A notable example is the approach to soft drugs in the Netherlands. Despite being illegal, the public prosecutor has chosen not to enforce the law. To the point that many if not most think they’re legal.
This situation presents a complex issue to me: it involves a small group of individuals (the prosecutor’s office) effectively deciding to disregard the broader democratic process and the will of the voters. When such things happen, I believe they should be rare, pragmatic and temporary.
What’s your view on the matter?
The ‘selective enforcement’ occurred because strict enforcement would be much more expensive than what anyone wanted – yet a fanatical minority was able to play games in Congress to repeatedly block bipartisan deals for “comprehensive immigration reform” (under Bush, Obama, and Biden).
It’s always confused me how USians refer to different congressional periods as happening “under” certain presidents as if they have any actual part to play in the legislative process itself. I live in a country where the head of government is the Prime Minister, whose equivalent would be the House Majority Leader, and actually has a lot to say about the legislative agenda.
The President in the USA can veto laws. In a Constitutional sense, this gives them more power than any other single legislator. They are also the leader of their party, which can make them just as influential as the Speaker of the House (House Majority leader) when their party has the majority. The public also pays more attention to the President than the Speaker. For these reasons, and because Presidents have defined terms, it’s convenient shorthand to describe a period of time.
The Speaker of the House is not the same as the House Majority Leader. The current Speaker is Mike Johnson and the current Majority Leader is Steve Scalise.
True. I see that Parliament also has a Speaker of the House with a similar role to the US Speaker of the House. I was confused why you equated the Prime Minister with the House Majority Leader, rather than the Speaker of the House. It sounds like in the UK, when a party gets a majority in Commons, their leader usually becomes PM, while in the US, their leader becomes Speaker.
Yeah, I guess in the US the Speaker usually wields their power in a very partisan manner, whereas in parliamentary systems they are usually supposed to act as bipartisan as possible.