No common presidential election in USA

What would happen if the US president was not elected by popular vote, but by Congress, and the elections to the Senate and the House of Representatives were held not every two, but four years?? How would this change American policy? Would Congress and the government cooperate better?
 

Skallagrim

Banned
Do you mean all Representatives and Senators would be elected at once every four years? And would the Senators still be elected by the state legislatures rather than the people? Those factors would have some effect here. If the state legislatures still decide who's in the Senate, then the election of state legislators will become (even) more tied to national politics. The outcome generally, however, would be that congressional elections become far more important. A congressional majority ensures that your party gets to decide who becomes President.

Since the President is installed by Congress, I assume he'll be subject to a possible vote of no confidence, and that Congress can basically dismiss him and his ministers and appoint a new President at any time? That would make sense in such a system. The effect would be to make the executive far less independently powerful. Congressional primacy all the way. Incidentally, would the President (like the rime Minister in Britain) be elected from within Congress, and would he retain his seat there? Or would Congress be obligated to choose someone who is not in Congress?

This is relevant, because we may probably assume the USA still uses electoral districts. This means that if you were to put a member of Congress in the Oval Office... he'd kind of have to retain his seat. Because if not... who replaced him? The one who get the second-highest number of votes in his district? That's probably his opponent, so he'd be giving the opposition an extra vote. For this reason, if you use a district system and Congress appoints the executive, then you'll either need to exclude all members of Congress from consideration, or you'll need to put it in the law that members of the executive retain their seats in Congress if they're already Congressmen.

End result: the USA would look a lot more like Britain, in the way its political system is organised.
 
The President is technically elected by the Electoral College, so as we've seen, the popular vote doesn't always win.

Would there be political parties under such a system? Or would they be more like coalitions of like-minded groups?
 
The President would be more beholden and accountable to the legislature, and less so to the people. Given just how corrupt the Senate was in the Gilded Age, I wouldn't be surprised if it became commonplace for Presidents to bribe their way to the White House during the 1880s and 90s.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
The President would be more beholden and accountable to the legislature, and less so to the people. Given just how corrupt the Senate was in the Gilded Age, I wouldn't be surprised if it became commonplace for Presidents to bribe their way to the White House during the 1880s and 90s.

Ah, outright buying the presidency. A time-honoured practice. The actual outcome would probably be no better or worse for it.
 
Ah, outright buying the presidency. A time-honoured practice. The actual outcome would probably be no better or worse for it.

Not every President we've had "bought" the Presidency and only a few could be considered definitely corrupt. So many more Presidents would be ineffectual, deffering to all-powerful Senators and bureaucrats, and the executive branch would be consistently infected with corruption reaching the highest levels of government. So things would in fact be a lot worse.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
Not every President we've had "bought" the Presidency and only a few could be considered definitely corrupt. So many more Presidents would be ineffectual, deffering to all-powerful Senators and bureaucrats, and the executive branch would be consistently infected with corruption reaching the highest levels of government. So things would in fact be a lot worse.

You're missing my point. I'm not saying every president in OTl was bought. I'm saying that I believe democracy yields no better results, and that even when it does, the Presidency doesn't exist in a vacuum. In part, that's my cynical view of democracy, but also, there were lots of countries in the late 19th century with Parliamentary sumpremacy (my own among them) where the members of the legislature were almost all representative of or beholden to certain elite interests... and the results weren't actually worse than in the USA.

I'm fairly sure that in a world where Congress is basically in chage, and almost openly sells the Oval Office to some rich glory-hound ever few years, the world would be no worse off. Because said glory hound would be there for... well, the glory. He wouldn't actually get to do anything important.
 
Top