Is an American Parliament Inevitable?

A session of the United States House of Representatives. Courtesy of Pew Research Center

By  HUNTER RYERSON ‘24

On Jan. 3, 2023, at the onset of the 118th US Congress, Republican Congressman Kevin McCarthy failed to secure a majority of votes for the Speakership of the House, hampered by protest votes from the hard-right Freedom Caucus. What followed were days of political drama and spectacle broadcasted clearly to American voters. C-SPAN, which was granted special authority to operate independently for the duration of the speakership crisis, gave America an unprecedentedly candid view of its representatives. Close-up reactions, rowdy boos and hollers, and angry shouting across the House floor made for a jarring departure from the low-energy routine typically shown on television. These were scenes fit for Netflix’s House of Cards, not our actual Capitol Hill. After 15 rounds of arguing, pleading, and horsetrading, McCarthy secured his gavel. In exchange, he traded away any certainty of keeping it by guaranteeing that any congressman could force a vote to oust the speaker at any time.

On Tuesday, Oct. 3, just under nine months after taking office, McCarthy was ousted from the speakership by that very procedure in a 216-210 House vote. Led by the very Freedom Caucus, which had hampered McCarthy’s original speakership bid, this motion stalled the work of an already-fumbling Congress. That afternoon, I joined some Cillian political junkies to watch this Congressional meltdown on a laptop screen. Someone joked: “Well, I guess Rishi Sunak’s gonna be speaker.”

The comparison between the ousted Speaker McCarthy and the resigned British Prime Minister Truss was apt: both arrived in power on shaky mandates from their respective conservative parties, and both failed to sustain a functional government to combat large-scale issues facing their respective citizenries. But this quick joke made me think more deeply about the growing similarities between parliamentary government and our own.

The system of parliamentary democracy requires the executive, or head of government, to derive their mandate from the legislature (i.e., parliament). Meanwhile, the head of state (typically held by a monarch or a ceremonial president) is a public persona embodying the state as a whole and is entirely distinct from the Head of Government. On paper, this is starkly different from our own constitutional republic, in which the directly elected president is both head of government and head of state, conducting partisan policy and embodying the United States as a unified nation. 

However, in the last decade, our past two presidents have veered away from statecraft and instead become personalities and figureheads for their respective ideologies. Former President Donald Trump is the clearest example. During Trump’s ultimately successful 2016 presidential bid, Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, insisted that: “[Trump] needs an experienced person to do the part of the [presidential] job he doesn’t want to do. He sees himself more as the chairman of the board than even the CEO, let alone the COO.” Trump’s supposed vision as a big-picture overseer of the federal government, but not dealing with day-to-day, nitty-gritty affairs, is greatly similar to the role of the parliamentary head of state. And, indeed, for the first two years of the Trump presidency, it was Speaker of the House Paul Ryan who spearheaded the (ultimately failed) Republican health care agenda, large tax cuts (true to his Ayn Rand fanaticism), and a greatly-bolstered military budget, managing the hyperspecific policy agendas as a Head of Government would. Similarly, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi broke precedent during her tenure, stripping the House Majority Leader of its role as manager of the legislative agenda and redirecting that authority to herself.

Meanwhile, President Biden’s first term has been marred by rumors of a constant tug-of-war between different Democratic factions over controlling policy. While right-wing conspiracy theories of a secret “shadow president” –– either in the form of a third Obama term, a Harris presidency, or even a Pelosi presidency –– have gone viral, and Weekend at Bernie’s references are a dime a dozen in political discourse, I’d be hard troubled to find any voter on the street who truly believes Biden is running the show.

Yet, even if we concede that the executive component of the presidency is fading, that isn’t proof that some bizarre pseudo-parliamentarianism has overtaken Washington. Another typical hallmark of parliamentary democracy is the feature of coalition government, where two or more parties within a multi-party parliament will collaborate to form a majority. This isn’t always the case, but parliamentary systems often allow for more third parties to gain seats, either by proportional representation, multi-round voting, or even the guarantee of the coalition itself (voting for a third party isn’t a wasted vote if they’d work with bigger parties on the important issues).

At first glance, this couldn’t be more different from our US system. We are so starkly divided across party lines, with Republicans and Democrats so hyperfocused on unseating one another that no third party (Reform, Libertarian, Green, or otherwise) wins elections or has any particular influence on the national stage. However, a closer look at ideological caucuses within our two parties reveals there is far more coalition at play than one might think.

In particular, following this recent McCarthy debacle, the Republican Party has proven itself to be a loose coalition between the far-right Freedom Caucus’ 46 members and the more moderate Republican Study Committee’s 156 members (accompanied by twenty unaffiliated Republicans). The Freedom Caucus agenda is dissimilar enough from that of mainstream Republicans that it is effectively its own party (akin to the split between the French Parliament’s hard-right National Rally Party and its more moderate Republican Party).

This notion of coalition isn’t unique to one instance of Republican infighting, either. Congressional Democrats are pretty evenly split down the middle between the 99 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the 94 of the moderate New Democrat Coalition, with ten congressmen drawing up the center under the Blue Dog Coalition. They may do a better job of hiding it than the GOP, but these two bigger Democratic factions (and, to a lesser extent, the Blue Dogs as well) have faced massive infighting in recent years. Most notably, the heated civil war between then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez revealed serious fractures in ideology within the Democratic Party as well.

American politics in the 21st Century have proven to be wildly unpredictable. The issues and circumstances we face are largely unprecedented, and our system of government will almost certainly evolve in unprecedented ways to match. As we, the people, seek to understand our government best and how to guarantee maximum progress, welfare, and stability, it is important to keep a thumb on the pulse of the three branches of government as responsible citizens. The pattern of the speakership rising in prominence and the presidency falling in turn, accompanied by a fragmenting two-party system, all corroborates the idea that a parliamentary America may be just around the corner, and we ought to understand the implications of that new system, so we as citizens are prepared to advocate for our needs within it.