
Originally Posted by
Montmorency
This scenario is a bad comparison, because it's basically impossible in our system of government. I don't mean just that those kinds of majorities are almost unattainable to either party (Obama had better in 2009), but that the institutions are arranged too differently from the UK's. The Constitution is not just a body of laws and norms here but a concrete and heavily contested document of a few thousand words. Functionally, only the states and courts - in practice just the courts - have "control" over the Constitution. The only way around this for a legislature (Congress) is to attempt to exercise jurisdiction stripping or to create new judicial positions to install hundreds of party hacks very rapidly in a way that has never occurred before, but this too does not make sense within your scenario because a legislative caucus and president with such intractable and vicious unity of purpose and will to power would never fail to pursue their substantive policy goals, be they extending healthcare access and reducing university costs or eliminating Medicare and public education.
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