impeached. And I guess that this is the closest we’ll ever get.