What's the matter with Fremont?

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

While parliament is seemingly productive if one measures by the quantity of legislation passing through the Commons each week, debate appears to have fallen off a cliff since the last general election. Most MPs aren't even going through the motions: bills pass with little or no debate, with the majority of posts in each thread being procedural notices from the speaker, and in most cases the sponsor has not bothered to offer any justification for their proposals at all—meaning the people of Fremont are given no explanation for why their representatives have voted for these measures. Then, just today, this happened:

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This bill—which if you read it carefully, purports to regulate official procedures of the federal Congress, presumably because of a proofreading error—is currently passing parliament 3-0, without a word of debate from anyone. I'm not singling out the speaker for criticism here, because we can all make mistakes and this would not be the first time a typo made it into the final version of a bill; but clearly there is a much larger problem afoot regarding the activity of our elected parliament.

I took the liberty of reviewing the threads for each piece of legislation considered by parliament in the current session:

Bill	Words of Debate*	Result
FT 5-18	498	Passed 3-0
FT 6-CA1	605	Tabled
FT 6-1	332	Passed 3-0
FT 6-2	247	Passed 5-0
FT 6-3	127	Passed 5-0
FT 6-4	227	Passed 2-0
FT 6-5	0	Passed 4-0
FT 6-6	78	Passed 3-0
FT 6-7	0	Passed 3-0
FT 6-8	163	Passed 4-1
FT 6-9	41	Passed 1-0
FT 6-10	63	Passed 3-0
FT 6-11	28	Passed 5-0
FT 6-12	4	Passed 4-1
FT 6-13	0	Passed 2-0
FT 6-14	0	Passing 2-0
FT 6-15	0	Passing 3-0
FT 6-16	0	Passing 2-0

*By MPs, excluding procedural announcements by the Speaker

Basically, since the first minister began his extended leave of absence from the forum, no-one has said much of anything in parliament. Again, this isn't the fault of any one person, but something needs to change, else we find ourselves in the same position we were in fourteen months ago when the First Constitution collapsed.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Ideological monotony is a problem, though there is definitely a significant degree of disagreement within the region and even within parliament. The difficulty is that the game thrives on debate, but elections reward candidates who are uncontroversial, which can disincentivise MPs from tackling difficult issues—as can the unfriendly attitude some bring to such debates. I also agree with Yankee that input from the sponsor can help kickstart debate (though of course one person cannot conjure activity on their own).

As for errors like the ones Truman mentioned earlier, I'm immune to those kinds of mistakes to say the least. I just ask that if something slips by, it gets pointed out, which of course people had a week to do so, and I think I bumped the thread like 3 times, and still zip.

Yeah, typos happen—again, I don't blame you for that (goodness knows I've made my fair share of drafting errors in the last three years ), though I agree it is disheartening that the rest of parliament had a week to review the bill in question and nobody brought it up.

I do, however, think it's a stretch to say the government is collapsing. We're going at 3 bills a week and we only had 3 the first several weeks the previous session, and going further back, sessions 1-4 weren't really much more productive.

I agree—which is why I posted this now, when the problems are real but reversible, instead of waiting until we find ourselves in a genuine crisis.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Fremont is a parliament after all, hasn't rendered it immune from the typical problems facing Atlasia overall, has it? In fact, it seems it is the most severe in Fremont. The gov't structure doesn't matter that much in terms of activity, it is its own separate problem.

This is why I pushed the idea of our constitutional documents as "a framework, and not a blueprint" at the ConCon in 2015. You cannot generate activity with a constitutional amendment. In the short run, the novelty of a new system may draw people to the game (this was part of the theory behind the Second Fremontian Constitution), but in the long run titles and protocol don't make the game: interactions over policy and elections do.

The question is whether our constitutional system facilitates or impedes these interactions by making it either easier or harder for the game to adapt to changing circumstances. This is why I am generally suspicious of plans to 'fix Atlasia' by introducing a flood of legislation to alter the constitution, either directly (by constitutional amendment) or practically (by laws restricting the power of the presidency or the Congress to act in certain ways). The Fremontian parliament was deliberately created so that the disappearance of one officer would not sink the entire region. Eighteen months ago, DFL's quasi-retirement would have manacled the government for the remainder of his term; as it is, the parliamentary system has allowed the speaker to assume most of his responsibilities—and while the situation is far from strong, as per the OP, things are still far better than they were fifteen months ago. The same provision allowed parliament to continue legislating during long absences of the speaker during my tenure as prime minister, by allowing the PM to take up the day-to-day work of administering parliament. In short, constitutional flexibility has allowed the government to remain functional even when activity is on a low ebb.

Too often, we fall into a habit of legislating on constitutional questions as if everything will always go according to plan. Congress and the regions are particularly prone to this when activity is at a high point: I'm reminded of last spring, when the South decided it was a good idea to expand their legislature to seven seats in response to rising activity—only to be left with an overlarge chamber later on. Most recently, we've seen Congress consider 'reform' legislation mandating all votes and motions occur on the forum, seemingly without many considering when it might be necessary to make an exception to that rule or whether it is even constitutional in the first place.

So I suppose I'd agree conditionally: constitutions can't create activity, but they can make it easier or more difficult for the government to do its job when the going gets tough.