Goals

My goals in creating this blog are 1. to determine how realistic and viable my ideas are, through dialogue with others, and 2. assuming, as I believe, that they are viable, to disseminate them to enough people that a tipping point will be reached and they will be put into effect.

The effects of having the House take over the job of selecting the President's Cabinet would be 1. to reduce the power of the President, to make him no more than a figurehead, carrying out ceremonial functions, 2. to enhance the power of the House and its leaders, making them effectively the government's ministers, with the majority leader the Prime Minister--probably resulting in a major reorganization of the House--, 3. to reduce the power of the Senate, and 4. to make the judiciary defer to the House. Issues of representativeness of the electoral college and the Senate would become insignificant. Overall the government would be more efficient and more responsive to the people. Sovereignty would be clearly concentrated in the House. There would no longer be a divided government. Current issues would be more likely to be resolved in a more timely manner.

The more Bush persists in going his own way with respect to Iraq, ignoring the advice of others and the clear will of the people, the more he insists on the power of the executive, the closer we may get to a governmental crisis that will facilitate the kind of changes I am thinking of.

More later.

The basic idea I would like to promote is that the House of Representatives should take charge of the process of nominating and appointing the heads of the executive departments, the President's Cabinet. The House could do so by telling the President that if he did not nominate and appoint the persons the House wants, it would not fund the positions. I know that the first reaction will be that the nomination and appointment of the executive officers is a power given by the Constitution to the President, and indeed it does, but the Constitution says nothing at all about how these persons are selected, or who has the power to make those selections. In fact there was some discussion of this issue in the first Congress, and the power was given to the President by the Congress largely only because the first President was George Washington. It has been a tradition ever since, but it is not part of the written Constitution. Thus it is not unconstitutional for the House to take on the role of selecting the persons whom the President nominates. Such a change would result in a cascade of changes in out government, most of them, I feel, for the better. More later.