The Failing of Checks and Balances in the US, and the Legacy of Jacques Delors

A Year Ahead of Living Dangerously; Countdown to November 2024

There’s less than a year to go to the US Presidential Election and the country appears to be sleepwalking into disaster. Despite strong economic indicators for Biden and a legislative first term that holds up well against any of his predecessors, Donald Trump is too close for comfort in his bid to get back into the White House (some polls have Trump comfortably out front, others neck-and-neck, some measurements that put Biden in the lead). Whatever the truth of the position, it augurs a perilous eleven months ahead, For 2023, heading into 2024, it can be argued that the guardrails of American democracy are barely holding and if Trump goes on to win next year, they will have demonstrably shown to have failed/. The institutions that are supposed to uphold the Republic may prove inadequate for the task ahead.

The ‘Courts’ have begun to fight back, Rulings in Colorado and Maine excluding Trump from the local ballots in 2024 for inciting insurrection as are they should be; what nation can be serious about governance that endorses the legitimacy of a seditionist?  In any EU nation this question would barely need to be asked. However the US legal system is proving to be a very slow moving machine, one that will probably not complete its civil and criminal actions against ‘the Former Guy’ before November 2024. Add in a partisan US Supreme Court with an inbuilt Republican majority for potentially decades, and you have a system that is nearly broken. Justice is moving too slowly.

Nor have the media been shown to have held Trump to account. There’s been admirable reporting from much of the main stream media but this can only get so far in a hopelessly anything-goes culture where fiction blurs with fact. It’s fine to pontificate – as some liberal columnists have done –  in an undergraduate debating manner on the ‘right’ of Trump to run and accordingly for his supporters voices to be heard, yet after the storming of the Capitol, is this not akin to allowing an arsonist access to a box of matches? Those reporters who treat Donald Trump as a just a regular ‘colourful’ politician are, to extend the preceding analogy, are playing with fire.

Ultimately, it may be the political system itself, the Electoral College, which will prove to be the most vulnerable of guardrails. Joe Biden could win the 2024 Election by 10 million votes and still lose overall by failing to carry enough of the rust-belt. It could come down – again – to a few hundred thousand votes across three or four states. Biden should be looking forward to his retirement after a distinguished lifetime of public service; instead, so weak is the political system in the US, he is made to hang on as probably the only Democrat who can beat Trump. If he loses next year, the decision to run again will be seen as a fateful defeat.

Rarely has there been such a sliding doors potential in the coming months. If the vote goes Trump’s way, Ukraine would be sacrificed immediately, NATO would be under siege, and the USA could become an authoritarian country quicker that most cynics imagine. There will be a substantially increased risk of a global trade war with a concomitant recession. The ‘West’ will become an amorphous concept as the right ring in the WU will be emboldened. A second Trump administration will have learnt from the first.  If Biden gets four more years, then the Centre holds; all will by no means be good with the World. But it will be a lot, lot, less bad. The hope is that the latter future history comes to be, but we can hear the rumbling of the former as an incoming storm approaching the shore, as we look on into the sea.

Delors Era a Relatively Golden Age

The death of the former European Commission President, Jacques Delors, is a reminder of a bygone age when the international affairs in general and what became the European Union had a more optimistic future ahead on the horizon. His time in charge of the EC from 1985 to 1995 was one of vision and change. His period of office saw the introduction of the Single European Act, the Social Charter, and the European Union itself, integrating trade and services, strengthening employee protection, and changing the constitutional structure of the European institutions (the EEC coming under the ‘European Union’ banner). By 1990/91, the USSR and her satellites had collapsed and the spirit of democracy filled the air. His term at the Commission laid much of the groundwork for the Euro which despite its critics still endures today, Any one of these milestones would’ve been enough for most political epithets. He was a leading figure in making the EU a club that most European countries either want to stay in or join. His service for which we can be grateful was that of an usual mixture, technocrat and visionary.