Monday, November 22, 2004
Ideas Worth Thinking About: Shadow Cabinet
At Daily Kos, Meteor Blades offers this.
The term sounds vaguely cloak-and-dagger. But it's a conventional way -- at least, elsewhere -- of providing some check-and-balance (especially important if one party holds the reins in all three branches of government). Here's how MB describes it:
Here is Wikipedia's take on it. Matt wrote about it over the summer (though that was in the context of a pre-Election Day shadow cabinet). To which Jack Balkin of riting on the wall offered some counter-opinion to chew on.
The term sounds vaguely cloak-and-dagger. But it's a conventional way -- at least, elsewhere -- of providing some check-and-balance (especially important if one party holds the reins in all three branches of government). Here's how MB describes it:
The government – in Britain, Australia and Canada, among others - appoints cabinet ministers, and the opposition party (or parties) chooses members of a shadow cabinet to keep tabs on the shenanigans and other activities of those ministers. The shadow cabinet is, in effect, the alternative administration. There can be just a few shadow ministers, the Tories in the U.K. currently have six; or a boxcar load, Labour in Australia has 32.
Shadow cabinets call themselves the Loyal Opposition. In Britain and Canada, it’s Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. The Royal Loyals, as it were, the very name making the point that opposition does not equate with treason. No pretense is made that the opposition’s role is non-partisan. On the contrary, its job is to oppose, and the shadow ministers provide its whetstone. Quite often, if elections turn the tables on the party in power, shadow ministers join the cabinet in their same role.
Here is Wikipedia's take on it. Matt wrote about it over the summer (though that was in the context of a pre-Election Day shadow cabinet). To which Jack Balkin of riting on the wall offered some counter-opinion to chew on.
