This is the Catery Daily podcast for Monday, January 20th, 2025.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Why do we have a president at all?

If Congress has oversight functions over the White House, why is it so hard for them to fire the president?

Should the U.S. adopt a parliamentary system where a prime minister more readily accountable and more easily removable would execute on behalf of Congress?

I spoke last week with Adam Gurry of liberal currents.

Given the last few presidential election cycles, given the two impeachments and zero convictions for Donald Trump when he was both

serving as president, of course, his second trial occurred after he was president.

You have to wonder if the original design of the Constitution is really

suitable to a presidential system. And I'm certainly not the only person at the Cato Institute

who has some affinity for a more parliamentary system where the executive, the chief executive, is, let's just say, a lot more replaceable.

How did you come to this notion that parliamentary systems may be vastly superior to the system that we have a presidential system in the

U.S.

Yeah, I mean, part of it is just taking the time to look at the comparative political science

and not even just the empirical conclusions of their relative performance,

but just the parliamentary model is a lot more common for actual democracies, right?

Presidential models, when you find presidents, as often as not, you're finding a dictator there.

And then, of course, famously, presidents that start democratically elected often don't end that way.

So just the fact that the parliamentary model is the one that's really taken off in places that becomes stable democracies. And of course, nowhere where America itself has been involved

in setting up a new democratic government, have we imposed our particular form of presidentialism,

which I think also says something.

Yeah.

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