Structure, size, powers and election of Presidency, VP. (Debating)

[MadmanMotley]

Aye.

[Former Lincoln Assemblyman & Lt. Gov. RGN]

Should the Vice Presidency position be retained?

• Aye

[] Nay
[] Abstain

[tmthforu94]

AYE

[Classic Conservative]

AYE

[MyRescueKittehRocks]

Aye, also I'd propose an amendment to allow the VP to be part of the cabinet if it's mutually agreed by the ticket and approved by both houses.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

ABSTAIN

I'm okay with keeping the VP if we give him/her an actual job to do, as opposed to sitting around for four months waiting for the president to be banned. In lieu of a concrete plan to make this happen, I can't support this proposal - but I don't want to shoot the possibility out of the water, either.

[Clark Kent]

AYE


If the President is banned, we'd need someone to take control.

[Negusa Nagast 🚀]

Nay.

In the absence of a plan that significantly shifts the role of the office, I cannot support retention. We need to making serious changes if we want to save the game.

[bore]

Nay

[Lincoln Republican]

Aye

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

AYE

[Fmr. Pres. Duke]

Aye

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

After years of inactive and placeholder VPs with few exceptions, we gave the VP small share of directly presiding over the Senate. We then went 4 out of 5 VPs that were active and engaged (Duke, DemPGH, Cincy and Windjammer, with Matt being the only exception due to personal reasons). Then everything went to hell and a hand basket in August of last year. I lost my internet access, Labor had a nominal majority and was obligated to give that commie traitor the PPTship (and in the process enact the disastrous concept of a partisan Senate administration to fix something that wasn't broken or at least not in that way!) and Jammy baby had to go and resign. By October, people had soured on VP involvement  and it's removal from Senate leadership got rolled into Nix's "OMG SIMPLICITY AT ALL COSTS" OSPR overhaul and subsequent amendment. And since then VP activity has been sh**t. You get what you pay for.

Restore the VP To being President of Senate, or better yet, make him "Primary Officer of the Congress" (We can find a better title later), empowering him to keep both houses running smoothly.

[Leinad]

Aye.

[Senator Cris]

The VP position will be retained.

[windjammer]

The result was 15 Ayes, 3 Nays and 1 Abstain for the record.

[bore]

Well Nix's senate rules reform was one of the best things we ever passed, because what went before it was completely unreadable.

Anyway I think we need to avoid doing an attorney general thing here where we randomly attach duties to a job. To take the attorney general as an example it had updating the wiki, a sort of SoIA style thing for the police, and prosecutions all rolled into one, but which require different skill sets. The only duty which people actually wanted was the prosecutions one, so the other two just didn't happen. Worse, in the wikis case no one else did it because it was the AG's job.

We need to remember that the VP is chosen for three main reasons, because they help the president get elected, in case the president resigns and to vote as the president would in the senate. None of these things have anything to do with running a legislative body. We need to avoid having a situation where the person running the legislatures is chosen not because they are good at that but for a completely different reason.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

We need to remember that the VP is chosen for three main reasons, because they help the president get elected, in case the president resigns and to vote as the president would in the senate.

And that is because these are the only major responsibilities currently held by the Vice President. If we give the veep new responsibilities, it stands to reason that these will alter the dynamics of the selection process, just as the dynamics of any other election would change if the powers of the office in question were significantly altered.

Honestly, the reason nobody pays attention to Vice Presidential candidates right now (except when forming unity tickets) is because the office has no significant responsibilities - it's not unlike taking the wheels off your car and then complaining that it doesn't go anywhere. By giving the Vice President an important role in running the national government, we will force candidates and voters to pay attention to VP picks, and the game will be better for it.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Indeed, bore has it backwards. After we gave the VP that ability, 80% of VPs were active. Windjammer was selected partially because of his experience in the Midwest Althing if I recall correctly. As it became in place longer, it had an impact on the selection process.


Also, no one doubts that consolidation of the rules were necessary. However, his package was not the only alternative and I created one that cut just 10% less from the text than Nix's, and yet retained the VP's responsibilities. (I think it was 73% versus 62% reduction in text size, so both were substantial. That was my point, it got lumped in with that and then defended ad nauseum by completely deriding all that came before. The old text was abysmal, but there were decent aspects of it that we had added over the years. And the VP's administering of part of the Senate derived not from specific grants but an arrangement made with the PPT at the beginning of the term, resting on the VP's role as the PPT Constitutional superior. The rules merely acknowledged this arrangement and had since 2010, only never to be utilized until 2013.

[bore]

Well whether the VP ran the senate or not wasn't really something that affected the length of the senate rules. As far as I remember, and this was debated at the time, the decision to put running the senate in the hands of a senator was taken, rightly or wrong, because it was seen as making the senate run better (for similar sort of reasons to the ones I mentioned), not because it made the rules slightly shorter.

To be honest I tend towards the view that the running of the senate should all be in one persons hands, it's far less confusing than 90 different threads ran by 90 different people, and the less people that need to  be relied on the less likely things are to go wrong.  So whatever we do it should be one person, not the PPT, the most senior senator and the VP who run things.

It's my opinion that the most important roles of the VP are, and will always be, the three I mentioned, and presidents will always select based on that, and that will lead to problems. That said, there is clearly a will here to give the VP this role, and there's no point fighting this.

[sentinel]

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Ahem, ahem -- allow me to make my rare post. I picked Dallasfan because 1) he's the bomb and 2) to unite the two smaller parties behind a candidate to be competitive for first choice picks and then (ideally) win on second/third choices etc. We only came 5(?) votes shy of winning so the strategy was fairly effective. Someone else wrote we were terrible campaigners -- you're mis-remembering. We were decent at the minimum. Dallasfan and I had a huge outreach effort going on, although we did come up short in the end.

[Adam Griffin]

Yes, even I can admit that the sirnick / dallasfan ticket overperformed relative to the upsets that the DemPGH / windjammer ticket was able to generate with the relatively large number of defections (21% of the conservative vote), but there is a caveat there. As windjammer can attest to, this is in part due to my laziness during the election save for the NE Senate race; I was completely convinced we would win after the first 12 hours or so (and I was right, wasn't I?) so I sent out only a handful of PMs that weekend. I had to deal with jambles constantly telling me "we're going to lose! The margin is closing!" etc etc, but based on initial returns, I was confident that we would eek out a victory in any scenario, as well as in a majority of Senate races. So, their efforts were largely successful because they did not have the Griffin machine grinding out one unbelievable vote after another; it's amazing what I can do when my back is against the wall! However, because I was not threatened by them, their over-performance had no counter from me.

Had it been a status quo election where all of the Federalists and conservatives knee-jerked against Labor, though, then the result would have been a mirror image in terms of margin. Fortunately, several of those votes came in early and cemented their fate.

But history doesn't remember losers well (unless and/or especially if they delete the appropriate threads)!

[Fmr. Pres. Duke]

Have we settled the issue of the VP yet? Not that I'm complaining about having nothing to do, but we need closure here

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Have we settled the issue of the VP yet? Not that I'm complaining about having nothing to do, but we need closure here

The text of the Executive Article adopted by the Convention preserves the office of VP and gives him the additional duty of serving as "President of the Congress" (i.e. the coordinator of the House and Senate). The specifics of that role will be hashed out once we've finished with the Judiciary and the Bill of Rights.