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To: MalPearce

Yes, different in the US. Speaker is usually partisan not necessarily just a debate moderator.

The speaker sets the “agenda”, which ultimately means that bills from the opposing party may never make it to the floor for a vote. Compromise can only occur among opposing parties if the appropriate leadership makes nice with the speaker.

One of the reasons Reagan did a lot is because he made nice w/Tip O’Neill.


39 posted on 10/03/2023 2:29:33 PM PDT by fruser1
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To: fruser1

That’s not exactly a good recipe for good government though. You may get a few years of a speaker you like enabling an agenda you like, then you get a boatload of years with a speaker you hate.

No wonder American politics is so polarised.

Over here, I’ve seen nearly fifty years of speakers and maybe 44 of those years, the Speaker acted independent of (if not “above”) the knockabout of party politics.

The only 6 years where I’d say we nearly had an American setup was when Bercow turned into a partisan speaker.

Like I said, Frederick Muhlenberg (American speaker, late 18th Century) played it straight down the middle, rather like most British Speakers do.

As a Constitutionalist I would actually like Speaker Trump to go back to the very roots of how the role was originally constituted. His independence of the Washington machine makes him uniquely qualified to sit “outside of party politics”.


45 posted on 10/03/2023 2:41:26 PM PDT by MalPearce ("You see, but you do not observe" - Holmes to Watson, A Scandal in Bohemia)
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