Abolition of Forum Affairs Department Bill

[Joe Republic]

I don't explicitly remember drafting Clause 3 (which appears to have been numbered 2), but this was a long time ago, after all.  The existing constituional clause reads as follows:

"The procedure for absentee voting will be to make such declaration publicly to the Department of Forum Affairs, and then for the absentee voter to email their vote to the Chief Justice, Secretary of Forum Affairs and Attorney General."

Therefore, all Clause 3 of this amendment does is change the wording.  It doesn't change the existing law, if you see what I mean.

[Joe Republic]

Well then that's incredibly redundant. We would have to assign funds to two departments to cover the current expenditures of one. We would need to have two people to do what one currently does.

What funding?  None of us get paid to do anything here.

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He/she would also be responsible for managing the census every four months, and interpreting voter laws, executive orders and past precedent.  It's a pretty tough job even by itself, especially since this is not a full-time game.

[Joe Republic]

The correct question here has been asked.

Under this system, what would the Department of Federal Elections do?  What would the Director of the Census Bureau do?

The DoFE does all the jobs of the SoFA with regards to running elections, counting votes and absentee ballots, etc.  The Census Bureau manages the voter rolls, as described in my last post here.

[Joe Republic]

MasterJedi, I refer you to Peter's earlier post, which helps describe the intent of this bill:

There's a lot to get through in this sort of debate, and I'll take it a piece at a time.

First of all, it is my opinion that the proposal that splits the Forum Affairs Dept into a Federal Elections Dept and a Census Bureau is a fundamentally good idea and would be hugely beneficial.

My reasons are relatively simple: Of the 5 Cabinet departments, it undoubtedly has the largest workload. It requires regular maintenance of the voter rolls (at least weekly), and then the administration of all federal elections, with all that that entails. Some departments do, quite literally nothing; The main culprit presently is DoD, but it varies from administration to administration.

Anyway, at the time of the Presidential elections, the Secretary of Forum Affairs must not only oversee 1 national race and 5 Regional races, as well as any special elections scheduled, he must then immediately begin to prepare work on the federal census once that has finished. I actually went through all of that once, and I have to say that I wouldn't wish it on anybody.

Splitting these responsibilities makes sense because it is not realistic to expect one person to put in a massive amount of time in a short period as is presently required.

In the periods between elections, a SoFA presently has registrations to keep him busy. Undoubtedly, this would fall to the Census bureau, leaving the Federal Elections Secretary with some free time. I would impress upon this body that it has been severely lacking in producing any sort of sensible electoral reform for a while - a totally free SoFE could use this time to construct sensible reforms based on experience with the Senate.

[Joe Republic]

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But this is something I'm not too sure about.  The clause that defines the various Cabinet offices is right there in the Constitution.  How could a statute redefine this?

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Indeed, I will now draft an amendment to this bill that now deals with each of those statutes.  Thank you for bringing it to my attention.

[Joe Republic]

Maybe you should also listen to what Q has said here, which is one of the main reasons I'll be voting against this.

I would like to ask Q and all other former SoFAs to tell me whether they believe it was too much work for them to handle. I really don't want to be hard on a person by not supporting this if they truely think that it is too much work for one man.

I don't think it's too much work, except if some unweildy bureaucratic secret ballot scheme is introduced.  The census work is fairly easy; it's mainly the election monitoring that provides opportunities for issues of contention to arise.

I think encouraging more reasonable behavior by individual voters toward the SoFA would be more effective in making the SoFA's job easier than would dividing up the office's responsibilities.

Also, certain changes in election law and procedure would make the job easier as well.  One that comes to mind is requiring candidates to register officially in the candidate declaration thread (which as a Senator myself I lacked the foresight to support) rather than leaving it up to the SoFA to determine whether, for example, establishing an exploratory committee constitutes an official declaration, among other issues.

I don't wish to speak against the President's agenda here, as he is my boss after all, but I'm not sure that there are not less radical means of achieving perhaps more practical reform.

Q may have little difficulty in managing the workload, because he is fully competent and capable.  That's why I nominated him.  However, what if we are faced with another Ilikeverin in the role of SoFA?

[Joe Republic]

This amendment wouldn't help that, they could still not do their job and nothing would happen. This is really nothing but making the government bigger, sorry but I can't support this.

On the contrary, whereas you would have the risk of one ineffective person in charge of two core duties, this would reduce that risk to a level where that person would only be responsible for one duty.  I realize that that is hardly reassuring, but it's all a matter of ensuring that both important tasks are not left to somebody who cannot deal with either.

I understand the concern about enlarging the government when it concerns spending public money, or encroaching on the rights of the common person.  But how does this simple act of forum affairs reform do either of those things?

[Joe Republic]

I got an idea, why don't we make the DSoFA the in charge of the Census Bureau, and the SoFA keep up with the Federal elections.  It would accomplish the same goal (making the SoFA's job easier) but not make in extra positions.

With respect, that proposal is almost exactly the same as this one.

[Joe Republic]

Exactly my point, except we don't need to change the constitution.  Instead, we just unofficially assign the duties to the SoFA and DSoFA.

According to Peter, we may not need to change the Constitution.  I'd like to hear more from him about that, because I'm not really sure about the logistics as yet.

I really don't see how assigning separate duties to the SoFA and DSofa is any different from splitting up the DoFA into two new departments anyway.

[Joe Republic]

Ah, I didn't realize we were actually on more-or-less the same page.

[Joe Republic]

The Senate shall have appropriate power via legislation to repeal or amend anything in this Section.

Thus the Senate has power to essentially tear up Article VIII, Section 2 any time it pleases and replace it with a new cabinet structure as you have proposed here. It does not require an Amendment process, because that is exactly what I intended, and what the plain text bears out.

It is not dissimilar to provisions of the US Constitution, e.g. Amendment XX, Section 2 reads:

The Congress shall assemble at least once in every year, and such meeting shall begin at noon on the 3d day of January, unless they shall by law appoint a different day.

In other words, the Amendment sets a transitional provision up, but allows for the Senate to change it by Law if they feel that thats what they want to do.

Ah, thank you for clarifying that, Peter.  In which case, I'll ask if a senator could kindly move to amend the title of this amendment to 'Abolition of Forum Affairs Department Bill', which hopefully will change the procedural functions therein.

I'll work on some subsequent amendments that address some other concerns that have been raised, which can be dealt with separately.

[Joe Republic]

How is it any different?!?

And could a senator please introduce the amendment I mentioned in my last post?  Please?!

[Joe Republic]

However, what if we are faced with another Ilikeverin in the role of SoFA?

Impeachment, I presume.

Look what happened the last time that was tried.

[Joe Republic]

could a senator please introduce the amendment I mentioned in my last post?  Please?!

I think Ebowed already changed it without any amendment, just look at the title of the thread.

Well look at that.  Thanks, Ebowed!

[Joe Republic]

sh**t!  I'm just writing up an amendment that deals with this now.  Is there any way to delay the final vote for a short while?

[Joe Republic]

My apologies.  I was hoping to have it posted here in good time.

[Joe Republic]

Actually, I believe the PPT and PoS can override procedure under certain circumstances.  Hopefully this will be resolved easily, as I don't really feel like waiting another two months to see this open again.

[Joe Republic]

Well here's the amendment that (hopefully) deals with existing statute:

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Conveniently, this also deals with the definition of the SoFE's duties, which already exist by way of the SoFA.

I'm just about to start defining the role of the Census Director now, for a subsequent amendment.

[Joe Republic]

Did you read the last two lines of my post?

[Joe Republic]

YOu should be ashamed of yourselves for allowing the seante to be made a mockery of.

Pardon me?