Yes, Cheverly is in the 4th District.

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What others say about boorite!

Could someone give me a brief rundown on how the US is governed, and how these governing officials are elected? I just don't get how it all fits together...

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Well, we have a two-party system, and the two candidates from the two major parties drop their pants and bend over, and corporations and rich persons and the gun lobby start ramming wads of cash up the candidates' asses until one of them explodes.

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What others say about boorite!

Yeah, I knew that bit.

I was referring more to governers, senators, representatives... uh... all those types of things. Executive and legislative and what have you...

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Okay, a very brief rundown:

FEDERAL GOVERNMENT:

Executive branch: The President and such. Serves a 4 year term of office with a limit of 2 terms.

Congress: Two houses. Representation in the House of Representatives is based on population. So each state is represented differently depending on the number of people. Connecticut has 5 representatives. California has a gazillion. Representatives serve 2 year terms.

Each state has 2 representatives in the Senate. Senators have 6-year terms.

Bills must pass both houses of Congress and be signed by the President to become law. The President can veto a bill, but both houses can override it with 2/3 majority votes. Bills can be submitted by the President or by either house.

Judiciary: These folks interpret the laws passed by Congress. They can also decide that a law passed by Congress is not constitutional. In which case Congress could amend the Constitution, but I think that also requires votes in the state legislatures.

STATE GOVERNMENT: This pretty much mirrors the Federal government, thogh the structure differs from state to state. In general, they act like their own entities and pass their own laws. Which is why, for example, liquor laws, taxes, and speed limits can differ from state to state. The Federal government can often trump these laws when they feel like it (for example, banning segregated schools).

The Federal government can also bring significant financial pressure on the states to get it's way. In At one time they would withhold highway funds from those states that didn't impose a 55mph speed limit.

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...Trot and Cap'n Bill were free from anxiety and care. Button-Bright never worried about anything. The Scarecrow, not being able to sleep, looked out of the window and tried to count the stars.

A few more notes:

Federal judges are appointed for life by the President. It seems to me that State and local judges are elected or appointed, depending on where.

The US Senate confirms the appointment of Fed judges.

If you hear a US legislator referred to as "Representative," he's a member of the House of Representatives (the big one). Same goes for "Congressman" (or "Congressperson"), I believe. Members of the Senate are called "Senator."

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What others say about boorite!

And to fill in the nomenclature, a governor is the head of the executive branch of a state -- analagous to the president. Therm lengths and timing of elections may vary from state to state.

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ken.kaufman@gmail.com

I got mail from the Montgomery County Board of Elections today which indicates that I do get to vote in the primaries; I just get a "nonpartisan" ballot because I'm neither Democrat or Republican. I wonder what will be on it.

It's worth noting that Democrats and Republicans aren't mentioned by name in the Constitution. I'm not sure whether the concept of political parties is mentioned at all. In case you couldn't tell, I think it's an outdated concept and should be done away with.

The general rule is that any power not explicitly granted to the federal government by the Constitution is left to the states.

I always thought "Congressperson" was a generic term for members of either house.

My perception is that the Senate is a somewhat more "prestigious" (not sure if that's the right word) body than the House. Their members serve longer terms, bills have to pass the House before they reach the Senate, and I seem to remember them having more power.

My perception of state governments is that it's a lot more confusing than other people are making it sound. :) There are all sorts of officials on all sorts of regional levels, and most of the time my ballots include candidates for about a half-dozen offices I didn't know existed. Counties and townships are sub-divisions of states which have their own police forces and bureaucracies and whatnot, but as you can tell from previous posts, there are elected officials whose constituencies cover geographical areas not consistent with county borders, and where I vote is not determined by what town or county I live in. I'm not really sure why things are set up this way, or how (or if) it all works.

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The what mentioned above is total fiction. Please don't take it seriously!

Okay, thanks for that.

Now, how does a president get elected? What the fuck is going on with this bizarre "primaries" thing?

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Primary elections are when members of a given political party vote for which candidate they'll run for President (among other offices). This avoids having, for example, multiple Republicans competing against one another for the popular vote in the general elections in November. In 2000, GWB had to defeat another Republican candidate named John McCain (who, for what it's worth, I would have rather seen win) to secure his own party's nomination, so he could then go up against the Democratic candidate, who turned out to be Al Gore.

Democrats can't vote in Republican primary elections, and vice versa. I can't vote in anybody's primary elections because I chose not to affiliate myself with a party when I registered to vote. Some people seem to think this is a terrible loss for me, but the way I see it, I'm just excluded from one more primary than everybody else.

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The what mentioned above is total fiction. Please don't take it seriously!

And then we have the electoral college:

When and election for President is held, the person who gets the majority of the votes in a state gets that states electoral votes.

The electoral votes = number of representatives + number of senators.

It's an all or nothing proposition. If a candidate gets 51% of the popular vote in a state, he gets ALL the electoral votes. Whoever gets a majority of the electoral votes wins.

This is why Bush won more electoral votes even when Gore won more of the popular vote.

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...Trot and Cap'n Bill were free from anxiety and care. Button-Bright never worried about anything. The Scarecrow, not being able to sleep, looked out of the window and tried to count the stars.

The previous post by Fuzzyman explains how Bush became president even though Gore got more votes. More people voted for Gore, but Bush got more electoral votes (because he got all of the electoral votes for Florida.)

Only once before has the person who became president won even though fewer people voted for him.

Summing up: the seperation of powers is to prevent one branch of the government from getting too much power and the people in that branch taking over.

A war is supposed to be voted on by the legislative branch (congress + senate) then the president may sign/approve the war or veto/refuse to pass the resolution.

Bush has stated he needs no congressional approval to go to war against Iraq (obviously he doesn't care about approval of the UN or US allies either).

The judicial branch evaluates laws. If a new law is passed (legislative passes it, executive branch/president signs it) I can claim it is against the constitution and it will go to court. Thus the judicial branch has the chance to decide if the new law is legal or not. In other words the judicial branch can strike down a law if it is felt to be outside of the scope of the constitution.

The administrative branch is made up of people selected by the president. Thus Colin Powell was not elected to secretary of state, Bush selected him.

Also there used to be other political parites in this country besides just the democrats and republicans, but they have been shut out of the picture. All the money is behind those two parties so candidates from other parties (the green party, the communist party, etc) do not get any news coverage, can not participate in debates, and must get huge numbers of petitions signed to even have their name appear on the ballot on a state by state basis.

You must be a member of a political party to vote in it's primary elections. I am not a party member so I don't get to vote on who the democrats or republicans pick to run against each other. (Although I have never voted for a republican and can not imagine any circumstance under which I would).

One final twist - some people join the party they like the least just so they can vote for the worst candidate during the primaries, hoping to make it easier for their guy to run against a sure loser.

Clear as mud now DexX? (Don't worry. Most US citizens have no fucking clue how it works. Most don't vote. And many of those who do vote based on idiotic non-issue related reasons. I know I used to work for thefoundation for the people and the press -- a firm that does much of the political polling in this country. You can imagine how many people could not even name the people running for president!)

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"Eat a fucking cock." - attitudechicka

Australia is mainly the UK's Westminster system, with some borrowings from the US system.

Federally speaking, there are two houses: the "lower house" - the House of Representatives - and the "upper house - the Senate. The House of Reps is popularly elected, with electorates based on population and electoral lines redrawn periodically as the population changes. They have four-year terms, and the party which takes the most seats in a general election forms "the government". The party with the largest number of seats in the minority is "the opposition". The leader of the government party is the Prime Minister, and he cannot hold this title unless he is successfully elected by popular vote to a seat in the upper or lower house.

The Senate is also popularly elected, but its seats are unchangeable, and were set a century ago to ensure that the smaller states would not be bullied by the larger ones. As such, the states with smaller populations tend to have a louder voice in the senate than the house of reps. Senators are voted for at the same time as the house of reps in the general election, but they have eight year terms, with half the seats being voted upon every four years. Because the seats are calculated differently, it is quite possible for a government to form without controlling the Senate.

It is also possible (and common) for a smaller party or a group of independents to hold the balance of power when none of the major parties hold a majority in either or both houses. A non-majority government needs to support of independents or a minor party (a coalition) in the house of reps to obtain a majority and be declared the governing party. This latter one happened in Victoria a couple of years ago (the State are miniature versions of the federal system).

We have two major parties: the Australian Labor Party (yes, without the U, and I don't know why) who are supposedly left-wing, but these days are left-leaning moderates with some ties to trade unions; and the Liberal Party, who are, bewilderingly conservatives. We have a third semi-major party: the Australian Democrats, whose job is traditionally to "keep the bastards honest". They never get enough seats to form an opposition, but they frequently get control of the Senate, sometimes in conjunction with independents. We have a Green party, but they don't get a lot of seats. We usually get a handful of independents in seats in both houses, too.

There you go, that's us.

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That's something I didn't know.

The way I understand it, electoral votes are actually cast by the electors, who are, as individuals, technically not obligated to do what the people in their state tell them to. Some people hoped that some electors would exercise that freedom in the last election, but obviously none did.

The "Secretary of XYZ" cabinet positions are something else that's not in the Constitution. They just sort of cropped up somewhere along the way.

The Australian House and Senate sound a lot like the American ones, although there's slightly less emphasis on which party controls them over here. If the President belongs to a different party than the majority of Congress, people generally look forward to a few years of stalemates, but I haven't often heard a party referred to as the "governing party".

It's uncommon for third-party Congresspeople to get elected. There's currently only one person each in the House and Senate who isn't a Democrat or a Republican. The Independent Senator, Jim Jeffords of Vermont, is an interesting story: he was a Republican when he got elected, but left the party shortly after the 2000 elections, apparently because in so doing he robbed the Republicans of their majority in the Senate.

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The what mentioned above is total fiction. Please don't take it seriously!

Just to confuse things more, it's actually more complicated than that.

While "closed primaries"--in which registered Democrats vote only in the Democratic primary and registered Republicans vote only in the Republican party--are the norm, there are variations. Each state decides its own primary system. There are several states that have "open primaries," in which any voter can vote in either the Democratic or Republican primary (but not both). There are a few states that have "blanket primaries" in which one can vote in the primary of either party. A couple of states (Iowa is the only one I can think of but I think there's at least one more) use a "caucus" system in which the party's state-level leadership basically decides who gets their nomination.

The date that a state's primary is held depends on the state. Some states (Iowa and New Hampshire are the two notable ones) hold theirs the earliest in an attempt to have more of an impact on the race. Several Southern states decided to group their primaries together on one day (called "Super Tuesday") to give the Southern region a powerful say in the nomination process. The primaries are actually run by the state government--the political parties submit their slate of candidates to the state's election entity ("Board of Elections," "Secretary of State" or however the particular state decides to handle it). All parties have their primaries on the same day within a state (presumably to simplify things and keep election costs down).

Unlike the Electoral College and national elections where all electoral votes are given on a winner-takes-all basis, individual states and parties within each state are free to choose how they award delegates for each candidate. Those delegates then go to conventions before national elections to declare their votes. (If you've ever seen it on TV, it's the part of the convention that often sounds something like "The great state of Mississippi, the land of cotton, the wondrous Mississippi river, Southern hospitality, and not nearly as much wife-beating as you might think, pledges 14 delegates to Mr. George W. Bush and 3 delegates to Mr. John McCain! WOOOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOO!") Most states (and major parties within that state) award delegates proportionally while a few are winner-take-all. Some of the primary losers will drop out and declare their support for a leading candidate, in which case the drop-out's delegates (if any) will probably switch their votes to support a leading candidate when the convention happens. In practice, nominations are generally locked up by one candidate by the time the convention happens (and by then, all of the opponents have already dropped out), so everyone makes a big show of how they were always for the winner anyway.

Another fascinating thing about American elections is...ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

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"And Wirthling isn't worth the paper he isn't printed on."

One question... why the fuck is it so complicated?

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200+ years of barnacles.

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...Trot and Cap'n Bill were free from anxiety and care. Button-Bright never worried about anything. The Scarecrow, not being able to sleep, looked out of the window and tried to count the stars.

I should amend that.

Part of it is barnacles. Things just get tacked on over the years.

But part of it is compromise. The reason we have two houses of Congress is that there was a big debate during the writing of the Constitution about whether states should be represented equally or by population. Larger states obviously wanted representation by population, while smaller states wanted equal representation.

Roger Sherman (from Connecticut, of course) devised the compromise where we have two houses. The electoral college is another byproduct of that compromise.

Interesting historal note: Southern states wanted slaves counted as part of their population. Northern states objected, of course. As a compromise, slaves were counted as 2/3 of a person.

To make things more complicated, the Constitution wasn't the first way the United States government was put together. First, there were the Articles of Confederation. In this case, the balance of power was tilted toward the states, which proved terribly ineffective. Hence the Constitutional convention, where a stroger federal covernment was defined.

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...Trot and Cap'n Bill were free from anxiety and care. Button-Bright never worried about anything. The Scarecrow, not being able to sleep, looked out of the window and tried to count the stars.

Why is it so complicated? I suppose if people are raised and accustomed to being ruled over by generally infathomable ways, and with soooo many different people in so many different offices doing so many things that could make people's lives miserable that eventually they either become too confused to make meaninful choices, or they just stop caring. It becomes too much a burden to put up with, and what you want never seems to matter in the end anyway. About the only way you can make people vote is to ignore *all* the beaurocracy and try to convince them that there's one really important office, and one really important time to decide upon it (that being the one of the US President), and that this one person of great national fame will fix all the problems.

See, when people in foreign countries claim that we US residents don't like to vote because we're stupid and lazy, they obviously haven't actually *experienced* the whole damn process. It's infernal.

For what it's worth, this complication doesn't stop me from voting... not that I operate under any illusion that I'm doing anything that will make a difference, mind you.

quote:

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Interesting historal note: Southern states wanted slaves counted as part of their population. Northern states objected, of course. As a compromise, slaves were counted as 2/3 of a person.

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If thy're not giving the poor bastards a vote, or even basic human rights, they could not justify counting them for electoral purposes.

You can't have your slave and beat it too.

Sorry, that was tasteless. :)

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Now he tells me...

OH! Sorry. Wrong subject.

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet

Two minor corrections on US presidential election procedures:

48 states plus the District of Columbia award their electoral votes, winner-take-all, to the winner of the statewide popular vote. The other two states, Maine and Nebraska, award two of their votes that way, and then one vote each to the winner of each congressional district in the state. In practice, this has made no difference.

In the 2000 election, one Elector (from Washington DC) did not vote as pledged (for Al Gore). Seeing that it would make no difference, she abstained in protest of DC's lack of congressional representation.

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ken.kaufman@gmail.com

DC is making a big deal lately out of not having any representation in Congress. They've even put it on their license plates, which is about the coolest political statement I've ever seen from a government institution.

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The what mentioned above is total fiction. Please don't take it seriously!

Something for everyone

He is a petty criminal compared to most

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet