What if we did as the Brits do, and expected our presidents to resign?
by Bernard Goldberg, Opinion Contributor - 07/09/22 12:00 PM ET
Boris Johnson didn’t want to go. And why would he? He had what he called “the greatest job in the world.” That’s a debatable point, of course; I always thought another Brit, Paul McCartney, had the greatest job in the world, but this is not a time to quibble.
Johnson, as we all know by now, announced on Thursday that he would resign as prime minister of the United Kingdom after a whole bunch of his cabinet ministers and top aides said publicly that they had lost confidence in him and quit. More than 50 of them packed up and walked out in just the past few days, fed up with the many scandals that plagued Johnson and his conservative party. As the New York Times put it, “There were too many jobs vacant and too few loyalists to fill them.”
There’s a good chance you didn’t know this, but Boris Johnson is the third consecutive British prime minister to resign before the end of their term in recent years. Theresa May and David Cameron also quit before their terms had expired — and, believe it or not, the empire survived.
There are many things about the British that we can admire — their style, their grace, their accents, which make them sound smarter than a lot of them are. And there are some things British that we don’t really need to emulate — their food is one that immediately comes to mind.
But what if we, over on this side of the pond, had a political system sort of like theirs? A system whereby our presidents — our version of their prime ministers — would throw in the towel when they lose the confidence of their team and, more importantly, of the people they were elected to serve.
I’m not going to play coy here, so let’s get right to it: I have in mind our current president and the one who came right before him.
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https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/3549217-what-if-we-did-as-the-brits-do-and-expected-our-presidents-to-resign/
