Regional Assembly Rules Amendment Bill

Blue Wolf II:
punk d:
1. No more than two votes of the Regional Assembly may be taking place simultaneously at any time, excluding election votes.
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This is too restrictive.
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I agree 100%. We had that rule in TNP once, and it was a horrible quagmire. There is a reason we got rid of it the first time, so lets not bring it back.
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I don't think this is an issue for a few reasons:

1) The Speaker is given leeway in scheduling the length that votes will be opening, allowing for creativity and flexibility where required.
2) Any three members of the RA will be able to stop a scheduled vote from occurring, either to allow a different one to go ahead first, or to send that one back to the drawing board.
3) This situation, that is, a number of bills sitting in the pipeline all at once, is quite unusual. We generally do not have a backlog.
 
I just think bills and recalls should be handled differently. A recall is not a change to legislation, either adding, updating, or deleting.

A recall is, in my opinion, a time sensitive action undertaken by RA members in order to call into account a member of the government. In my opinion there should be specific procedures around this above and beyond the typical proposal procedures.
 
That makes perfect sense to me - as I've said, I believe the Speaker intended to create a separate procedure for recall votes (even if it is just skipping the Formal Debate period), so I will definitely nudge him about that when he returns... and an amendment to this bill after it passes might make some sense as well. Possibly a recall provision, possibly the ability to expedite in cases of urgency, that kind of thing.

One thing I'm not convinced on, though, is where the urgency of a recall comes in. Usually we recall officials over inactivity (though, granted, as far as I can recall we've only had the one successful one from which to draw conclusions), not gross incompetence or misconduct. If we're that close to an election that the timing is very very tight, we could simply let the electoral process work its magic instead of rushing to a recall.

Obviously, in cases of clear malfeasance, it's important to be able to act quickly, but for that I think a general emergency expedition clause would suffice.
 
SillyString - you have been watching the most recent recalls, havent you?

You have me 2x
Hileville
Eluvatar

That's 4. None of them were for inactivity. This particular recall was for inactivity. Yes, I'll grant that perhaps 20-30% of recalls are due to negligence, but the vast majority are for conduct issues. Further, the last recall that passed, the one against Pasargad, was most assuredly not for inactivity.

To me, if there's misconduct in office it's imperative that we have an expeditious way (because we know the courts aren't speedy and when they are there a myriad of complaints) for the RA to decide if we want to keep that person in office.

I'm fairly convinced that given the history of successful recall votes the RA will take the matter seriously and not remove a person from office willy nilly. Having said that, recall is one of the fundamental rights we have as RA members. I believe you are looking at what I'm saying reflected only by the lens of the Gaspo situation. This situation was odd with respect to recall motions in the past.
 
I was looking at those actually, punk - I was ignoring them as useful precedent because they failed. As a region, we tend to be perfectly happy to rush into a recall vote against an official that doesn't have a chance of garnering sufficient support (wasn't there a recall against Gaspo as soon as he was elected, even?). It's the votes that succeed that are intriguing, and provide any information about the region's willingness to actually recall someone in various situations.

You're right, though - I was not considering the Pasargad recall, because I'm not familiar with that one. I'm not even sure I was a TNP citizen at the time that that occurred.

To bring this talk back to the bill in question, however... nearly every issue that is being raised with respect to Gaspo's recall is fixed in r3n's rewrite.

The RA is being given the chance to object to the timing of a bill, which would allow motions like flem's against r3n's two bills to have actual legal weight and require the Speaker to reschedule in favor of the desired recall.

The RA is also being given the ability to force a vote on an issue, providing (I believe) a check on the Speaker's current unilateral power to stop debate. This would allow the RA to *demand* a vote on an issue the Speaker has tried to stop, which would prevent the Speaker from easily abusing their power in a way that the current rules have no way of doing.

And then, of course, it fixes the absurd Speaker Pro Tem rules currently in place, where the SPT position is created upon a 24 hour absence of the Speaker, but cannot be declined, avoided, or reassigned unless the poor person stuck with the burden takes a formal leave of absence or fails to log into the forum for two weeks, while in the meantime the RA grinds to a halt.

The only thing this bill doesn't have is a way to expedite important votes, because r3n and COE and I were unable to formulate a good balance for such a power while we were drafting (is emergency determined by the delegate? the speaker? the RA? Can it be overridden if any one of the three disagrees? etc), and thought that the flexibility provided by the rewrite in general can make up for that lack. If there is a real desire to implement this, though, I would very strongly encourage first passing this bill, and then crafting a specific amendment to it. The current rules are really far too problematic in a giant number of ways to be left standing.
 
r3n's bill is currently not passing, fwiw.

It's early, yes, but the delegate has also voted against this bill. And no, I think with the recent situation with Gaspo, it's very important to pass a bill that incorporates a way to expedite bills. Because I don't want to pass this bill and then have to wait 4-5 weeks to then pass another bill that helps us expedite the process.

Just my opinion, many more days to go in this vote.
 
I know it's not passing - and if it fails, then there is absolutely nothing stopping exactly what happened here from happening again.

I'm confused by your statement, though. You don't want to wait 4-5 weeks - is there any reason why it would take 4-5 weeks to draft a simple amendment? Is there any reason why drafting a simple amendment would take longer than doing so to an unpassed bill, particularly given that we would be stuck under the old rules which give no flexibility in scheduling or shortening votes?
 
I was giving myself wiggle room based on previous discussions and the current calendar as I understand it to be. I don't know what's next up on the docket.

3 weeks, then?
 
If this bill goes through, it could be amended relatively quickly - someone drafts an amendment, there are a couple days to discuss the wording and tweak it some, maybe formal debate shortened to a couple days, and the Speaker would have leeway to set the vote to anywhere between 3 and 7 days long. Failing other things moving to vote - and there are not any currently scheduled to do so - it could probably be done in under a week and a half if people are motivated to do so.

It wouldn't necessarily be longer if this bill fails first, other than that the vote would have to be 7 days, but I think it would take longer because different peoples' concerns would get conflated. Emergency expedition, recall procedure, and number of votes at once, for example, are all things people have brought up as concerns and trying to amend the bill as a whole and then revote means that the fixes would likely take far longer to reach consensus.

As a side note, I've had a chat with the Speaker about the two votes at once issue - this rule was implemented in order to prevent people from being removed from the RA for a short absence. The current membership rules necessitate removal if you a) miss 4 consecutive votes and b) do not vote once every 20 days. Without limiting the number of votes at once (see the million billion recalls motioned all at once, against Elu and Hile and Abbey and Punk and Raven and and and and), someone who could not get a leave of absence because they had only gone away for a week would have found themselves stripped of RA membership, since it had been over 20 days since the last vote before those ones.

Essentially, it's a protective measure. It can be tweaked some - bump the number to three, perhaps, or allow it to be overridden by the agreement of some number of RA members, or at the discretion of the speaker, yadda yadda - but I do think it's important, particularly if r3n's bill passes, that we build in protections for RA members against a plethora of 3-day votes used to disenfranchise them.
 
I think the authors have a lot of good ideas, and I appreciate their hard work on this proposal. However, it makes way to many assumptions about the way RA members and future Speakers will behave. It provides new tools for the politically savvy to either kill legislation or ramrod it through. I'm voting nay.
 
Great Bights Mum:
I think the authors have a lot of good ideas, and I appreciate their hard work on this proposal. However, it makes way to many assumptions about the way RA members and future Speakers will behave. It provides new tools for the politically savvy to either kill legislation or ramrod it through. I'm voting nay.
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Good point.

After consideration, I am voting nay on this also.
 
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