PETER VAN ONSELEN: The big lie BOTH Kamala Harris and Donald Trump told the world in today’s muched-hyped US presidential debate
People around the world following the debacle surrounding the second presidential debate may not realize how utterly irrelevant virtually everything either candidate says is when it comes to implementing change.
The American political system is broken, divided, and nearly incapable of implementing national change in a country spiraling out of control.
The federal government does not have the power to improve American society in the ways that presidential candidates claim they will do if elected.
The real power lies with the states. And American states are not equal as they are in many other federations around the world.
In Australia, for example, we have something called ‘horizontal fiscal adjustment’, which ensures that poorer states are subsidised so that they do not lag behind states that are naturally richer.
That doesn’t happen in America. So there’s a huge wealth inequality between states in the US, just like between people.
Think of all the obstacles a president faces when trying to achieve something.
The big lie is that it is extremely difficult for an American president to get much done domestically, even when they have control of both houses of Congress.
There is little major party discipline to begin with, so a president will have a hard time convincing his own party to support initiatives he promises to implement, let alone the other side of politics.
This means that their ideas may not get through the House of Representatives (one of the two chambers of Congress), even if their political party has power there, which is often not the case.
Being elected president in no way guarantees that your party will have the numbers in the House. Even if they do, the lack of party discipline means that you can’t rely on those numbers.
Plus, House elections are every two years, so the numbers change so often that difficult long-term reforms can’t keep up. So they rarely happen.
That’s before you get to the Senate, which is needed to pass legislation if it is to become law. The partisan makeup of the Senate is often different than that of the House.
Even if a president somehow gets it through both houses of Congress, the original idea is likely reduced to a shadow of what it originally seemed.
And then it is still interpreted away by a divided Supreme Court, a group of judges who are much more politically motivated than the supreme courts in other countries.
And at the end of this long, hard-to-understand system, the federal government’s decisions are usually subordinate to state law anyway, because the American federation retains strong power within the 50 states.
That was the only way to bring and keep the Union together.
What power does the president actually have?
They may appear powerful internationally, but that external power is unmatched at home, where policy decisions really matter: where they affect the American people.
There are understandable calls to end all negativity in presidential campaigns, but the only real domestic power an American president has is a negative power: the veto power he has over anything Congress tries to pass without him.
It contributes to the inertia and the idea that politics in the US is always negative and always seems broken.
Such a negative force as the dominant power of the presidency clashes with the mantra of hope so often falsely proclaimed by next-generation candidates and progressives, hoping that this will help them find their way to the White House.
So when you hear both Trump and Harris claim that if elected they will change this and that, know that it’s all rhetoric, no substance.
Because in reality, they can’t do much. American presidents aren’t as powerful as they seem, at least not on the domestic front.
Peter van Onselen is political editor of Daily Mail Australia.