SENATE BILL: Amendment to the Caucus Infrastructure and Formation Act (OTPD)

[TJ in Oregon]

The point of listing non-partisan caucuses on the ballot is that interest groups in real life have no analagous role in Atlasia. In real life, such groups run ads, make campaign donations, and distribute literature to the masses. I am aware caucuses don't do these things, but we're also not all in Congress either. The point is to have issue based advocacy groups drive our politics some instead of the two behemoth parties.

Having partisan caucuses isn't going to split the two main parties because people aren't foolish enough to think that they will be better off with loyalty to their caucus rather than their party. If anything it will grow them. People who are currently independents are given an incentive to join the two large parties rather than the other way around. Look at the voter roles since we've passed the caucus bill, not a single voter has left either major party and one has joined.

[TJ in Oregon]

For the record, Marokai in no way directly influenced me to change my vote. I changed my vote because of the section restricting membership of a caucus to members of a single party.

That isn't really a change.

It depends on how it's interpreted. The current bill assumes official membership is restricted to one party, but this could be interpreted as to outlaw even some form of honorary membership by other citizens. For example, the Right to Life Caucus has a bylaws provision that affords the same rights within the caucus of all those who wish to join regardless of whether or not they can be officially registered by the government. With the right lawsuit, that could be illegal under this bill.

[TJ in Oregon]

You all interpreted it as intra-party caucuses when you voted for it before. It doesn't really make sense to change.

There's a difference between 'interpreting' it to mean intra-party caucuses (which is the clear intent of the first bill) and explicitly banning outsiders from joining. The federal government would simply give no recognition to other citizens who wish to join under the former while non-party members joining would be explicitly illegal under the latter (unless "membership" is intepreted to mean membership as recognized by the government---in which case we'll likely need a court ruling at some point in the future).

[TJ in Oregon]

"Honorary" members certainly won't get any recognition from the government. But they don't under the current version either. I don't believe this version would "ban" a caucus deciding to allow them anymore than the previous one would.

I wouldn't interpret it that way either, but I could see how someone would. I don't want (not that it matters unless this bill stays here for three more weeks ) a bill to pass that includes a point that could reasonably be interpreted to mean that, especially when it could say something like:

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that would effectively mean the same thing as what you are arguing for but cannot be intepreted to mean something else.