HERE are some things to ponder on. The leader of the largest party in the federal parliament of India, Mr. Rahul Gandhi, from the Indian Congress Party, was expelled from the House (later reinstated by the courts).
There was no supermajority in parliament that voted for his removal. It is doubtful any competent political theorist would deny that India is a special democratic polity in the world.
With dozens of cultures and languages, the social cohesion of India is stronger than perhaps the other nations in the world.
President Macron of France put a Bill before parliament to increase the pension age. Sensing he would lose the vote, by way of presidential degree he legislated the Bill into law. There is no supermajority in the French parliament to overturn what Macron did.
In the United States, legislation can be passed by one vote if there is a 50- 50 composition in opposing parties in the Senate. The Vice President breaks the tie, meaning that just one vote allows for the passage of Bills. There is no supermajority needed in the US Senate to appoint a Supreme Court justice.
The Prime Minister of the UK became the head of government through the following processes. When Prime Minister, Boris Johnson resigned, the ruling Conservative Party defined the avenue by which a contestant can become PM.
Each candidate has to secure 100 endorsements from the sitting Members of Parliament for the ruling party. Those who secure more than that 100 nominations square off in a vote among Conservative MPs.
Mr. Sunak was the only candidate to reach the 100 points and thus was declared the PM. In natural law, contestants should be allowed to freely and openly fight to become head of the party either by the votes of party members or the executive committee of the party (what we in Guyana call the central committee) or through votes among his/her colleagues in parliament. Mr. Sunak faced no voting system. There was no supermajority vote to make Mr. Sunak the PM.
The only supermajority in the UK system is the current majority of 80 seats that the Conservative Party holds in the House.
With that simply 80 seat majority, the UK Government has passed legislation to send refugees going to the UK from the Third World to Rwanda. The UK government did not need a supermajority to legislate for refugees to be flown to Rwanda.
In the US of 50 States, each State sends two senators to the Senate. Rhode Island has 1 million people. California has 39 million. Texas has 30 million. Two senators from Rhode Island have the same voting power as the two from California.
There is no supermajority clause in the American constitution that would weaken the voting rights of Rhode Island senators as against those from California and Texas.
So there is the suggestion that Guyana’s parliament should ensure that, on major legislations, there should be a supermajority.
If Guyana adopts that then it will be a first in the world because no other country has a parliamentary system based on supermajority voting, not even India which is federal system consisting of 29 union states.
In India, the US, Germany, Canada, and UK the top four known federal systems, at the federal, parliamentary level has no supermajority. To go to war, the federal parliament has to authorise the executive (Prime Minister or President) to declare war against another country.
If the UK parliament agrees to go to war, a simple majority will do it even if all the parliamentary representatives from Scotland vote against it. There was no supermajority when the National Assembly in Britain authorised the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair to invade Iraq.
In Guyana, there is a plethora of suggestions about how Guyana can strengthen its democracy but the advocacies are more based on political and ethnic impulses rather than democratic instincts. Just one infamous example should suffice.
When the Ali presidency came into existence in August 2020, shortly after, the Stabroek News rejected the end of the tenure of Dr. Vincent Adams as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. At the time, Dr. Adams sat in the leadership of an opposition party, the Alliance For Change.
There was no precedent in the world where an incoming administration retained the CEO of a very sensitive, important state institution who at the time was in the leadership of the opposition.
The same newspaper argued months after that it was not acceptable for the Private Sector Commission to sit on the board of the Natural Resource Fund because that NGO is pro-PPP. This is what I mean by anti-government impulses.