The Parliment Fails

As any civics student knows, there are two houses in our national legislature - the House of Representatives and the Parliment (??):

Senate Democrats fell short this afternoon in their effort to hold a vote of no confidence in Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales but still registered a strong, if symbolic, rebuke of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.

The Senate voted 53 to 38 to end debate and allow a vote on the no-confidence motion itself. Since 60 votes were required to shut off the debate, or invoke cloture, supporters of the motion were lacking seven votes. But Mr. Gonzales’s critics could console themselves with the knowledge that they mustered a majority, and that several Republicans sided with them .

The outcome left the attorney general’s critics in Congress uncertain about what to do next in their campaign to dislodge him from office. Congress cannot remove a Cabinet member except by impeachment, so the no-confidence motion would have been non-binding.

I refer to the Senate as "the Parliment" because the action of issuing a "no confidence" vote is meaningful only if you have a parlimentary system of goverment. In a bi-cameral representative republic, it's meaningless. The Parliment...er, Senate, has no power to fire the Attorney General. All they can do is go "Nyah, Nyah, Nyah!" and make angry faces. The president, meanwhile, is the only vote that counts and as long as he continues to support Gonzales, there's not a darn thing the Senate can do except hold pompous press conferences.

Good thing they have Chuckie Schumer because he can do pompous with the best of them.