An American Connection
Over the last thirteen years, I have been pleasantly surprised to find that Parliamentum attracts a surprising number of readers from the United States, about one-quarter to one-third of the total depending on the year. I occasionally write on American topics, but mainly on British North American history and how Canada or the United Kingdom relate to the United States, and by drawing anecdotally from the five years that I spent there. I also go only as far as my limited knowledge of American political institutions permits and remain aware of all the known unknowns which face me here. From the point of view of a Commonwealth Realm like Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States does many things backwards and in defiance of what strikes us as common sense. For instance, the House of Representatives dissolves by efflux of time in January after the general election the previous November. In another strange twist, the House of Representatives also has no Standing Orders – which is to say, a set of rules which carries over by default from one Congress to the next, though subject to amendment at any time – but instead must adopt its own rules wholesale every two years.
The framers who founded the United States of America in the 1780s and wrote the Articles of Confederation in 1777 and the United States Constitution in 1787 well understood British history, parliamentary precedents, and the Common Law. John Adams in his Political Essays on the Principal Points of Controversy Between Great Britain and Her Colonies, Thomas Jefferson in his Summary View of the Rights of British America, and Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay in the Federalist Papers all demonstrated a strong grasp of the general intellectual currents of the Enlightenment, the First British Empire, and Hanovarian Britain, in addition to an implicit fluency with the venerable tomes of the era like Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. They designed the United States Constitution as a republican transcription of the Hanovarian Constitution of the 18th century when a stronger separation of powers between the executive and legislature pertained and before Responsible Government and collective ministerial responsibility had fully emerged by the 1830s and significantly narrowed that separation (but did not “fuse” the two).
I first noticed in 2012 that Alexander Hamilton devoted Federalist 69 to comparing the authorities of the President of the United States under Article II of the US Constitution to the royal prerogatives and authorities of the King of the United Kingdom, and that Hamilton expressly compared one clause in Article II, Section 3 to prorogation. This reference suddenly became relevant again after Donald Trump pulled a Grover Cleveland and won a non-consecutive second term earlier this month and his staff started floating the idea of invoking in early 2025 what I call the Presidential Bicameral Adjournment Clause of the US Constitution for the first time since 1787. I would like to compare prorogation in the Commonwealth Realms to the rough American equivalents of prorogation: first, the adjournment sine die and the 20th Amendment; and second, the Presidential Bicameral Adjournment Clause – so far never used. But I must admit, I have encountered some difficulty in discerning the precise effects of adjournment sine die on legislative business. Some learned American readers might need to correct any errors if I have failed to do their system justice.
