This Is Not News

Let me pick up on the discussion of the British House of Lords that I started a few days ago. I’m a big proponent of changing some of our government institutions here in the US, so it’s been instructive to me to look at the difficulties that the UK has faced in trying to do so.

Quick intro-to-Parliament here: the House of Commons is a lot like our House of Representatives. The nation is divided into districts (called constituencies). Voters in that district vote for the one candidate that they want to represent them. Whichever candidate gets more votes than any other candidate becomes the Member of Parliament (MP) from that constituency. This type of system is often referred to as single-member district (because only one person can win the election and represent the area) with a first-past-the-post election system (because whoever is in the lead when the election is over is declared the winner).

Now, an important contrast between the American and British system is that in the British system, the House of Commons also controls the executive branch of the government. There is no separate election for the chief executive. A majority of the House of Commons decides who will be the Prime Minister. If one party has a majority of the seats in the House of Commons, then the leader of that party becomes Prime Minister. If no party has an outright majority, then the party that has the most seats will try to form a coalition with smaller parties to get their support. In that case the leader of the large party would most likely become Prime Minister and folks from the smaller parties would get important positions in the government. Imagine if Nancy Pelosi had immediately become President when the Democrats won control of the House of Representatives in 2006 or that John Boehner immediately became President when the Republicans won in 2010, and you get the idea. (When I say immediately, I mean there’s no months-long transition between the election and the swearing-in of the winners. It all happens in a matter of days.)

Personally, I find this system much more appealing than ours. I hate divided government, where one party controls all or part of the legislative branch and another party controls the executive. Neither side is able to implement its platform. Each side waters down the other sides’ proposals and makes legislation more complicated. Each side blames the other side when things go wrong and grabs the credit when things go right. Voters don’t get a strong sense of what each party stands for or the consequences of each side’s favored policies. Reading from afar, it seems to me like people take the parties’ manifestos (their statement of priorities and proposals) a lot more seriously than folks take party platforms in America. I think this is in part because voters in the UK know that if a party wins control of the government, they are likely to have the power to enact whatever they put in their manifesto, and can make the credible claim that that’s what voters want them to do. Thus the process of debating and drafting the manifesto helps voters become more informed, and when things turn out well or poorly, there’s no confusion about where to place the credit or the blame.

But all of that is connected to the House of Commons in the UK. Wasn’t I talking about the House of Lords? Supposedly. Here’s the thing. Once upon a time, the House of Lords was the more powerful chamber of the British government. If you held an important rank in the nobility or the clergy, you had a seat in the House of Lords. If your noble title passed on to your heir, so did your seat. And if those elected commoners in the other chamber got above their station and passed a bill you didn’t like, you and your fellow Lords could reject it. As the notions of equal rights, universal suffrage, and democratic representation took hold, the members of the House of Commons became unwilling to put up with that kind of treatment. With support from the monarchy, the House of Commons was able to force the House of Lords to accept the Parliament Acts, laws that establish that the House of Lords can not reject a bill that has been passed by the House of Commons. (The UK has no written constitution, so the structure of its government is established by laws passed by the government.)

So if the Lords can’t reject a bill, what can it do? It has some powers to investigate and hold hearings, and in terms of passing laws, they can propose amendments to a bill. If the Commons does not want to accept these amendments and pass the bill in its original form, it has to wait a year and hold a second vote on the bill. That’s the procedural guarantee that the Commons is the primary chamber – even if the Lords uses its statutory power to its maximum, the most it can do is delay passage of a law by a year. In practice, it’s also looked down upon for the Lords to reject a bill that was specifically described in the governing party’s manifesto, but that’s more of a “we have this power but we agree not to use it” kind of thing, and after seeing the explosion of filibusters in the Senate I don’t really like relying on those types of cultural restraints.

Now these days, only a small number of the seats in the House of Lords are passed on to the member’s heir. A reform in the 1990s replaced most of the hereditary seats with lifetime appointments. But there are still a number of people who think it’s ridiculous for a democratic country in the 21st century to have any kind of aristocratic, unelected power structure. A minority party in the UK, the Liberal Democrats, have held this view for a while, and in 2010 the election for control of the House of Commons was so close that neither the Labour Party nor the Conservative Party won a majority of the seats. The Liberal Democrats controlled just enough seats that they could tip the balance of power either way. They chose to form a coalition with the Conservatives, and one of their terms was that the House of Lords would be transformed into an elected body. The leaders of the Conservative Party agreed.

What no one fully appreciated was that not every Conservative member of Parliament was willing to go along with the deal. A small but significant minority of them refused to go along with the plan. It appears that the minority was significant enough to derail the whole thing, and now many people wonder if the coalition can survive to the end of the government’s term in 2015. But what I’ve been wondering is whether I’m glad to see the effort fail or not. This kind of surprises me. Given my feelings about democracy, you’d think I’d be all over the expansion of voter control over the government. All things being equal, I probably would support it.

The thing is, even though I expressed my skepticism about cultural restraints a couple of paragraphs ago, they do have some impact. Even the US Senate doesn’t filibuster everything. And it seems to me like the House of Lords knows it’s on a short leash and can’t be seen as abusing its power or else the entire thing might be abolished. If the members were elected, I don’t see why they’d have that restraint. They could justifiably say that they were elected to exercise certain powers and so it’s perfectly legitimate for them to do so. And that would set up more situations like we currently have in the US, where the Republicans control one chamber of the legislature while the Democrats control the other and the Republicans have significant procedural power to slow or even reject legislation in that chamber. The Conservatives might hold a majority in the Commons while Labor and the Liberal Democrats control a majority of the Lords and use that majority to slow down every bill the Commons passes and demand concessions. At that point the government stops being driven by a relatively clear vision and becomes a muddle. I’m not sure that helps democracy.

The idea of a unicameral legislature has a lot of appeal to me, so I don’t know if I’d be heartbroken if the UK eliminated the House of Lords altogether. And there’s probably a way to change the Lords to give it elected members while very clearly curtailing its power. But it’s a change of such magnitude that it needs to be thought out very carefully so that the unintended consequences don’t overwhelm the desired benefits of the change.

I posted yesterday about my efforts to learn more about the United Kingdom’s efforts to reform its House of Lords. At the moment, it looks like that effort is going nowhere, because a small number of Conservative members of Parliament are refusing to support it. Whether or not that’s a good thing depends in part on whether you think it’s important that a democratic government be responsive to its citizens. Should our elected officials see their job as going what the people want them to do? Or should they see it as doing whatever they think is right, and then hoping to convince the people later? The knee jerk reaction might be to say the latter, but America’s system, in part by design and in part by accident, is set up much more along the latter lines.

One reason for this is that in our government, it is almost impossible for a majority at an given time to actually elect a set of government officials who will follow their desires. Look at all of the roadblocks that exist between a popular majority and the final enactment of a law. (Some of this may be obvious or common knowledge, but I think there’s value in looking at all of htese peices of information as a total package.)

• Lawmaking power is split between a legislative branch and an executive branch. Congress must pass a bill and the president must sign it before it becomes a law. If the two disagree, they can block each other, so neither one gets to enact its preferred policy.
• This is exacerbated by the staggered terms on which these officials are elected. We vote for president every four years. These tend to be the highest profile elections we have with the highest turnout. But members of one chamber of Congress, the House of Representatives, are elected very two years. So every other House election happens in a year without a presidential election. These elections tend to have have lower turnout and often result in the party that doesn’t control the presidency gaining power in Congress. To compound the issue, members of the other house, the Senate, are elected to six year terms. Every two years, one-third of the seats in the Senate come up for election. So whatever the public wants at any given election, there’s two-thirds of the Senate that wasn’t necessarily elected with that goal in mind. If the public’s desires are consistent, that’s no big deal, but if the public changes its mind about something, it’ll be six years before the Senate will fully reflect that change.
• The Senate also gives each state an equal number of votes, regardless of population. So even if the entire population of the state of California wants something, the states of Utah and Alaska could override that desire.
• The president is not actually elected by a national popular vote, but by an electoral college that assigns a number of votes to each state in such a way that it is possible, although unlikely, that someone could lose the popular vote and still win the presidency.
• On top of all of these built-in structural features, the Senate has developed a number of traditions and procedures that allow a minority to slow down or even block a bill. CHief among these are the filibuster, in which three-fifths of the senators must vote to stop talking about a bill before it can be voted on. So 59 out of 100 senators can support a law, and that law will not pass.
• When a law is finally passed and signed, it can be reviewed and overturned by a Supreme Court whose members hold lifetime terms, meaning that a law passed today will have to meet the approal of justices appointed 20 or 25 years ago.

These structural and procedural systems make it very hard for any party or any president to make major changes in our system. Once those changes go through, it’s very hard to undo them. Some people say that this a strength of our checks-and-balances system – the government will not swing wildly from one policy to another based on which party has won the most recent election, but will be required to stay in a rough consensus area and only make changes after the voters have had a long time to think about and approve those changes. It is much harder to get a radical government when the government’s power is split, and if all those different power-holders agree on something then the public can have more confidence about it.

Other people call it a weakness, because not only is it hard to react quickly to changing circumstances, the voters have a hard time assigning responsibility for the good and bad results of the government’s policies. If they don’t know who gets the credit and who gets the blame, they can’t be sure of who to re-elect and who to get rid of.

I have my own opinions, which I’ve shared before and which I’ll probably share again when I look at the UK’s latest efforts for Lords reform. But for now I wanted to get this stuff down for future reference and invite your thoughts on that opening question: Should government officials be trying to do what the people want them to do, or do they have a different kind of responsibility?