But the Washington newspapers can no more remove a President during his term of place than the Times can remove a lord mayor during his year of office.
Walter Bagehot
The Public Record
Walter Bagehot was an English journalist, businessman, and essayist, who wrote extensively about government, economics, literature and race. He is known for co-founding the National Review in 1855, and for his works The English Constitution and Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (1873).
gutenberg.org
After saying that the division of the legislature and the executive in Presidential governments weakens the legislative power, it may seem a contradiction to say that it also weakens the executive power.
The division weakens the whole aggregate force of Government--the entire imperial power; and therefore it weakens both its halves.
In England a strong Cabinet can obtain the concurrence of the legislature in all acts which facilitate its administration; it is itself, so to say, the legislature.
The natural tendency of the members of every legislature is to make themselves conspicuous.
They wish to gratify an ambition laudable or blamable; they wish to promote the measures they think best for the public welfare; they wish to make their WILL felt in great affairs.
All these mixed motives urge them to oppose the executive.
They are embodying the purposes of others if they aid; they are advancing their own opinions if they defeat: they are first if they vanquish; they are auxiliaries if they support.
But the Presidential system not only gives the executive power an antagonist in the legislative power, and so makes it weaker; it also enfeebles it by impairing its intrinsic quality.
A Cabinet is elected by a legislature; and when that legislature is composed of fit persons, that mode of electing the executive is the very best.
Generally speaking, in an electioneering country (I mean in a country full of political life, and used to the manipulation of popular institutions), the election of candidates to elect candidates is a farce.
He is but a messenger--a transmitter; the real decision is in those who choose him--who chose him because they knew what he would do.
Members are mostly, perhaps, elected because they will vote for a particular Ministry, rather than for purely legislative reasons.
But--and here is the capital distinction--the functions of the House of Commons are important and CONTINUOUS.
It does not, like the Electoral College in the United States, separate when it has elected its ruler; it watches, legislates, seats and unseats ministries, from day to day.
A good Parliament, too, is a capital choosing body.
If it is fit to make laws for a country, its majority ought to represent the general average intelligence of that country; its various members ought to represent the various special interests, special opinions, special prejudices, to be…
There ought to be an advocate for every particular sect, and a vast neutral body of no sect--homogeneous and judicial, like the nation itself.
It is, what Washington and Hamilton strove to create, an electoral college of the picked men of the nation.
The best mode of appreciating its advantages is to look at the alternative.
The competing constituency is the nation itself, and this is, according to theory and experience, in all but the rarest cases, a bad constituency.
He is not the choice of the nation, he is the choice of the wire-pullers.
And, as the nation is less able to choose than a Parliament, so it has worse people to choose out of.
The American legislators of the last century have been much blamed for not permitting the Ministers of the President to be members of the assembly; but, with reference to the specific end which they had in view, they saw clearly and…
If they are not excluded they become the executive, they eclipse the President himself.
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