> he explained it correctly to his wife (American lawyer), or if she verified.
Are you saying I am mixing it up now? My post acknowledged I had mixed it up before: given that the Commission is so powerful, I had thought it was comprised of the heads of state. I’m aware that’s not how it’s structured. I was explaining it to my wife because the reality is very complicated!
> I don't like the way US presidents are elected either, ignoring popular vote and including gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering cannot affect a Presidential election, because the Electoral College is elected based on statewide popular votes. And the logic behind the Electoral College is the exact same as the reason why so many EU bodies have one member per member state. The U.S. President doesn’t only represent the people, he also represents the states as sovereign entities. The states have chosen to move in the populist direction by providing to allocate their electoral votes based on statewide elections, but they have never consented to abandoning the prerogative to do things differently.
Moreover, the electoral college also is deliberately designed to produce more decisive results. In every case where the U.S. electoral college vote produced a different result than the national popular vote, the President’s party still won the Congressional popular vote. In those cases, a pure popular vote for the President would have produced a divided government. Most European countries avoid that by not directly electing their chief executive at all, and instead providing various ways for the party that controls the legislature to also control the executive.
Finally, in terms of “bypassing Congress,” what you’re describing is a general feature of Presidential systems where the executive is led by the same party as the legislature. For example, the French President has limited powers in theory. But in practice he’s very powerful if his party also controls the National Assembly: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2022/05/02/w...
“In most cases, these constitutional provisions end up being diluted in practice. When the president obtains a supporting majority in the Assemblée Nationale, they are less tied to following the Constitution to the letter and are able to propose legislation. In doing so, they then encroach on the role of government and in fact have significant power, often described as more substantial than that of heads of state in other countries.”