Section 2 Guided Reading And Review The House Of Representatives: Fill & Download for Free

From the term-limitation movement to the rise of Ross Perot, the signs of discontent with the political status quo are everywhere. Our author outlines a plan to channel that discontent in an innovative direction, one that would make the House of Representatives more democratic and more responsive to the variety of opinion to be found in the country and that would break the monopoly on power enjoyed by the two parties. "Because of our peculiar electoral law," he writes, "the American government is divided between two parties. The American people are not"This is the first in an occasional series comparing the U.S. system of politics and elections with other democracies around the world.Democracy.In America.How’s it going?In the period 1990-2010, the United States comes in 29th out of 31 democracies in percentage of the voting-age population that actually votes, with an average turnout of 57.28 percent.“If it be admitted that a man possessing absolute power may misuse that power bywronging his adversaries, why should not a majority be liable to the same reproach? Men do not change their characters by uniting with one another; nor does their patience in the presence of obstacles increase with their strength. For my own part, I cannot believe it; the power to do everything which I should refuse to one of my equals, I will never grant to any number of them.”Alexis de Tocqueville, “Tyranny of the Majority,” Chapter XV, Book 1, Democracy in AmericaThe world has, America has changed--but the United States Congress has not. And because Congress hasn't changed, more and more people feel alienated from government, and the silent crisis of legitimacy, which figures as a haunting leitmotif in so many of our other crises, intensifies. The size of the House of Representatives has been the same since 1910. And America's archaic and undemocratic system of electing, by plurality, one member of Congress per district--an eighteenth-century anachronism long since abandoned by most European democracies--has scarcely been questioned in the entire period since 1789.This kind of acquiescence in tradition--pious if you approve of it, mindless if you do not--might be justified if the U.S. Congress were an effective and popular institution. The consensus of its inmates and its constituents, however, is that Congress does not work. Widespread discontent with the political system could have been expected to produce proposals for reform of the legislative branch, and it has. Unfortunately, the most familiar proposals for reforming Congress would do so at the expense of democracy.All this system-bashing could also begin to imply that I have no respect or appreciation for the Framers. That’s not so. Although I don’t seem to have the normal allotment of reverence for the Constitution or its authors, I see them as very smart guys, many of them heroes of the War for Independence, who came to Philadelphia in the summer 1787 hoping to -- and trying hard to -- make things better.And they did make things better, considering that the weak Articles of Confederation -- the framework of national government in effect before the Constitution -- was inadequate to the task of making a nation out of the then-13 states.But the Framers had their blind spots. I won’t mention slavery for the moment, since that’s where everyone goes and since that blot has been amended out of the Constitution (and since many of the Framers, notably Ben Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, were anti-slavery).One of the big blind spots, which seriously interfered with their thinking on many constitutional matters, is that they believed it would be possible to have national politics without political parties. This played a big role in the creation of the Electoral College system. The strange tale of how the electoral system came about puts some of its weird features into context. Once you get this context, it is at least understandable what the Framers thought they were doing.NO EXECUTIVE BRANCHUnder the Articles of Confederation (the U.S. national government system created during the Revolutionary War period that was replaced in 1789 by the Constitution), there was no executive branch and no president and therefore no method of choosing a chief executive officer for the whole nation.The Framers of the Constitution saw the need for such an executive to run the beefed up new national government they were creating. But they couldn’t decide how much power to give to the new office, especially because they couldn’t figure out how the president would be chosen.Over the course of the constitutional convention, the delegates considered having the president chosen by Congress, but they feared the interdependence between the branches that would be engendered. They considered having the governors of the states or the state legislatures choose the president, but they likewise were anxious that the chief executive of the new souped-up federal government not be overly beholden to the state governments.Another obvious way -- at least to us -- would be to let the country vote. This was apparently discussed, but not very seriously. Often, the Framers’ decision to invent the Electoral College is interpreted as part of their mixed feelings about democracy. There is some truth to that.Imperfect Union: The Constitutional roots of the mess we're in The Framers were a fairly aristocratic bunch, many of whom had mixed feelings about “democracy,” which they sometimes regarded as mob rule. Although the preamble begins with “We, the people,” and guarantees a “republican form of government” to all of the states, the word “democracy” is not mentioned in the text of the Constitution.When the Framers used the word themselves it was often a pejorative term. On the convention’s first day, delegate Edmund Randolph of Virginia warned that “none of the [state] constitutions have provided sufficient checks against democracy.” A week later, Massachusetts delegate Elbridge Gerry said “the evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy.” Father of the Constitution James Madison referred to “the inconvenience of democracy,” and Alexander Hamilton to the “imprudence” of it.The Framers did, after all, create four power centers (president, House, Senate and Supreme Court) and only the House was to be directly elected.But, on balance, the Framers’ decision not to let the people directly elect the president is more complicated than their aristocratic mistrust of the mob.THREE BAD IDEASBad idea No. 1 is term limitation. Why should any constituency be prevented from sending the same representative or senator back to Washington again and again? The direct election of U.S. senators, brought about by the Seventeenth Amendment, did not, as advertised, eliminate corporate influence on legislative politics. Only the very naive believe that the same promised result--the sidelining of "special interests" and the filling of the legislature with public-spirited citizen-legislators--will be produced by frequent rotation. In a capital city in which expertise is power, the frequent circulation of amateur legislators would only increase the relative influence of the permanent congressional staff, the federal bureaucracy and the entrenched Washington establishment of lobbyists and insiders.The misguided panacea of the moment, term limitation joins two long-standing proposals for congressional reform, one associated with the left, the other with the right. For much of the twentieth century Progressives, New Dealers, and then left liberals, in the name of "responsible party government," have dreamed of reforming the United States to resemble an idealized Britain--bad idea No. 2. (Ironically, today constitutional reformers in Britain are seeking a new system with many "American" features, such as federalism, judicial review, and a written constitution.) Those who seek to reform Congress along parliamentary lines are not concerned about the separation of powers, an antiquated system they deride. Instead, they favor the "separation of parties." In their view, the American mass electorate should be given a clear choice between two sharply defined ideological parties; a party that wins a bare majority in the House, the Senate, and the presidential election should be given carte blanche to govern with as few impediments to the exercise of power as possible, rolling over not only the opposition party but also dissidents within the majority party itself.If a parliamentary Congress was the dream of midcentury liberals when it appeared that the Democratic Party would control all three branches forever, the recent inability of Republicans to elect congressional majorities has created a constituency on the American right for bad idea No. 3--what can almost be described as presidential rule. Effectively abandoning any hope of ever recapturing Congress, many Republicans have favored strengthening the power of partisan Presidents to alter policy directly, through executive orders, rather than the old-fashioned way--by pressing for the repeal or the amendment of laws.Since Richard Nixon began the present era of Republican presidential dominance, Republican claims for "inherent" executive prerogative have grown ever more extravagant (recycling the arguments of Democratic presidentialists in the era from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson). President George Bush has claimed vast powers in domestic as well as foreign policy. In addition to asserting that he had the power to wage war in the Persian Gulf without congressional approval, he has declared that he will not enforce provisions that he considers unconstitutional in laws that he has signed. Some conservatives even argue that Bush should exercise a supposed "inherent" line-item veto that has been read into the Constitution (where, somehow, it has eluded discovery since the days of George Washington, who observed, "From the nature of the Constitution, I must approve all the parts of a bill, or reject it, in toto").Further magnification of discretionary White House power--even in the service of legitimate goals--runs the danger of creating a North American form of Latin American plebiscitary presidentialism, in which a demagogic Presidente circumvents a weak legislature and rules by fiat, in the name of a "mandate" from the national electorate.Many of the problems of Congress that term limiters, parliamentary reformers, and presidential-power enthusiasts seek to address are genuine: swollen congressional staffs and perks, arrogance by entrenched committee chairmen, subservience to wealthy and well-organized lobbies, micromanagement of executive agencies by incompetent or venal legislators. These abuses cry out for remedies--but for republican remedies.A GOOD IDEAOther reforms of Congress can extend rather than restrict democracy in America. One is an overdue increase in the size of the House of Representatives.In 1789 the first House of Representatives had sixty-five members, each representing about 30,000 inhabitants (and far fewer qualified voters). Anti-Federalist opponents of the new federal Constitution protested that districts of 30,000 were too large: congressmen would be far too remote from the concerns of their constituents (the constituencies in most state legislatures at the time were much smaller). One of the Federalist papers (No. 55) is devoted to justifying such enormous districts.Today each of the 435 members of the House represents about twenty times as many voters as the first representatives did. Whereas the United States has, on average, one representative for roughly every 600,000 inhabitants, the ratio in Japan is one to 238,600, in Germany one to 120,000, in France one to 96,300, and in Britain one to 87,500. Obviously, the disparity is due largely to the differences in population between the United States and other Western countries, but the number of representatives also plays a role. The U.S. House of Representatives is small by Western democratic standards. Germany's newly revised Bundestag has 662 members, the British House of Commons 651 members, France's National Assembly 577 members, and Japan's lower house of the Diet 512 members.There is nothing sacred about 435, the number at which the-House of Representatives has been frozen by law since 1929. In the intervening six decades the United States has more than doubled in population. A vote for a representative, therefore, counts less than half as much in 1992 as it did in 1929--and a twentieth as much as it did in 1792. The weight of a vote will continue to decline: fifty years from now the average congressional district may include 750,000 people. Already, Montana has gone to court to challenge the present apportionment system, which would give the huge state only one congressional seat, representing 800,000 people. What is more, at the rate that the U.S. population is growing, in the foreseeable future a fifth of the states may have only one representative--and a third only two or one.Clearly, the membership of the House cannot be increased in direct proportion to the population. If the original 30,000-member constituencies had been retained, by today there would be more than 8,000 representatives. (The House would have to meet in a stadium.) Nevertheless, moderate increases in House size can help limit the dilution of democracy caused by population growth. If the experience of other Western democracies is any guide, a 500-member House would not be unmanageable, nor would a 600-member House. The House is not the Senate; it loses its special function as districts grow too large and representatives find themselves ever more remote from their constituencies. If there is an argument against moderate increases in House membership beyond 435, it must be more compelling than mere tradition. Sixty-three years is not time immemorial.PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATIONThe comparatively small number of representatives in the popular branch of the U.S. legislature is not, however, the only respect in which the United States is less democratic than the countries of Western Europe.Electoral systems can be divided into two fundamental varieties: the plurality, or "winner-take-all," method and the party-list method, with proportional representation (PR). Under the plurality system a representative is elected by a simple plurality (or in some cases a majority) of voters in a single-member district. In contrast, in PR systems the country is divided into multimember districts (in a small country such as Israel, the entire nation may be a single district). Several parties present lists of candidates within each multimember district; the electorate casts its votes for the parties, rather than the candidates; and then the seats are allocated among the parties, on the basis of the proportion they received of the total vote.The United States has inherited the plurality method from Britain, which maintains it as well (Australia has broken with the British tradition in favor of more-modern methods). The Anglo-American method makes possible distortions of the democratic process which are simply impossible under PR. Imagine a country with a plurality system in which there are two major parties, X and Y. Those who vote for party X, even if they make up no more than 51 percent of the voters in each single-member district, may elect 100 percent of the representatives; those voting for party Y, although they constitute 49 percent of the population, MAY END UP WITH NO REPRESENTATIVES AT ALL. Now suppose that X and Y are joined by a third party, Z. If in every district X receives 40 percent of the vote, Y 38 percent, and Z 22 percent, X will control every seat in the legislature, even though 60 percent of the population voted for other parties.These examples may seem extreme, but there are cases in which plurality systems have elected one party even though another received a greater number of votes. For example, in 1974 the British Conservative Party lost its majority of seats in the House of Commons, even though it received 300,000 more votes than the Labour Parry. In the latest British election John Major's Conservative Party retained a majority in the House of Commons, even though a majority of British voters cast votes for parties other than the Conservatives.Similar distortions exist in the United States. In 1990 the Republican Party won 45 percent of the popular vote but was reduced to 38 percent of the seats in the House. The Democrats, with 53 percent of the popular vote, received 61 percent of the seats. As in Britain, a strong third-party challenge could permit a minority of American voters to elect a majority of members of Congress. Nothing remotely comparable to these distortions is possible under proportional representation.Another advantage of PR is the way it makes gerrymandering difficult or impossible. In multimember districts every party or voting bloc will be represented more or less in proportion to its strength in the entire electorate, regardless of how the district lines are drawn. It is only in plurality systems, in which an area of several blocks may make the difference between losing everything and winning everything by a few percentage points, that there is a strong incentive to gerrymander.Along with partisan gerrymandering, today's government-mandated racial gerrymandering could be eliminated by PR without curtailing the voting power of ethnic minorities. Federal courts have gone from striking down a "strangely irregular twenty-eight-sided" district drawn to prevent black voters from pooling their strength to requiring the creation of equally strange districts to encourage the election of black candidates. Under PR, blacks and Hispanics would find it much easier to elect candidates of their own ethnic group--if they chose. But they would not be maneuvered into such a choice by being electorally ghettoized in safe "minority" districts. Other ethnic minorities, who do not receive preferential gerrymandering, would benefit as well. For example, the federal courts have recognized the right of blacks to have districts redesigned to their benefit--but not the right of Hasidim. PR would eliminate the need for heavy-handed efforts that force some electoral minorities to waste their votes while artificially magnifying the weight of other minority votes. At the same time, PR would increase the power of all minorities--ethnic, religious, ideological, economic, blacks and Hasidim--to elect representatives to Congress, on whatever grounds they chose.Proportional representation has an additional advantage, insofar as it permits the election of talented or distinguished persons who can get a minority of the vote in a district but who disdain to indulge in the vulgar exaggeration and false promises necessary to win a majority. Noting that "the highly cultivated members of the community" find it difficult to be elected under a winner-take-all system, John Stuart Mill wrote,"Had a plan like Mr. Hare's [for proportional representation] by good fortune suggested itself to the enlightened and patriotic founders of the American Republic, the Federal and State Assemblies would have contained many of these distinguished men, and democracy would have been spared its greatest reproach and one of its most formidable evils."PRACTICALITIESWhat would it take to install proportional representation for members of the House of Representatives? Nothing more than an act of Congress. No constitutional amendment is necessary. Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution states, "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators." This gives Congress the power to preempt all state electoral laws and to mandate a system of multimember districts with proportional representation for electing members of the House of Representatives.Because the idea of PR is to give electoral representation not only to parties or candidates that win by slight pluralities or majorities but also to second-, third-, and fourth-place winners, it requires multimember districts. The best way to adapt PR to American conditions would be to consolidate present contiguous congressional districts into multimember districts with some manageable number of members--seven, say, or nine. The larger the number elected from a multimember district, the smaller the number of voters needed to elect at least one representative to the House.By promoting a close correspondence between groups of voters and groups represented in Congress, PR minimizes the waste of votes that occurs under our present system. For example, the same hypothetical voting population that, divided into nine single-member districts, now returns nine Democrats, each with a slight plurality in his district, might, if organized into a nine-member district with PR, send four Democrats, three Republicans, one Libertarian, and one Conservative to Congress--WITH THE SAME VOTES CAST. By the same token, Democrats who today waste their votes in largely Republican areas might be able to elect a minority of a consolidated multimember district's congressional delegation. Many voters who today are resigned to never electing a congressman of their party or their philosophy, simply because they happen to belong to permanent electoral minorities in their local communities, would suddenly be able to help elect one or more representatives, without changing either their residence or their views.Multimember districts are nothing new in the United States. Combined with both plurality elections and PR, they have long been used at the state and municipal levels. For example, from 1870 to 1980 the cumulative vote within three-member districts (similar to PR) was used to elect legislators to the Illinois Assembly. As early as 1867 Senator Charles Buckalew proposed that cumulative voting for House elections be imposed by Congress on reconstructed southern states seeking readmission to the Union; following this experiment, either cumulative voting or proportional representation (which he thought too complex for the Americans of his day to comprehend!) could be adopted nationwide. That his proposed reform got nowhere was a tragedy not only for the black, white Republican, and Populist electoral minorities in the South, who were soon effectively disenfranchised by the dominant Democrats, but for the country as a whole, which might have adopted PR by the turn of the century, as many European democracies had.What about the states that are so sparsely populated that they have only one congressman apiece? PR works only when districts elect multiple members--at least two or three, and preferably more than four or five. At present six states have such small populations that they have only one representative apiece (Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming). Perhaps single-member states would elect their representatives under a plurality system. Still, it seems unfair not to allow their citizens the benefits of PR. The fairest approach would be to increase the number of representatives to give these states more representatives.These proposals may seem radical. They are. Established institutions need be accorded respect only to the degree that they have earned it. In this case it is difficult to argue with the political scientist Theodore Lowi that "nothing about the present American party system warrants the respect it receives."Discontent is manifested not only by third-party challenges but also by split-ticket voting, a practice that expresses the inability of many Americans to identify completely with either national party. In 1988, for example, a quarter of the Ohio voters who voted for George Bush also voted for the liberal Democratic senator Howard Metzenbaum. Split-ticket voting like this has produced today's deadlocked government. The blame lies with a party system that does not allow the preferences of substantial numbers of Americans to be expressed.Because of our peculiar electoral law, the U.S. government is divided between two parties. The American people are not.THE CUMULATIVE VOTE AND CONGRESSIONAL LEADERSHIPThe principal behind PR--the representation of electoral minorities as minorities in the government--would be thwarted if it were not carried through to the selection of the leaders of the legislature. The instrument to carry it through is the cumulative vote.The technique of cumulative voting was devised by corporate lawyers to ensure minority-shareholder representation on the board of directors of a corporation. The technique gives a voting bloc a choice, whether to distribute its votes among all the candidates who are to be elected to the board at the same time, or to pool its votes, in order to be sure of electing one or several candidates. The theory is that it is better to be represented by a minority on the board than not to be represented at all.Cumulative voting could easily be applied to the selection of both the House and the Senate leadership. Under the present system for selecting the speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader, whatever party or faction controls a bare majority of each body can control the leadership and elect all the committee chairmen. Suppose, however, that each house of Congress were run by a leadership committee. Suppose further that each representative or senator did not have to cast one vote for each committee position but could cast all his or her votes for one candidate. Minorities within each house could then elect members to the leadership committees.Why should a party that controls 51 percent of the seats in a legislature control 100 percent of the chairmanships of legislative committees? Why should 49 percent of the population go unrepresented in the congressional leadership, merely because they are 49 rather than 51 percent? Why should there be a revolution in committee leadership in a closely divided House if, say, half a dozen districts return representatives belonging to the former minority party?Life is full of crude approximations, and the ancient convention that treats a 51 percent majority as a surrogate for the whole might be tolerable if there were not an alternative. But there is: the cumulative vote.EXTREMISM--OR CONSENSUS?Compared with proportional representation, the Anglo-American plurality method is so manifestly unfair that it must be justified in terms of other values. Most of the criticism of PR is directed at multiparty systems, which PR is thought--correctly--to promote. Plurality systems tend to encourage two parties to dominate, while PR systems generally reward the formation of small parties.Some claim that the multiparty democracy encouraged by PR is "undemocratic," because coalition-building is undertaken in the legislature by minority parties, rather than within broad, would-be-majority parties before winner-take-all elections. Insofar as smaller parties must make more compromises than large parties in order to get their programs passed, PR is said to deny voters the right to choose between two clearly defined party platforms, one of which has the chance of becoming the platform of a stable legislative majority. This assumes, however, that there is no logrolling in two-party systems. It also assumes that most voters identify wholly with one or the other party. In reality, Americans, to the extent that they vote for parties rather than individual candidates, choose one party over the other because it is the lesser of two evils, not because they fully endorse the national party's positions on all issues. The addition of new parties would increase the chances that voters could find representatives who shared most or all of their values and concerns.The charge that a multiparty system leads to governmental instability is untrue for a country like the United States, whose government is based on the separation of powers. In multiparty parliamentary regimes, because the Prime Minister and executive officers belong to the parties in the dominant coalition, the entire government may fall if a small party defects. In such a system a small extremist party may be able to exact major concessions on policy, as the price of its joining a coalition. Reportedly, in the spring of 1990, for example, a single Brooklyn rabbi, by virtue of his influence over a tiny religious party, prevented the formation of a legislative coalition in Israel's Knesset. This kind of instability would remain impossible in the United States, where the President would continue to be elected by the plurality system, and would serve for a fixed term no matter what multiparty coalitions formed in the House of Representatives. Israel, now on the way to adopting direct elections for the Prime Minister, is moving away from parliamentary instability toward a system like the one I advocate, combining the separation of powers with PR for elections to a popular legislative chamber.NATIONAL ELECTIONThe Framers could not picture how a national election would work. Never in the history of the world had a comparable election been conducted in a territory as large as the United States – even the 1787 version of the United States that covered just 13 eastern seaboard states from Maine to Georgia. (Maine, by the way, was then part of Massachusetts and didn’t become a separate state until 1820.)The differences and distances between the 13 states were much bigger deals than they are today, despite the enormous growth of the United States. There was no national media by which the people of New England would come to know about the political leaders of the Deep South, or vice versa. There was no tradition of campaigning for office; in fact powerful norms banned overt office-seeking. (This business of presidential candidates running around the country begging for votes dates back roughly to the 1890s.)Because the potential electorate was so much more state-oriented in political thinking, if everyone could just vote for a person whom they thought would make a good president, they would mostly vote for a favorite son of their own state. The favorite sons of the most populous states – Virginia, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania -- would tend to get the most votes, which made small-state delegates nervous. (There’s an irony here: Despite the Framers efforts to work around this problem, the first 10 presidential elections were all won by candidates from Virginia or Massachusetts.)If the Framers had assumed that national political parties would present the nation with a reasonable set of choices for president, they might have come up with a less complicated, more directly democratic plan. At least the eminent constitutional law scholar Bruce Ackerman suggested as much in his book “The Failure of the Founding Fathers.”But, as I mentioned in a previous installment of this series, the Framers had a blind spot about political parties. They disliked them, which is understandable. But they believed you could have national politics without political parties, which was just naïve and wrong.The Framers envisioned a nation led by a certain kind of natural aristocrat who was above partisanship, like George Washington, whose noble qualities would inspire and justify trust. Everyone knew Washington would be the first president no matter what kind of selection system was used (and he remains the only president named unanimously in the Electoral College). But the Framers weren’t sure that, after Washington, any subsequent Great Man would have a comparable national reputation.Washington owed his national reputation to his role as hero-general of the War for Independence and the Framers couldn’t assume a similar event to create a similar hero in the future. So a “Committee of Eleven” Framers worked on the side on ideas for how to choose a president while the rest of the constitutional convention pursued other matters.NEW PARTIESIt is anyone's guess what the parties in a House elected by PR would be. (The Senate would continue to be elected the way it is now, and such effect as there would be on it would be indirect.) Although voters might continue to identify with the two major parties for a time, dissidents would soon learn that third-party votes were not wasted.The largest party in the House might well be the Republicans. As it is, their party, with its homogeneous and stable group of core voters and centralized, disciplined organization, is far more like a European party than the Democratic Party is. If PR were adopted, the Republicans might lose their right wing to a new conservative party or parties, but the number of right-wing Republican voters is fairly small (as the Patrick Buchanan campaign unintentionally demonstrated, by adding only single-digit figures to large protest votes). The Republicans might compensate for their loss by becoming a more consistently classical-liberal party--pro-business, pro-choice--and attracting fiscally conservative social liberals who now identify with a Democrat like Paul Tsongas. Such a neoliberal Republican Party might hold steady at 35 to 40 percent of the House.The Democratic Party, an incoherent coalition of smaller proto-parties, lobbies, interest groups, and machines, which are brought together only by the winner-take-all logic of our electoral system, would, however, probably disintegrate. The breakup of the Democratic Party as the result of PR would not mean that the power of today's Democratic voters would decline. On the contrary, the kind of moderate Democrats represented by the Democratic Leadership Council, freed from the electoral necessity of appeasing ethnic and liberal lobbies, might well prosper. Together with "Reagan Democrats" wooed back from the Republican presidential coalition, moderate Democrats in Congress might form a Populist Party equivalent to Christian Democratic parties in Europe. Slightly right of center on social issues and foreign policy, slightly left of center on middle-class benefits, such a party could be expected to draw substantial support from Northeastern ethnics, middle-and lower-middle-class whites and Hispanics in the South and West, and perhaps socially conservative blacks. It would be heavily Catholic. A Populist Party might be the nearest rival to the Republicans for the status of largest party in the House.The United States, unlike Europe, probably would not have a strong Social Democratic Party, given the low level of unionization and the lack of a mainstream socialist intellectual tradition here. There might nevertheless be something that called itself the Social Democratic Party, representing unions, farmers, public-sector employees. Heavily black and Hispanic, such a party would favor protectionism and government subsidies to industry.A small American Green Party would almost certainly arise from the decomposition of the Democrats. Appealing to New Age environmentalists, pacifists, feminists, and gay-rights activists, such a party might have trouble winning five percent of the vote in successive elections. So might other fringe parties that are easy to imagine: the Conservatives, a far right-fundamentalist alliance; the Multicultural Coalition, a coalition of ethnic-separatist parties; and anti-tax Libertarians.Carrying this speculative exercise one step further, we might assign percentages of House membership to these hypothetical parties. Based on European experience and American political subcultures, the pattern might be as follows: Republicans (40 percent), Populists (30 percent), Social Democrats (15 percent), Greens (5 percent), Conservatives (5 percent), Multiculturalists and Libertarians (5 percent between them).One question that immediately comes to mind is, Would a multiparty system exaggerate the power of small, extremist parties in the House? The danger that such parties might hold the key to House leadership would be eliminated by the leadership reforms proposed above. If the position of speaker of the House rotated among the members of a leadership committee elected by cumulative vote, moderate parties would be assured of exercising power in their turn and having substantial weight on the leadership committees, without having to make any compromises with extremists.The chances that tiny fringe parties would win significant representation would be limited by the division of the country into multimember districts. The danger of extremism could also be guarded against by setting a threshold for participation in the legislature. Germany's requirement that parties get five percent of the nationwide vote, for example, has been enough to exclude both the neo-Nazi Republicans and the radical-left Greens. Anyone who argues for a higher threshold should explain just which 10 or 20 percent of his fellow citizens are so dangerous that they should be effectively disenfranchised.It is extremely doubtful that PR could bring black-nationalist or white-supremacist parties to power in the House. Since blacks constitute only 12 percent of the population, and an even smaller proportion of the electorate, most black voters would have to support an extremist party for it to clear a five-percent threshold. It seems unlikely that they would, because more-moderate multiracial parties would more accurately reflect the economic concerns and values of most black voters. Even if a black-nationalist party passed the five-percent hurdle, it could be kept out of the House leadership. To elect one member to a five-member leadership committee, at least 17 percent of the House membership would be necessary. Black radicals would have to form coalitions with non-blacks.What about white Klansmen and neo-Nazis? Right-wing nationalist parties have made gains in recent European elections, but these are protest votes by moderate voters who seek to change particular policies of centrist parties, not to replace those parties permanently with extremists. In the United States the support for Buchanan's extreme conservatism, even in the Republican Party, appears to have been in the single digits, and support for David Duke-style racism vanishingly small. This suggests that the only viable far-right parties in a multiparty House would be Pat Robertson-style Christian conservatives, not Aryan Nation skinheads.Those who claim that PR was responsible for the electoral successes of the National Socialist party in Weimar Germany are mistaken, according to no less an authority than Hermann Goering. Enid Lakeman, a British advocate of PR, writes of Weimar Germany that "if the British electoral system had been in use [the Nazi party] might have been grossly over-represented....Goering said at his trial that under the British system that [1933] election would have given the Nazis every seat in the country, and he cannot have been far wrong." Hitler would have loved the Anglo-American electoral system.For some, of course, a system that gives any influence to "extremists" like conservative Christians and social democrats is bad. Even if this intolerant position could be reconciled with a commitment to democracy in America, would PR be worse than the plurality system in this respect? Under our present system small but intensely motivated ideological minorities have the power to force moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats to placate them in order to get the small margin of voters sometimes necessary for election in winner-take-all races. In a multiparty system such intense minorities might gain direct representation in Congress but would lose their ability to dictate centrist-party platforms. To be sure, on particular measures large, centrist parties might need small-party help, but they would not need to ally themselves with small parties in order to win election in the first place. In the shifting coalitions formed to pass different bills, the larger, moderate parties would have the upper hand.In addition to ideological extremism, today's two-party American system promotes "extremism of the center." This results from the need for the two national parties to exaggerate their differences in order to appeal to the crucial minority of white middle-class swing voters. These voters--Wallace-ites and Reagan Democrats--do not identify completely with either national party. Since 1968 they have elected primarily Republican Presidents who share their conservative cultural and foreign-policy values, and Democratic congressmen who protect their middle-class transfers (Social Security, Medicaid, student loans). The penchant of these "populists" for ticket-splitting not only exaggerates the indirect power of this group but also encourages Democrats and Republicans alike to pander to their worst instincts. The Democrats try to appeal to the populist swing vote with giveaways; the Republicans play on racial resentment and call for military strength. If populists had their own party in Congress, their leaders would presumably have to be more responsible and measured in their views than are swing voters whose prejudices and appetites are stoked and exploited by both of today's national parties. As long as there is ticket-splitting, extremism of this kind will be built into our present system--and will corrupt it. A case can be made, then, that PR is just as likely to reduce the political power of extremist minorities as to enhance it.CITIZEN PARTICIPATIONHow do you measure the health of a democracy? One obvious and absolutely valid first thought is to measure the level of citizen participation, and the basic form of such participation is voting.Of all the developed democracies in the world, the United States ranks near the bottom in the portion of its voting-age citizen population that votes. And, I’m afraid to tell you, the situation is even worse than that general statement makes it look.“A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective,” a soon-to-be published text on comparative democracy, examines U.S. democracy in the context of (you guessed it) 31 developed democracies across the six populated continents of the world (although the biggest chunk of the 31 are in Europe). The lead author, political scientist Steven Taylor of Troy University in Alabama, kindly shared with me an advance copy of the chapter that deals with voter turnout.It includes a chart depicting the percentage of the voting-age population that actually voted in all 31 democracies in the period 1990-2010. The highest turnout is Italy, with an average participation rate of 86.12 percent. The top 10 countries by this measure — all with average turnouts above 78 percent — are Italy, Belgium, Greece, Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Brazil, Finland, Korea and New Zealand.The United States comes in 29th of the 31 nations, with an average turnout of 57.28 percent.That is a bad number. Very bad. You can argue, I suppose, that as long as people have a right to vote, it is up to them whether they choose to exercise that right. I’m not interested in making excuses for lazy or tuned-out voters, but Professor Bingham Powell of the University of Rochester, a veteran comparer of different systems of democracy, urges me (and you) to bear in mind that “lots of things affect voter turnout other than interest and competence of the voters.”Even bearing that mind, in judging the health of a democracy, I don’t know how a low rate of voting participation can be taken as anything other than a serious sign of democratic ill health.'FATHER' OF ELECTORAL COLLEGEJames Wilson of Pennsylvania is credited by many sources as the “father” of the Electoral College. Wilson was actually one of the most democratically minded of the Framers, but once it became clear that direct popular election for president was not going to be adopted, Wilson and the others came up with a plan that had no real precedent and very few subsequent imitators, but which makes some sense once you have in mind the various questions and problems the Framers faced.The president would be chosen indirectly, in a process that could take several steps. First the Constitution created the position of presidential “elector,” chosen by the state legislatures.As the Committee of Eleven conceived the office of presidential elector, these were not to be people who ran for the office or announced to the public whom they would favor for president. And they certainly didn’t have in mind the modern situation where the role of the elector is pro-forma and is given to party regulars who are pledged or legally bound to support the party’s nominee. On the contrary, the Framers’ plan assigned no role to partisanship. (In fact, nowhere does the Constitution mention political parties.)The electors were intended to be men of good reputation whose judgment would be trusted to know something -- and something more than the average voter -- about the great men of the nation who might be worthy of consideration for president. If there was a new Washington out there somewhere, the electors were supposed to be the kind of gentlemen of sufficient learning and wisdom and connections to the national scene to know about him.The plan left it entirely up to each state legislature to decide how to choose electors (except that no member of Congress or other federal official could be an elector). This appealed to the states-righters in the convention and in the country. Any state that wanted to could allow its voters to choose the presidential electors (which appealed to those hoping for a more democratic process), or the electors could be appointed directly by the legislature. Both measures were used in the early going.In fact, it’s worth noting that the Framers had no thought that the president would have a “mandate” from “the people.” They were looking for excellence, not popularity. Ackerman’s “Failure” book (cited above) argues that not until the fourth presidential election -- the one in 1800 in which Thomas Jefferson defeated the incumbent president John Adams but inadvertently tied with his own running mate -- did the idea develop that a president derived some of his authority from a popular mandate.However they might be chosen, each elector was instructed to vote for two men for president -- not one for president and one for vice president, two men -- either of whom the elector thought would make a good president. But at least one of the two had to be from a state different than the elector himself. (This is the provision that caused the Cheney problem two-plus centuries later, which I mentioned in the previous installment.)Why? The Framers knew the loyalty that these early Americans felt to their home state grandees and they assumed that most electors would support someone from their own state and that the big-state candidates would have a significant advantage. But if there was a new Washington around, they hoped the electors from other states would push that person into the top tier of finishers.The original plan said that if anyone was named on a majority of ballots, that person would be president. But assuming there would be no parties and no nominees, it seemed quite likely that after Washington no single candidate would be named by a majority of the electors. So the Framers decided that the top five electoral-vote recipients would all have their names forwarded to Congress and the winner would be chosen by the House of Representatives, voting on a one-state one-vote basis and with a requirement that the balloting continue until one candidate received support from an absolute majority of states.If two candidates were each named on a majority of ballots, the one with the most votes would be president and the runner-up would be vice president. But if two men had a majority and an equal number of electoral votes, those two candidates would be offered to House for the same one-state, one-vote runoff. You might think that scenario is far-fetched, but, of course, it happened.If the plan worked the way it was envisioned by the Framers, it would look pretty ugly to modern eyes. Because of the crazy one-state one-vote rule, a fifth-place finisher who for some reason appealed to representatives of small states could end up as president. And although the Framers worried about a system that would make the president into a creature of the Congress, their back-up mechanism would undermine that goal. The only benefit of the electoral vote would be to force the House to choose from among five candidates chosen by others (and note that the Constitution bars any member of Congress from being an elector).But the plan never played out, not even once, after Washington retired. Bear that in mind when people defend the Electoral College system as representing the divine wisdom of the Framers. The Electoral College, as practiced today, has almost nothing in common with the system the Framers intended or envisioned. The emergence of national political parties and presidential tickets, the decision by most states to adopt a winner-take-all system for the awarding of its electoral votes and other changes of modern politics have led to a number of pretty strange results. In the next installment, I’ll go over some of those weirdnesses.IT GETS WORSESome of those “other” factors will be the subject of the next installment, but first allow me to argue that the U.S. turnout is actually quite a bit worse than that 57 percent participation rate makes it look.Curtis Gans of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate, who specializes in studying turnout, says that presidential election turnouts in recent history have been generally in the upper 50s, occasionally breaking into the low 60s, and midterm turnouts have fairly consistently hovered just above and below the 40 percent mark. Here are Gans’ calculations of the turnouts over the last five midterm elections:1994: 40.9 percent1998: 37.9 percent2002: 39.6 percent2006: 40.6 percent2010: 41.5 percentAs you can see, there’s been a slight uptick over the last few cycles, but Gans believes this trend is ending. After studying turnout in the primaries so far this cycle (it hit a record low in 15 of the first 25 states to hold primaries this year), Gans is projecting a drop in the turnout on Election Day this year from the level of recent midterms.When constructing the table that ranked the United States 29th out of 31 democracies in turnout, the authors of the textbook cited above rated each country according to the highest-turnout election in its normal cycle. But nobody else on the list has a system that alternates regularly between a high-turnout election and a low-turnout election. In a typical election elsewhere in the democratic world, everything is on table.So let’s just look this square in the face. It’s true that the presidency is not on the ballot this year. And that makes the midterm a somewhat less important election. But all 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and 35 Senate seats, including the one in Minnesota (there’s a couple of extras because of vacancies), will be on the ballot.Theoretically, this is an opportunity for the electorate to deeply change the power structure in Washington, and to send, in the most meaningful and democratic way, a signal about what they want their national government to do over the next two years. It’s somewhat unlikely that this election will result in such a clear signal. But even if it does, the message will be sent by just 40 percent of the voting-age population.TRANSFORMING AMERICAN POLITICSOf course, a little instability might help end the trench warfare in American politics. By multiplying the possibilities for coalitions, a PR-produced multiparty system could introduce movement and change where there is now only partisan maneuvering on the margins of deadlock. To use the parties in my example, a legislative coalition of Republicans, Libertarians, and Conservatives might be able to cap runaway spending and put through a bill enabling parents to choose the schools that their children will attend. Populists might be able to attract Social Democrats and Conservatives whose lower-middle-class constituents were dependent on federal transfer payments into an alliance on the issue of comprehensive health-care reform. Small-town Christian Conservatives and rural Greens might find themselves allied against environmentally disruptive development projects.The formation of multiple parties could transform American politics in other ways. Although only members of the House of Representatives would be elected by PR, parties in the House would soon begin to run candidates for the Senate as well, so that the Senate, too, might be divided among several parties offering a choice, not an echo.The effects on presidential elections could be even more interesting, because of the constitutional provision that if no presidential candidate wins a majority of the electoral-college vote, the choice will be left to the House of Representatives. "The presence of a third important party capable of obtaining seats in the House of Representatives and a few electoral votes would hardly throw every presidential election into the House of Representatives," Theodore Lowi has written. "Its presence WOULD, however, force each of the candidates for the nominations of the two major parties to look to the House of Representatives as the place where the real election MIGHT TAKE PLACE. This would transform the presidency because Congress would become the president's direct constituency." The possibility that a splitting of the presidential vote among several candidates would give the House the opportunity to choose might deter Presidents from demagogically "running against Congress," as have Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush.A much more likely scenario than elections thrown into the House is the formation of multiparty alliances to elect presidential candidates. Not only might populists have the dominant party in the House, but also they might be the dominant partner in winning presidential alliances. No longer would populists be tempted to split their votes between Republican Presidents and Democratic Congresses. Divided government could come to an end.Such a system might create incentives for interbranch cooperation, rather than confrontation. Since Presidents would tend to be elected by the same multiparty coalition that dominated voting in the House, they would be inclined to view major congressmen as allies, not enemies. At the same time, the multiplication of parties might increase presidential influence in Congress, because it would be difficult for centrist majorities in the House to entice Greens, radical Christians, and other small parties into the supermajorities needed to override presidential vetoes. Presidents who found it easier to organize legislative coalitions, in turn, would be less tempted to circumvent Congress and undermine constitutional democracy by bureaucratic policy changes in the name of "inherent executive power."There might even be a parallel to the "era of good feelings" that, in hindsight, can be seen to have existed from 1936 to 1968. Contrast the accomplishments of that era--the winning of the Second World War, the Marshall Plan, NATO, GATT, the GI Bill, interstate highways, public education, the Civil Rights Act--with the dissension, deadlock, and deficits of the period from 1968 to the present. Contributing to the nonpartisan achievements of that earlier period might have been the fact that the United States had a de facto three-party system. From their rebellion against FDR's court-packing scheme until their downfall as the result of the civil-rights movement, conservative southern Democrats in Congress functioned in effect as a third party, voting almost as often with the Republicans as with liberal Democrats. Their power had evil roots, to be sure, in black disenfranchisement; recognizing this, one can also recognize that they played a moderating role in American politics, checking the excesses of left-wing New Dealers and isolationist Republicans alike. If something like the post-1968 two-party system had existed from the Depression until the 1960s, with a deep division between left-wing New Dealers and far-right Republicans combined with nearly constant control of the presidency and Congress by opposing parties, then America might have been far less stable and successful both abroad and at home.The Founding Fathers did not think that the long development of democratic political forms in America and the world had come to an end with their work. Neither should we. America was once the laboratory of democracy. If the alliance of tradition and cynicism against democratic reform of Congress prevails, America may become democracy's museum instead.DIFFERENTIATIONNo other democracy in the world has a system quite like this, a system in which the legislative branch is regularly up for grabs in an election in which the executive branch is not. A system in which we have alternating turnouts from bad (60 percent) to worse (40 percent) then back to bad then back to worse.You can say this was in a sense part of the Framers’ design. They built the staggered terms into the U.S. Constitution. There is general agreement that they wanted to cushion the national government from short-term swings in public opinion, and to make a bit harder to change the whole government with one sudden gust of public opinion that might be short-lived.But the Framers did not mean to set up this weird alternation between bad and worse turnouts. It was not anyone’s intention and it’s hard to imagine why anyone would ever intend such a pattern. It has just evolved. And it’s pretty crazy. And no other democracy in the world has anything like that going on.Reference:Parliamentary republic - WikipediaA Radical Plan to Change American PoliticsWhy the Constitution’s Framers didn’t want us to directly elect the presidentWhy do so few citizens participate in our democracy?James Madison and Executive PowerMajority Rule/Minority Rights: Essential PrinciplesThe Constitution and the FoundingAmerican RevolutionThe Formation of a National Government

Massachusetts Budget ProcessThe Governor gets the ball rolling and actually is allowed to send their budget to the House as a Bill, this is not the case in all states. This is the process:1. Governor's BudgetThe annual budget process begins each year when the Governor files recommendations as a bill with the House of Representatives. Under the state Constitution, the Governor must submit a proposal by the 4th Wednesday in January or, in the event of a new term, within five weeks later. This bill is called 'House 1’ or ‘House 2’ depending on the year.2. House Ways & Means BudgetThe House Committee on Ways and Means examines the Governor’s proposal and releases its own recommendations for the annual budget for deliberation by the House of Representatives. Prior to release of the House Ways and Means Budget, Joint Ways and Means Committee budget hearings are held across the state.3. House BudgetThe full House of Representatives considers amendments to the House Ways and Means recommendations and debates their inclusion in the bill. The House of Representatives then approves a final, amended version of the bill which is then sent to the Senate for consideration.4. Senate Ways & Means BudgetThe Senate Committee on Ways and Means examines both the Governor’s proposal and the House proposal and releases its own recommendations for the annual budget for deliberation by the Senate.5. Senate BudgetThe full Senate considers amendments to the Senate Ways and Means recommendations and debates their inclusion in the bill. The Senate then approves a final, amended version of the bill.6. Conference CommitteeThe House and Senate appoint three members each to a "conference committee" to reconcile the differences between the House and Senate proposals. One member of the minority party must be appointed by each branch. The conference committee reports a final compromise bill to the House and Senate for a final vote of acceptance in each branch.7. Governor's ActionsThe Governor has 10 days to review the budget and take action to either approve or veto the budget. The Governor may approve or veto the entire budget, veto or reduce specific line items, veto outside sections or submit changes as an amendment to the budget for further consideration by the Legislature. (NOTE: Governors in many states have the line item veto, the President of the US does not.)8. Legislative OverridesThe Legislature can override the Governor’s vetoes with a two-thirds vote in each branch. The House must vote first to override any vetoes before they may be considered by the Senate.9. Final BudgetFollowing any Legislative overrides, the budget is finalized and is commonly referred to as the “General Appropriations Act” for the upcoming fiscal year.This process takes about 7 months.Massachusetts Budget ProcessNew York State Budget ProcessNew York State uses an executive budget model. Under this system, the Executive is responsible for developing and preparing a comprehensive, balanced budget proposal, which the Legislature modifies and enacts into law. The Governor is required by the State Constitution to seek and coordinate requests from agencies of State government, develop a “complete” plan of proposed expenditures and the revenues available to support them (a “balanced budget”), and submit a budget to the Legislature along with the appropriation bills and other legislation required to carry out budgetary recommendations. The Governor is also required by the State Finance Law to manage the budget through administrative actions during the fiscal year.The State’s fiscal year begins April 1 and ends on March 31. However, the actual “budget cycle,” representing the time between early budget preparation and final disbursements, begins some nine months earlier and lasts approximately 27 months – until the expiration of the State Comptroller’s authority to honor vouchers against the previous fiscal year’s appropriations.1. Agency Budget Preparation (June–September/October)http://...Preparation of budget requests varies among agencies reflecting their size, complexity and internal practice. Typically, budget development begins at the program or subdepartmental level, with staff preparing individual program requests. The head of the agency or its top fiscal officer may hold internalhearings at which program managers outline their budgetary needs.Although agencies begin to analyze their budget needs as early as May or June, the formal budget cycle begins when the Budget Director issues a policy memorandum - the “call letter” - to agency heads. The call letter outlines, in general terms, the Governor’s priorities for the coming year, alerts the agency heads to expected fiscal constraints and informs agencies of the schedule for submitting requests to the Division of the Budget. The call letter signals the official start of the budget process.By early-mid fall, a final program package is assembled by each agency, which is guided by the instructions set forth by the Division of the Budget, reviewed for consistency with the call letter, and approved by the agency head.2. Division Of The Budget Review (September/October–December)http://...In accordance with the schedule outlined in the call letter, agencies typically submit their budget requests to the Division of the Budget in early-mid fall, with copies provided to the legislative fiscal committees. Examination units within the Division then analyze the requests of the agencies for which they have responsibility. Examiners may seek additional information from the agencies and may hold informal hearings or meetings with agency management to clarify agency requests and seek a more precise definition of agency priorities. By the end of October, examination units have also usually determined funding requirements to continue agency programs at current levels in the new year.In November, the Budget Director conducts constitutionally authorized “formal” budget hearings, giving agency heads an opportunity to present and discuss their budget requests and giving the staff of the Division of the Budget and the Governor’s office an opportunity to raise critical questions on program, policy and priorities. As provided in the Constitution, representatives of the Legislature also participate in the hearings.Under reform legislation passed in January 2007, a “quick start” budget process was instituted to help provide an earlier understanding of the state’s available funding resources. By November 5, the Division of the Budget, the Assembly, the Senate, and the comptroller release detailed forecasts of revenues and expenditures. After a public meeting with the respective staff members of these parties, DOB, the Senate, and the Assembly release a consensus forecast of the state’s financial position by November 15.Through late November, the Division’s examiners transform agency requests into preliminary budget and personnel recommendations which are reviewed in detail with the Director. They also prepare the appropriation bills and any other legislation required to carry out these recommendations. Concurrently, the Division of the Budget’s fiscal planning staff is reassessing economic projections, investigating possible changes in the revenue structure, analyzing trends in federal funding, and preparing the Financial Plan that describes and forecasts the State’s fiscal condition. The Financial Plan is prepared both on a cash basis and according to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).By early December, the Division of the Budget will normally have completed its preliminary recommendations on both revenues and expenditures, and presented them to the Governor and the Governor’s staff. Budget staff then prepare the tables and the narrative (the “budget story”) that accompany each agency budget, and the descriptions and forecasts of individual revenue sources.3. The Governor’s Decisions (November - January)The Governor’s staff, who are also preparing the annual “State of the State” message to the Legislature, work with the Division throughout the development of the budget. The Governor is kept up-to-date on changing economic and revenue forecasts and confirms that executive program priorities are accurately reflected in the budget. Based on the preliminary recommendations and the most current reading of the economic and fiscal environment, the final Executive Budget recommendations are formulated in a series of meetings between Division of the Budget staff and the Governor. These sessions focus on major fiscal and policy issues and may lead to significant revisions in agency budgets.4. Legislative Action (January–March)http://...Typically by mid-January – or, following a gubernatorial election year, by February 1 – the Governor submits his Executive Budget to the Legislature, along with the related appropriation, revenue, and budget bills. The State’s five-year Financial Plan, Five-Year Capital Program and Financing Plan, and financial information supporting the Executive Budget are also submitted with the Executive Budget. The Executive Budget documents are available here.The Legislature, primarily through its fiscal committees – Senate Finance and Assembly Ways and Means – analyzes the Governor’s spending proposals and revenue estimates, holds public hearings on major programs, and seeks further information from the Division of the Budget and other State agencies. Following that review, the Legislature acts on the appropriation bills submitted with the Executive Budget.Under budget reform legislation passed in 2007, the Legislature is required to use a conference committee process between the two houses to organize its deliberations, set priorities, and reach agreement on a Budget. In addition, the State Finance Law requires that the Executive and Legislature convene a consensus economic and revenue forecasting conference and issue a consensus report on tax, lottery and miscellaneous receipts on or before March 1. If the parties fail to reach consensus, the Comptroller is required to issue a binding revenue forecast by March 5.Based on their separate and joint deliberations, the two houses reach agreement on spending and revenue recommendations, which are reflected in amended versions of the Governor’s proposed appropriation bills and related legislation, and approved by both houses. These amended bills are available from the Senate and Assembly Document Rooms located in the Capitol and the Legislative Office Building, and on the Internet.The appropriation bills, except for those items which were added by the Legislature and the appropriations for the Legislature and Judiciary, become law without further action by the Governor. The Governor must approve or disapprove all or parts of the appropriation bills covering the Legislature and Judiciary, and may use the line item veto to disapprove items added by the Legislature while approving the remainder of the bill. As provided in the Constitution, the Legislature may override the Governor’s veto by a vote of two-thirds of the members of each house. The appropriation bills legally authorize the expenditure of funds during the new fiscal year.Prior to passage of the appropriation bills, the Legislature must issue a summary of the proposed changes to the budget to its members. The Division of the Budget is also required to prepare a report that summarizes the impact of the Legislature’s actions on the State’s multi-year Financial Plan. Once the Governor completes his review of the Legislature’s actions, the Division then issues a comprehensive Enacted Budget Report that contains the State’s official Financial Plan projections for the current and successive fiscal years. The Legislature must also issue a report describing appropriation changes and the effect of the Enacted Budget on State agency employment levels.5. Budget Execution (April–March)At this point the budget process enters a new phase: budget execution. As a first step, the Division of the Budget approves “certificates of allocation” informing the State Comptroller that accounts may be established as specified in the certificates and that vouchers drawn against the accounts may be honored.In addition, the Division of the Budget keeps a close watch throughout the year on the flow of revenue and the pattern of expenditures against its projections. This information is reflected in quarterly updates of the Financial Plan which are provided to the Legislature as required by law in April (or as soon as practicable after budget enactment), July, October and with the Executive Budget for the ensuing year (usually January).The Debt Reform Act of 2000 requires the Governor to report on the State’s compliance with statutory caps placed on new debt issued after March 31, 2000. The State annually reports these findings in the Financial Plan Update closest to October 31.These updates serve as the basis of financial management during the fiscal year, and may alert both the Governor and the Legislature to potential problems in maintaining budget balance as the State fiscal year unfolds.Shortly after the end of the fiscal year, the Division of the Budget issues a comprehensive report that (1) compares unaudited year-end results to the projections set forth in the Enacted Budget and in the final update to the Financial Plan and (2) summarizes the reasons for the annual change in receipts and disbursements.The Budget Process, New York StateTexas State Budget ProcessIn Texas, the legislature, specifically the Legislative Budget Board is responsible for preparing the preliminary budget. Since the state has a divided executive branch, the state comptroller is also involved in the process.The Texas budget process begins during the year prior to each regular session of the state's Legislature, which are held in odd-numbered years.1. Legislative Appropriations RequestsEach state agency prepares a detailed legislative appropriations request (LAR) under the guidelines of the state's Legislative Budget Board (LBB). These LARs itemize the funding each agency feels it needs to pursue its various tasks, and include performance measures designed to ensure the money is spent efficiently and effectively.These LARs generally are sent to LBB, the Comptroller's office and several other state agencies by the end of summer or in early fall.2. LBB and Governor's Office of the Budget, Planning and Policy Hearings.The LBB and the Governor's Office of Budget, Planning and Policy hold hearings on their content.In the fall before the session, LBB uses the LARs as a basis to prepare a draft of the state's general appropriations bill, which will provide state agencies and institutions with funding for the following two fiscal years.3. State Comptroller Issues the Biennial Revenue Estimate.At the beginning of the legislative session, the Comptroller's office issues its biennial revenue estimate (BRE), a careful estimate of the funds likely to be available from taxes and other revenue sources over the next two years. The Texas Constitution makes the BRE a cap on legislative spending for this period.4. House and Senate HearingsBoth the Texas House Committee on Appropriations and the Senate Finance Committee hold hearings on the general appropriations bill, and make changes to it reflecting the BRE's limits and their funding priorities.5. Approval of House and Senate hearing versions.When the committees complete their versions of the bill, they send them to the full House and Senate, respectively, for approval.6. Bicameral Conference Committee to resolve differences in billsThese two bills then go to a conference committee made up of members of both the House and Senate, which resolves their differences to produce a single bill reflecting the wishes of both bodies.7. Both Houses Vote on Combined Bill.8. Certification by State Comptroller.Once approved, it goes to the Comptroller's office for "certification," a formal statement from the Comptroller that the bill spends no more than the amounts reflected in the BRE.9. Governor's signature.The bill then faces a final hurdle, the governor's signature. Texas has a "line-item veto," allowing the governor to trim individual spending items from the bill as he or she sees fit. (This veto can be overridden a two-thirds majority vote in each house, but in practice the governor's decisions are rarely challenged.)Once signed, the bill becomes law, directing the state's finances for two more years.http://www.texastransparency.org/State_Finance/Budget_Finance/Budget_Primer.phpEach state's budget process is slightly different so if you want to know about a specific state I suggest you go to that state's website to find out.

Thanks for the A2A. As a starter I’d like to address what Philip Doublet said regarding Justin not keeping his promises.You mean someone that’s broken every substantive campaign promise, plunged the country into massive debt, introduced new taxes which will slam the middle class he lied about protecting, and does not appear to have a brain in his useless head? Maybe everyone else is just lucky, that's all.Do you have a single idea how politic works? Because when I hear this statement from pretty much everyone who doesn’t know much how politic works it makes me cringe a bit because a prime minister or a world leader in a democratic system doesn’t completely have the last word. So I propose here to review a bit what is the Canadian political system and then I’ll answer the question.First Canada has 3 levels of governments:Federal government (the Government of Canada) - Responsible for things that affect the whole country, such as citizenship and immigration, national defence and trade with other countries.Provincial and territorial governments) - Responsible for things such as education, health care and highways.Municipal (local) governments (cities, towns, and villages in Ontario) - Responsible for firefighting, city streets and other local matters. If there is no local government, the province provides services.At the federal level, there are 3 parts of government:Elizabeth II, Queen of Canada, is Canada's formal head of state. The Governor General represents the Queen in Canada and carries out the duties of head of state.The House of Commons makes Canada's laws. Canadians elect representatives to the House of Commons. These representatives are called Members of Parliament (MPs) and usually belong to a political party. The political party that has the largest number of MPs forms the government, and its leader becomes prime minister.The prime minister is the head of government in Canada. The Prime Minister chooses MPs to serve as ministers in the cabinet. There are ministers for citizenship and immigration, justice and other subjects. The cabinet makes important decisions about government policy.The Senate reviews laws that are proposed by the House of Commons. Senators come from across Canada. The prime minister chooses the senators.At the provincial level:The Lieutenant Governor represents the Queen.The Legislative Assembly makes law. In Ontario, elected representatives are called Members of Provincial Parliament (MPPs).The political party that has the largest number of MPPs forms the government, and its leader becomes premier. The premier is the head of government in Ontario.The premier leads the government and chooses MPPs to serve as ministers in the cabinet. The cabinet sets government policy and introduces laws for the Legislative Assembly to consider.At the municipal level:The Province of Ontario defines the structure, finances, and management of the local governments of cities, towns and villages.Residents of the municipality elect the mayor and council members to lead the local government. Committees of councillors discuss budget, service and administrative issues that are then passed on to the council for debate. Citizens, business owners and community groups can present their concerns to councillors at committee meetings.Municipalities may also be part of a larger county or regional government.So now that we are clear on the Canadian political system, it is quite obvious that the prime minister isn’t alone in this whole machine. But let’s see what are the real power a federal prime minister has.The prime minister’s powers are supported by constitutional convention, rather than specific rules written in laws or in the Constitution. For example, section 56(1) of the Canada Elections Act states that the Governor General can dissolve Parliament and trigger a federal election. However, this piece of legislation doesn’t explain how it has become customary for the Governor General to take these steps only on the prime minister’s advice. This means that those who don’t know about this unwritten rule may not know that the prime minister is involved in triggering an election at all.The previous example about the prime minister’s role in dissolving Parliament draws attention to how using constitutional conventions as the primary way of guiding the prime minister’s power can be problematic, as these rules are not always clear. Disagreement around what these unwritten rules say regarding what the prime minister can or cannot do may make it difficult for these conventions to constrain the prime minister’s power. One example is the prime minister’s power to determine how long an election campaign will be – a longer campaign can have negative financial consequences for parties that are not prepared for such a timeline, thus weakening their ability to campaign effectively.On the other side, not holding the prime minister to a set of concrete rules can be advantageous, as it allows the leader to determine the best way to manage responsibilities and the extent to which he or she will consult with cabinet in making decisions.Executive and Legislative BranchesThe prime minister exerts significant influence over the executive branch of government through controlling ministerial appointments. According to convention, he or she has the power to appoint, assign and dismiss cabinet members. This means that while the prime minister cannot force members of Parliament to take a specific position, cabinet ministers can be motivated to adopt the prime minister’s views because they are afraid to lose their positions. The prime minister’s indirect influence on an MP’s decision-making power has led to some criticisms about buying loyalty, since the MP’s ability to represent the best interests of his or her constituency could be jeopardized in certain situations where the MP feels pressured to side with the prime minister.The prime minister can also have substantial influence over the legislative branch of government, as the ability to decide the timing of a federal election allows him or her to better control what and when laws will be passed. In Canada, bills can be passed through either the House of Commons or the Senate. They must move through three readings “in the House where it is starting from, where parliamentarians debate the idea behind the bill.” Once the bill passes the third reading or debate, it passes to the other house, where it goes through the same stages and it becomes law once it has been given to the Governor General for royal assent. This process of passing a bill into law is interrupted when the prime minister recommends that the Governor General dissolve Parliament, thereby triggering a federal election. With dissolution, all government and private members’ bills “die,” which means that they will be dropped if they have not yet received royal assent by the time Parliament is dissolved.Appointment Powers1) Appointing JudgesSection 96 of the Constitution Act, 1867 gives the Governor General the power to “appoint the Judges of the Superior, District and County Courts in each province.”Because the Governor General makes judicial appointment decisions on the advice of the the prime minister, he or she has significant authority in the judicial appointment process.The Governor General in Council appoints Supreme Court of Canada judges on the recommendation of the prime minister. First, the minister of justice identifies a pool of qualified candidates, which is reviewed by a selection panel comprised of up to five MPs. The panel then submits an unranked list of three recommended candidates to the prime minister, who makes the final decision about who to recommend. This authority has attracted controversy over the lack of transparency in the decision-making process. However, as there are currently no public hearings on Supreme Court nominees, there is little opportunity for Canadians to learn more about what fuels the prime minister’s decision in the judicial appointment process.2) Appointing SenatorsSections 21 and 32 of the Constitution Act, 1867 require that a “fit and qualified Person” be appointed to the Senate when there are vacancies, in order to keep membership at 105 senators. As is the constitutional convention, senators are appointed by the Governor General on the advice of the prime minister, according to established geographical divisions that are laid out in section 22 of the Constitution. The prime minister’s ability to recommend to the Governor General which senators are to be appointed is especially important given the long tenure of senators, who can sit until the mandatory retirement age of 75.A controversy has developed over whether it is possible for a prime minister to impose an indefinite moratorium on all Senate appointments. For example, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has not made any new recommendations for Senate appointment to the Governor General for at least two and half years, which has resulted in there being 22 fewer senators than the 105 members required under section 21 of the Constitution. Some have suggested that this question of whether the prime minister has “the authority to appoint or not appoint” senators at his or her discretion has not yet been firmly established, as there is no reference in the Constitution about what might happen if the prime minister refuses to recommend a candidate for appointment. Therefore, a lawyer has brought this question to the court, by seeking a declaration that the prime minister has a constitutional obligation to fill Senate vacancies by making recommendations for Senate appointment to the Governor General within a reasonable time.So now that we understands a bit more the prime minister responsibilities let me open a parenthesis on the electoral promises.Whatever a politician says during an election are anything but promises. When analysing speeches during electoral campaigns one can quickly understands that most candidates will rarely use the term “I promise.” Because they are fully aware that they cannot promise anything, thus, in reality, what they are saying are projections and suppositions: “I will amend this law” “I will lower the taxes for such and such group”, but rarely, at least for this era a candidate will be dumb enough to start a speech with “I promise” because as we can see in the process of adopting a law, the prime minister doesn’t have the last word he can influence those voting for the law or any plans that he has by putting the right senator in place one that follows his/her concept, but this is in no way a guaranty that the law will be voted even if it comes directly from the prime minister itself.Justin is very new in the field as prime minister but he’s no stranger to the process since we all know who his father was and although he is not his father, he does have the very same charisma and I believe that he will definitely shake up some status quo… but it is way too early yet to be 100% percent certain on how efficient he will be as prime minister. So no Philip, Justin did not break any promises because I followed his campaign and in none of his speeches has he ever started with “I promise.” A promise isn’t a promise until it has been stated. Electoral promises is a term that is widely used in news media, but not all journalists are political science expert and so many are definitely not versed in the art of speech analysis.Why aren’t there more world leaders like Justin? Because, for the very first time in history - at least Canadian history, the prime minister we have doesn’t seems much to look for his own interests and seem genuinely having the people at heart. Only time will tell if this will change and this is not just a single person responsibility.