Abolition of Forum Affairs Department Bill

[Peter]

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.
This proposal, however, doesn't really capture that, and as is becoming more apparent with every attempt at forum affairs reform attempted in recent times, I suspect there was nil consultation on this. Whilst I successfully maintained the illusion of being all singing and all knowing with this stuff, thats all it was, I often took a wide circle of consultation.

I previously discussed why this should be a bill and not an Amendment here, so I won't cover the same ground twice.

Secondly, the duties of each office need to clearly defined. Whilst the duties of the DoFE are reasonably defined, we hear little about the CB. Also tied to this point is the matter of already existing statute: Take a guess at how many federal statutes presently explicitly mention the Secretary of Forum Affairs or require action by him? 5.
# Line of Succession Act
# Deputy SoFA Act
# Government Thread Act
# (Voting System Reform Act - if it is still in operation)
# Unified Electoral Code Act - Section 7
If you abolish the office, something must be done about these references, i.e. those duties or references should be explicitly directed towards one of the new departments.

Thirdly, this fun over Clause 3 which references Absentee Voting. I simply refer you to Article VIII, Section 2, Clause 4 (which is what the clause was attempting to amend) and then ask that you actually read it and consider what it means.

[Peter]

What the hell? I never thought that you had to email it to three people currently. It's always just a thread that you vote in prior to the election. Ugh I hate it when I miss things like this.

Oh indeed. In fact from the very moment that the absentee ballot was invented it was just like this. See the Amendment to the Original Constitution which brought it in. For some reason, every SoFA has simply ignored the Law. Its great.

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This has been tried, and actually worked when True Dem and I did it together. However, Alcon and ILV didn't really work well together when they tried this. Q and Yates worked reasonably well together.

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Ignoring the fact that its probably unconstitutional, having 5 different standards of counting votes is never sensible. Also the sheer incompetence of Governors such as 9iron should tell us that that isn't feasible.

[Peter]

Amendment to the Original Constitution

NixonNow got all the data from the old Wiki back online?

No, but he found an early backup from April, which means we have some of the data.

[Peter]

The constitutional point is this:

When I sat down and drafted our Second Constitution, I had the task of not only constructing a sensible government structure, but keeping it in continuity with what we already had.

Specifically this was the First Constitution that had in its provisions established the 5 Executive Departments (State, Defense, Forum Affairs, Justice, Labor) and bunked them into  a line of succession. Other than that constitutional provision, there was no actual reason to suggest that the Executive Departments existed.

Thus, the Second Constitution had to take account of this by ensuring the continuation of these five executive depts. Had I failed to mention their existence in the Second Constitution, the departments would have ceased to exist, and you would have to have sat down and written legislation to re-establish them. I saw that as unnecessary, but I also wanted to avoid the problem of a rigid cabinet structure that we had had set for us under the First Constitution.

Thus, I arrived at the comprimise we have before us: I put all the stuff that I knew we needed to ensure continuity of government but that I thought should be amendable by simple legislation into Article VIII, Section 2, and then finished it off with clause 5:

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.