On Monday, 19 March 2018 3:16:43 PM AEDT Rick Moen via luv-talk wrote:
If members of Congress were able to vote "we think Paul Ryan is more capable as President" instead of "we think our President is a criminal" then maybe things would be different.
Quibble: If the Senate were to vote _only_ to remove The Toddler, and do nothing else, then (current) Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan would _not_ be next in line for the Presidency but rather Mike 'torquemada' Pence, the VP.
The common practice in Australian politics is to have the "Deputy PM" be someone who supports the PM but lacks the power to mount a credible challenge. In the case of "The Coalition" (Liberals and Nationals who almost always work together) the PM is Liberal (the larger of the 2 Tory parties) and the Deputy PM is National. I don't expect to see the Deputy PM ever become the PM, especially not from the Tories. In the case of Pence, I doubt that he would be likely to win a Congressional popularity contest, it's possible that he would do worse than Trump. Paul Ryan might not be the most likely, but he seems a much better candidate.
Here's a hilarious political fantasy: Impeachment and trial gets delayed until after the November midterm elections. The Senate finds cause to remove _both_ the Pres. and VP. (This assumes the House files indictments aka impeachmens against both, and the Senate presumes to find them convincing.) Let's say for further entertainment value that Hillary Clinton has run in the November midterms for a House of Representatives seat in (say) a New York State Congressional district, and won. Let's say that the Democrats achieve an absolute House majority in November, and then elects as the new Speaker of the House... Hillary Clinton.
Guess who then would immediately ascend to the Presidency upon Trump and Pence's removal from office? ;->
;) But I'm really doubtful that they could find cause to impeach Pence. He is horrible but doesn't strike me as particularly stupid. I think that the only hope for impeaching him would be to get him to say "I did not have sexual relations with that MAN" under oath. One can only hope that some intern has a stained shirt in a cupboard somewhere.
Oz gains many advantage in electoral flexibility from its pioneering use of ranked-choice voting, I vaguely recall. Such methods have been slowly gaining more adoption in more progressive-minded parts of the USA, such as (locally) the City of San Francisco. Adopting it for Federal offices would of course required Constitutional amendments, hence would be very difficult, more's the pity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_federal_election,_1919 It was having 2 competing Tory parties that caused the adoption of preferential voting. If the sane conservatives were to split from the party of Trump the same thing could happen in the US. But it seems that there has been a slow attrition of sane people from the GOP rather than a hard fork of the party.
But having the US President at odds with Congress seems a common occurance after mid-terms.
It's actually so common that it's expected. Rare is the party in power that doesn't raise a backlash after a few years.
That happens everywhere. But in Australia it either results in the PM and parliamentary majority changing or both of them not changing much. But winning with a smaller than expected majority can lead to a change of PM. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/