avocadia: Accountability:

I tend to be of the belief that placing elected officials at the head of civil service departments just means we filled the role of taking charge and accountability men who have made a career of avoiding accountability and receiving advice from others on which way to lean. Perhaps that last is just cynicism, but I believe the former.

I lean towards Cabinent being drawn from everywhere, acting independantly of Parliament, but (regularly) accountable to Parliament and dismissable by Parliament.

cam: Dismissable by Parliament: That is interesting. So are you suggesting, that is there were a separate executive, that parliament could sack cabinet members?

cam

avocadia: Accountability:

Sackable? My belief is that the Parliament should be holding the Executive accountable. Being able to sack Cabinet members would seem to follow naturally from this, otherwise it would be a very superficial accountability.

The devil is in the details. House passes - by supermajority - a No Confidence motion, vetoable by someone. Perhaps the Senate. Perhaps the President/GG can do a claytons veto by just re-appointing the cabinet member.

cam: I re-edited my constitution today: and made the House of Representatives over-whelmingly sortionist. It would be a nice form of crowd wisdom if they could pass no-confidence motions on executive cabinet members. I think I shall add it.

I decided I liked the structure of commons (sortitionists), specialists (senate/high court) and unitary elector (GG/GM). So rewrote the structure to be that. Now I am trying to map all the checks and balances back and forth.

cam

Alan: separate but equal: I used to believe in a separate executive, but George Bush has persuaded me of the error of my ways, particularly by his abuse of the role of symbolic leader and his expansion of presidential power to unprecedented levels.

The expansion of personal staffs is an old, old story and it does not just apply in Washington. The personal staff of the prime minister has expanded dramatically under both Blair and Howard and our ministers take orders from twenty-somethings in Howard\'s office with just as much enthusiasm as their counterparts in Washington.

In traditional China the tension between scholar-officials and eunuchs goes back to at least the Han dynasty. The officials had the bureaucracy and tradition on their side. The eunuchs had personal access to the emperor. Guess who usually won out? At least in China the eunuchs were disqualified from taking office in the bureaucracy.

avocadia: George Bush proves the rule:

George W. Bush doesn\'t have a seperate executive. It is pretty clear that the Bush administration is not seperate from the Congress but is in fact running a joint operation with Congress. Bush has expanded presidential power by refuting the idea of seperation with the approval of Congress. Perhaps the Republicans in Congress are just the suicide squad sent in to vote themselves out of existance. Hey, makes more sense than a cruise missile hitting the Pentagon :- )</p<

adam: Its an interesting example: I was thinking of equating modern political staffers with eunuchs just the other day; it\'s good to see I\'m not the only one ...

I was thinking of bundling imperial courtesans into the same category. They\'re all specialists appointed by the executive (or the executive staff), concerned with the propagation of the executive\'s political mandate, but lacking a mandate of their own. When political mandates were expressed via heredity, these abstractions were rather physical.

Although my sympathy is also usually with the civil service, there are examples of the eunuchs being on the right side of history, but foiled by the civil service. Ok, the only one I can come up with is the kneecapping of the eunuch led Ming dynasty treasure ships by the bureaucracy. But it\'s kind of a big one.

Hmm, I wonder if you could put a formal limit on executive staffers? No more than twice the size of cabinet, or somesuch.

Alan: eunuchs: Han and Tang used eunuch auditors with considerable success, but they left real power with the Six Ministries. Eunuch officials repeatedly sent in very negative reports about An Lushan. The reports were ignored and the An Lushan rebellion followed. Your example of Zheng He is another case of eunuchs not deserving the bad press the official histories (written by scholar-officials) give them. Those are about the only cases I know.

Eunuchs were also important in Byzantium and the Islamic world, although the reasons were slightly different. To my knowledge, no-one\'s done any detailed comparative work on eunuch governance.

I suspect the formal limit is to make ministers absoluely responsible, no excsues and no exceptions, for what happens in the private office. That includes the memo-got-lost defence beloved of our present emperor.

cam: Is the problem a strong executive?: or a weak congress? It seems to me, due to party discipline (if it is even that, just partisanship and laziness) that congress has given up many of its duties of oversight. I think another problem is that there is no active way to bring things to the judicature\'s attention. The Attorney-General has that role, but it is firmly part of the executive.

Another problem is, we are seeing the state of exception being used almost perfectly by Bush. Agamben describes it as an absence of law. ie no judicial component. Guantanamo and FISA are examples of that approach. But these are congressional oversight issues. Anyhole like that is supposed to be closed by legislation, or if it is avoiding the law, like the wiretapping, then it becomes criminal.

It is ironic that Bush chafes at the congressional powers that were gained during Nixon\'s time. But he has proved himself worthy of every restriction, plus more, that congress can slap on him.

I am genuinely interested to see if the Democrats get congress if it will be any different.

The benefit of a separate executive/legislature in comparison to a parliamentary system which embeds those two together is, at least in washington system you get the oppurtunity for congressional oversight. In Australia the opposition is relied on for oversight and they cant make laws, like congress can.

cam

cam: How about making staffers face: Senate inquiries. If they are part of the political process then maybe the ministerial departments need legislative oversight.

Would it help, or make a difference?

cam

cam: It couldnt have been done without collusion: and even that wasnt enough for him. If faction is the reason, then if the democrats get control, we should see real oversight. But will we?

cam

Alan: Is the problem a strong executive?: I\'m as concerned with Bush\'s abuse of his symbolic role as his executive role. I doubt he would have been re-elected or retained his congressional majority without the constant drumbeat of commander-in-chief appearances.

Bush has been blatant, for example, in using the armed forces as a partisan backdrop. Perhaps a separate executive can work democratically, but the Madison proposition that merely separating the powers of government is enough is clearly wrong. Perhaps a stronger set of watchdog institutions, as in South Africa, could rebalance the system.

avocadia: Will they or WOn\'t they: Last I heard they were being gun shy on proposing to do their job, namely applying checks to the Executive

avocadia: Neither:

It is neither strong executive or weak congress, these are just the side-effects. It is factionalism. The GOP believes that collusion between the White House and Congress, with a lazy media lending support by omission, will lead to a permenant Republican government.

cam: What checks does South Africa have?: Independent bodies have had trouble fighting off premiers desires for absolute power in the past. Take for instance Carr and ICAC recently, or Kennett and the Auditor-General. Executives move to obliterate anything that stands in their way of absolute power.

Independent institutions like ICAC are awesome though. Anything that puts that kind of oversight fear into the executive is good IMO.

The militarisation of everything is part of the national security state which executives have used to expand their power and turn everything into a crisis that requires maximal force (and civilian submission). Have a look at this for example .

We have criminals in Wadeye, send in the ARMY!

Some Wadeye public servants have called for the Army to be sent in to help control the violence. ...

Gang member Claude Kinthari thinks the Army is needed to bring peace to Wadeye.

\"I think the task force is going to stop it,\" he said.

It is the same as terrorism, there is nothing in gang violence that the police aren\'t armed well enough for.

cam: Your thesis is testable if the Democrats: get the house or senate. We should see more oversight and the executive reigned in. Madison believed separation of powers and check and balances was enough to stop factionalism abrogating the rights of minorities. He even helped put in a bill of rights just to make sure.

If factions and factional control are the root cause of the advance of executive power, are they empowered by the unrepresentative nature of a representative system? Allowing, what are essentially minority factions, to abrogate the rights of not only other minorities, but the majority as well?

Would mob rule be better than absolute factional rule?

cam

cam: ghetto seven: I am not sure they will either. It is like the meaningless differentiation between left and right; government has formed a stable system which is self-dampening and oscillates in slow rotation. The Democrats are part of the waitocracy and are being patient so they get a turn. They might even get to control all arms of government and be lauded as political genii\'

cam

adam: An Lushan: Going by that wikipedia page, An Lushan is an interesting example for a few reasons.  The civil service had been weakend by crony appointments . Executive advisors who were expert in court politics had undue influence, making the relationship with those advisers more important than sound performance in government. Court life went out of synch with reality, and then reality bit it in the arse.

It seems to me the main reason to have eunuchs, whether you\'re an Ottoman or Chinese emperor, is to ensure the harem is only made pregnant from a single geneline, and to reduce any father-child nepotism that might occur amongst your staffers.

I suppose you could give parliament (Senate?) the power to impeach ministers. Wouldn\'t help much in the current Australian parliament though.

cam: I think Avo suggested: in a previous thread that states start impeachment proceedings against anti-federalist judges.

cam

adam: Can\'t find the comment: Did he suggest mechanics, or who would make the judgement? A majority of state parliaments, say?

Alan: why eunuchs?: We\'re getting a little way from republican design issues, but it\'s a fun issue. I suspect that Byzantium disproves the theory that using eunuchs had anything to do with bloodlines. Hereditary succession was the exception for Byzantine emperors, so trying to guarantee the bloodline cannot have been the motive for giving eunuchs control of the gynaikaion.

A Byzantine emperor was expected to represent Christ and, as such, had to be physically perfect. The Byzantines had a horror of capital punishment and tended to blind or castrate deposed emperors as a kinder, gentler alternative to execution. The Chinese also had a rule that the emperor had to be physically perfect. This gave rise tot he idea that the one group who could be trusted with the emperor\'s domestic space were those who, by virtue of eunuch status, were disqualified from ever becoming emperor.

cam: Maybe it was gtalk then: I remember it coming from avo\'s keyboard though, hopefully he will chime in. I took it to mean a majority of states parliaments deciding to impeach/remove a judge.

cam

avocadia: Mechanics:

Cam was con-fusing two ideas:

• That the States should appoint most of the High Court Justices, with one Justice appointed by Parliament.
• That the States may direct the Governor-General to withhold his signature from a Bill.

The core idea was that the GG is not a vice-regal position but vice-provincial, for want of a better term. The GG follows the direction of the States Council, mostly. The States Council is made up of plentipotentary representatives; one from each State and appointed by however the state chooses.

At the time it was Cam who said that the States should be able to remove Justices from the High Court; I agree to a point, in that if anyone was to remove Justices it should be the States, but I am not sure I share Cam\'s distaste for tenure. There\'s nothing wrong with the idea of impeaching a Justice for High Crimes or perhaps gross incompetence, but the shenannigans in the US at the moment are a warning that partisan whores will cry incompetence at judges who hold a different opinion of what the law says.

avocadia: Madison and Bill of Rights: I thought Madison opposed the Bill of Rights, believing that the Constitution with its checks and balances was enough to protect minorities. I could easily be mistaken.

cam: There was no real opposition to a bill of rights: in the US. Both Federalists and Republicans thought them wise. There was some concern that constitutional amendments so soon after ratification might see the republicans remove federal taxing power or federalists expand the power of the executive to meddle in state laws/courts.

Enacting a bill of rights was one of his campaign promises when he was re-elected to Congress. IIRC though he was concerned that any enumerated rights might limit or deny those not explicitly listed, according to Ketchum he saw the advantages of the rights being used to limit executive interference (not limit an individuals right) and that freedom of the press was becoming increasingly important in US democracy. He was also concerned about majority rule expressed through the legislative;

... the prescriptions in favor of liberty ought to be levelled against the quarter where the greatest danger lies, namely, that in either the executive or legislative departments of Government, but in the body of the people, operating by the majority against the minority.

It may be thought that all paper barriers against the power of the community are too weal to be worthy of attention; ... yet as they have a tendency to impress some degreee of respect for them, to establish the public opinion in their favor, and rouse the attention of the whole community, it may be one means to control the majority from those acts to which they might otherwise be inclined.

He was the leader of the majority party in the House at the time.

cam

adam: Bloodlines: Well, Byzantium may show eunuchs weren\'t necessarily about bloodlines, but it wasn\'t irrelevant elsewhere. The next occupants of Istanbul (no Constantinople), the Ottomans, always used black eunuchs to guard the Topkapi harem. This offered twofold security for the imperial line, as if any eunuch or imposter did manage to slip past the knife and impregnate a concubine, it would be rather obvious nine months later.

I would wonder if the lack of a descendant made eunuchs, like priests, more likely to be Company Men, loyal to the organisation. Fashion just doesn\'t seem enough to explain it. Eunuch calm can\'t be that wonderful.

We\'re getting a little way from republican design issues

That\'s because you haven\'t heard my plan for an elite genetically engineered class of eunuch supermen! Mere Platonic philosopher-kings will cower before them! Bwwhahaha.

Alan: cutting out staffers: Perhaps we do not need genetic enhancement or surgical intervention. Maybe ministerial staffers should be banned from standing for parliament for a certain time.

cam: How often do staffers end up running: for parliament?

cam

adam: It\'s pretty common: Mark Latham, Andrew Robb, Petro Georgiou ... looks like Crikey has a list .