American democracy, they say, is an ideal model. And since Tocqueville (who admired it, while detecting the risk of seeing it one day slip into dictatorship), few have ventured to criticize its constitutional principles. Each saw in particular a nearly perfect separation of powers in the interest of the country.
Nevertheless, this separation of powers has just cause a major crisis in Washington: the incapacity of the executive and the legislature, for months, to reach an agreement on the ceiling of the public debt does not only provoke the dismayed amazement of all those who believed that the elected officials of the United States were able to think a little beyond their immediate electoral interests. It also reveals a fundamental contradiction in the American political model: when the executive and legislature are in open conflict, and neither of them want to give in, there is no mechanism that allows one to outcompete the other. We rediscover that a U.S. president cannot govern without the approval of Congress. And that if one of the two houses is not of the same camp as the president, he must either seek and accept compromises or resigned himself to become the executor of a policy that is not his own. Today, the ideological conflict is so violent that no one, neither in the White House nor in the Capitol, has wanted to seek a compromise for a long time, neither to subject himself to, nor even to make it possible for the other to save face.
This is where the existence of a Prime Minister finds its raison d’etre: he embodies the legitimacy of the Parliament to the President. In his absence, France would have been ungovernable in 1986 and in all subsequent periods of cohabitation. Practice has then therein imposed a law that the 1958 Constitution did not indeed impose: to the President of the Republic external affairs and defence; to the Prime Minister and his government home affairs. We may find this practice again in 2012 if the incumbent president, then re-elected, is immediately confronted with a left-wing majority in the National Assembly.
If there was such a prime minister today in the United States, the issue of debt ceilings would not have arisen at all: the Prime Minister, a Republican, would have imposed his solution right at the beginning of this year; the President, Democrat, would have solemnly told the media that it was a very bad solution, hoping that the failure of a republican government would allow him to be re-elected in November 2012 and win the Congressional Elections in the process.
The absence in the United States of this function of head of government is explained by the fact that the federal government had, originally, only competencies of defence and foreign policy. It is only with the 1929 crisis that it granted itself some others. The rise of sovereignty in each state, under the name of tea party, tends to return, and reduce the federal government to external functions which had justified its creation.
And it is precisely in the name of the only necessities of « national security » that to save face, Republicans agree to seek a temporary compromise with Democrats on the limits of the public debt. If the United States is not able to move to a French style solution, or at least regain sanity, we will witness gradually the undoing of American federalism. We have nothing to gain from this.