Positive Liberty

Interesting Dan Walters column today on California’s weak executive branch:

A persuasive argument could be made for moving California toward a parliamentary democracy rather than the federal system that the state adopted from the national government 150-plus years ago.
The federal system, rooted in the post-Revolutionary War fear of concentrated power, institutionalizes the concept of “checks and balances.” We Californians have enhanced the diffusion inherent in the federal system by making more of the executive branch offices separately elected, installing a system of direct democracy that bypasses elected government altogether, maintaining a long state constitution that decrees how government is to be conducted, requiring supermajority votes on many issues, and vesting authority in many quasi-independent agencies.

We have deluded ourselves into believing that installing more cooks in the political kitchen will somehow produce a more palatable menu when, in fact, it has exactly the opposite effect. One of many examples: Multiple offices and agencies claim pieces of California’s 6 million-student system of public K-12 education, and that means no one is accountable for the performance of the system. Everyone claims credit whenever something goes well, and no one bears responsibility for when things go wrong, thus increasing the public’s frustration. One can take almost any issue – transportation, water, land use, energy, etc. – and the dynamics are similar.

A parliamentary system, as used in Great Britain, Canada and most other democracies, strengthens the executive branch of government by requiring it to reflect a legislative majority. A parliamentary governor would have the authority–and the responsibility–to make policy as long as he or she retained a legislative majority, thus diminishing the buck-passing and gridlock-inducing aspects of the federal system that have enervated California.

We should be moving toward streamlining authority and accountability but, if anything, we have continued to move in the other direction, with ever-greater levels of diffusion and ever-lower levels of accountability….