Posted on 06/21/2017 3:47:23 PM PDT by fwdude
We taught Texans how to be be Texan.
Hell, we had a fort whoopup back in the day. That was it’s actual name.
Your points might apply to some Parliamentary governments -- but, not Canada's. FWIW:
1) We have a written Constitution -- always have, although it didn't include the "Charter of Rights and Freedoms" until 1982.
2) Before we got the CoR&F, there was no question that "Parliament is supreme" (that was an oft-spoken phrase). With the written constitution, we have experienced the same Judicial overreach that Americans have. IOW, the SCOC has acted much like the SCOTUS. Which is more "tyrannical": rule by elected representatives of a minority, or rule by 9 appointed quasi-aristocrats? (Rhetorical question -- they're each worse than the other.)
3. We haven't had a federal government that was supported by 50% +1 votes in decades. Typically, a Parliamentary majority can be secured with about 40% of the votes. The reason: we have 3 major, 2 minor, and over a dozen also-ran parties, at the federal level. (Please note, I realize that this makes your point stronger.)
“All it needs now is royal consent from the House of Commons...”
I don’t have anything to add to the substantive comments on this travesty others have made here — but, in the interest of accuracy (or something):
The correct terminology is “royal assent”; and, as the name suggests, it involves the Queen (or her representative, the Governor General) signing off on a bill passed by Parliament (which, btw, includes both the House of Commons, and the Senate).
BTW, the Queen rarely exercises a veto power similar to the U.S. President’s. (By “rarely”, I mean never in the past hundred and fifty years or so; but, it is still a theoretical possibility. Of course, if a veto were exercised, that would probably mean the end of the Monarchy.) IOW, Royal assent is a given.
Parliamentary systems have other weaknesses as well, which I have not touched on. More problematic for me is a system where the government is formed via compromises made after the vote, as opposed to knowing what those compromises are and working through them in a primary process to decide who is going to be in the Big Tent in the first place.
Contrary to what is taught in US Civics classes, the American Founders did not envision a Supreme Court with the authority to nullify laws. They imagined a much weaker form of judicial review that permitted triers of fact and law to reduce laws to a nullity only on a case basis, a remedy that already existed in the common law.
The Federalists, fearing the radicalism of Jefferson and his party, thought they'd found a bulwark in John Adams' midnight appointments to the Federal bench.
I believe they are turning in their graves at the result of John Marshall's subsequent overreach. You should have learned from our mistake.
Sounds like an updated verse for “Alice’s Restaurant”.
Time for a wall on the north border.
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