chatham harrison is tending a new garden: As always, it's instructive that in the postwar reconstruction we provided our constitutional structure to zero (0) defeated foes

i don’t actually know this, this isn’t a rhetorical question, but, like, do other representative democracies expect that their heads of state maintain 14-16 hour a day, 7 day a week schedules, or is that just specific to our national obsession with looking busy?

From what I understand it's function of our President be an executive with a capital E, the Prime Minister of the UK, for instance, simply has a lot more bureaucracy and shares a lot more power with Parliament.

and is not head of state

I mean “head of state” means functionally a lot less when winning an election more or less automatically appoints cabinet positions. The parliamentary system vests most power with parliaments.

there's an entire category of things that head of state does and head of government doesn't. functionally we do devolve a good chunk of that to other proxies, but our system is somewhat rare in that head of state and head of government are the same person.

you obviously can manage to get by with them being the same person-- we have-- but there are good reasons (not always the same good reasons) why most other systems don't.

As always, it's instructive that in the postwar reconstruction we provided our constitutional structure to zero (0) defeated foes

It’s really only South America that has at all thought the Presidential system was worth emulating, and the results there have been…pretty wild.

(South) 'Merica

Also the comparative length of the Japanese and American constitutions

Yeah, though I think that our biggest issue is that the Constitution is one for a federal republic where sovereignty is shared between states and the federal government, which is pretty much a historical anomaly.

Yes, an anomaly driven by being a very contingent consensus agreement between governments jealous of their power

And one that is not at all constructed for a functional modern state, but which is apparently unchangeable in that regard. Like, it's probably closer in structure to the EU than any specific European country, but with a military.

Still though, I think it's not *this* issue really, because presidents' work habits are more or less arbitrary and I think the key skill is being able to snap into action, rather than doing long hours of idk, reading papers?

I mean…lots and lots of countries are federations of one sort or another. The US is far from unique in that regard.

To varying degrees, but nothing really approaches it, I think. Germany is a "federal republic" but there's nothing guaranteeing each German state equal representation in a body as powerful as the Senate.

IIRC this was something the shift to a republic specifically enacted, too. There's no place for a well-developed provincial sovereignty in a modern state unless those provinces are themselves countries (ex. Scotland, Texas)

I mean, Germany is odd because its constituent states were fully kingdoms until the end of WW1, but don't seem to assert much of that any more.

The centralized power of the German Empire and then the Third Reich probably were enough to erode whatever sub-German nationalism there might have been in Bavaria, or Saxony, or whatever else they have.

Alberta would like to have a word.

Oh I see what you’re getting at. I agree that there probably isn’t anything on that specific model, but in Canada, for instance, health care and education are provincial responsibilities and they’re HUGE chunks of the budget, provinces have to agree to constitutional amendments…there’s a lot.

It probably looks different from the outside, though.

Yeah, that's fair - it's not nothing, but especially on international matters, I think POTUS is almost uniquely accountable to federalist systems in a way other governments don't have to worry about.

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