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I don't understand this appeal to try to elect basically a king in a democracy. A single individual should not have the power to enact huge change and as far as I can tell he doesn't in the US.

Instead we should focus on electing good people to congress. The president should be irrelevant mostly if a congress is competent and can work together. Even if a president turns out to be a psycho congress can veto prof bills and pass them.




That's how the system was supposed to work. Since then Congress has given much of its authority over to the executive branch. The presidency doesn't need to consult Congress to engage in military action or make international promises.

I agree that we need to fix congress and also break the duopoly strangling it with swings from one extreme to another.

The president is supposed to be an administrator executing the laws passed by co guess. They are rhe head of state in I ternarional affairs but without the authority to make binding agreeme to for the country. They are the head of the military responsible for defending the county but are not able to attack other countries without the approval of congress. At least, that's how it's supposed to be.

Only congress can save this country, and that should terrify everyone.


If you're electing them, that's not a King. What you've got there is, maybe a Dictator of some sort depending on what happens when you try electing somebody else, but it's not a King (unless this is Star Wars for some reason).

The whole point of Monarchy is that you get random monarchs because of how sexual reproduction works. Short, stupid, clumsy, more or less everything is possible. England even had rules trying to pick boys to be the next monarch (these rules are no longer in effect for future generations) and because Mother Nature doesn't give a shit we got several Queens anyway. So elections have nothing to do with how somebody gets to be King.

Anyway, I think the role you're thinking about is Head of the Executive. You need a single human in this role for effective government, because the executive is responsible for immediate tactical responses and of necessity a democratic legislature cannot react fast enough or cohesively enough to serve this purpose.

It does you no good to give, say, Nancy Pelosi the status of "Commander in Chief" of your military forces, and then oblige her to hold a vote, subject to the whims of dozens or hundreds of people, on any directives for those forces. The Executive needs to make rapid tactical decisions and not be paralysed by conflicting political ambitions. This is also true for civil emergencies, nobody whose town was just destroyed by a volcano wants to hear about how due to procedural rules the emergency supplies won't arrive until Wednesday because a senator from another state wanted to make a broader point about gay marriage.


>If you're electing them, that's not a King. What you've got there is, maybe a Dictator of some sort depending on what happens when you try electing somebody else, but it's not a King (unless this is Star Wars for some reason).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elective_monarchy


Fair, although a lot of those examples you'd need to squint pretty hard to see an election. Hong Kong also "elected" Beijing's preferred candidate recently. No candidates representing the actual people of Hong Kong were allowed to run...




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