N401: Lincoln Assembly Expansion Amendment - Failed

[Drew]

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II.  This Amendment shall take effect in June 2017 for the Elections held in that month.

Sponsor: Drew

We'll begin a 72 hour debate period with this bill.  Because it's an amendment, it will need 4/5 approval to be placed on the ballot.

[Drew]

I support this for a number of reasons.  For one thing, it allows for a greater number of voices in the Assembly, and allows for a greater diversity of viewpoints.  Also, a drawback of a three-member body would be that it only takes one member to completely kill a proposed constitutional amendment, by either voting no, or simply not voting at all.  A five-member body would allow for one member to dissent without singlehandedly defeating an amendment before it gets to the people, the majority of whom may very well like to approve it.  Finally, this amendment would give the Assembly a consistent size and wouldn't be subject to fluctuation from one term to the next.  Any vacancies can be filled by special election or appointment throughout the course of a term.  If one member is missing, a four member body can function significantly better than a two person body.

[Lachi]

I massively support this amendment. Nothing wrong with increasing Atlasian activity at all!

[JGibson]

I am in massive favor of this bill. The more activity in this region's legislature, the better.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Speaking not only as the former chairman of the committee responsible for creating this constitution, but as a native son of Lincoln, I must urge the Assembly to reject this amendment out of hand. Allow me to explain why.

The first campaign I ever fought I won nearly two years ago, in March 2015. I began that month as a candidate for the Mideast Assembly, an old and celebrated legislature whose seats changed number every two months as interest in joining waxed and waned, until one year (before my time) its members elected to fix the size of the chamber permanently at five, as the Speaker now proposes to do. That March, there were five candidates for five seats in the Assembly, and so all five were elected - without opposition, and without a serious chance of being defeated. In May, the number of candidates was again five; in July, that number fell to four; in September, but one name appeared on the ballot; this in spite of a concerted effort by every elected leader in the region to recruit citizens to serve in the regional government. It was a pattern Atlasia had seen before, in the West (which collapsed for the fourth time in four years just months ago), and which veteran reformers and political leaders knew well and understood: the five-seat legislature that existed on paper did not represent the needs or reflect the reality on the ground. In fact, its persistence (and the initial hesitance of the Assembly to do anything about it) made matters worse by making it harder to turn out poor legislators via the democratic process.

Why did the Mideast Assembly fail, and why did reformers respond by indexing the size of the new legislatures to activity? There are, fundamentally, three reasons:


     (1) Quantity ≠ Quality. If your sailboat is sinking, rolling a few boulders aboard does nothing to solve the problem. Simply put, the number of legislators is far less important than the quality of those legislators. The best way to ensure that the best people are being elected to our regional legislatures is to decrease the number of seats up for election when the number of candidates running is relatively small. All those uncontested elections in the Mideast actually made it harder to govern, despite the five-seat legislature we had on paper, because predictably one or two, or even three or four of the elected candidates were inactive "deadbeat lawmakers" who never did anything in office. Because there were never more than five candidates, and because the number of seats in the Assembly was permanently fixed, the voters never had a chance to vote the deadbeats out. The result was that close votes on controversial legislation (like the constitutional amendments mentioned by the sponsor) often ended in ties, with the do-nothing who held the tie-breaking vote too checked out to care. I have spent a cumulative thirteen months presiding over one legislature or another, and I can tell you that five inactive delegates are not preferable to three active delegates.

Of course, you might get luck and see five active delegates elected via an uncontested election, but that raises another problem...

     (2) Uncontested elections are bad for democracy. The democratic process is typified by choice; democratic governments have legitimacy because the people select the representatives who write their laws. This principle is undermined by the fixed five-seat rule, because it makes it quite easy for someone to be elected delegate without opposition. This happened routinely under the Third Constitution, and would have happened here in December 2016 had it not been for the sliding scale that keeps the size of the Assembly in proportion to the active population.

A government that lets in everyone who runs is not a representative democracy, because in uncontested elections the voters do not have the opportunity to say "no." The sliding scale provision ensures that at least one candidate will not be elected, and that is a good thing. The alternative is an unrepresentative aristocracy of self-appointed lawmakers who hold their office by virtue of being clever enough to post in the Candidate Declaration Thread.

Now, I'm sure someone is going to stand up and say "why not run another candidate if choice is so important?" and while naturally that is the ideal, sometimes its just not possible. What goes up must come down, and activity is no exception: there will be times in the future when it will be impossible to find five great candidates for delegate, and when that happens the people must have the opportunity to vote the bad apple out. Anything less is a mockery of the principle of representative government.

     (3) Flexibility is strength. A government that cannot function unless five active people run for the Assembly every two months is a weak government, prone to instability and periods of malaise that threaten to topple the entire system. Those who have been around long enough to see the cycle all the way through know this; it's why the authors of the constitution (all veteran lawmakers with years of experience in government) build the sliding scale provision into Article I. Again, we all want five active legislators, but sometimes - as veterans move on to higher office and recruitment efforts wax temporarily - that's just not feasible, and during those times it's better to have three active, committed, and democratically-chosen delegates in charge than to have a handful of deadbeats and zombies mixed in.


Let's not forget that no-one is arguing against allowing the voters to elect five delegates; the question is whether such should be a choice, or a command. If interest in joining the Assembly justifies five seats, then five seats there shall be; but if only three or four candidates want to run, we shouldn't nullify the principle of choice or force ourselves to install a bad candidate because of an inflexible constitutional amendment.

I say this as someone who has had the opportunity to work in and with regional governments for two years, who has seen multiple activity crises come and go, and who has contributed to or been the primary author of four constitutions. I've seen regions rise, and I've seen them fall; the quickest way into the second category is to tie yourself to a legislative formula that cannot be easily adapted to the reality on the ground. Don't believe me? Take a gander at how many bills passed the Mideast Assembly in the last nine months of its existence. I'm sure y'all have the best of intentions, but this is a bad idea.

[This account no longer in use.]

I am against this for many of the reasons Truman has brought up. Increasing the assembly size immediately seems too quick, especially when the last election only had six candidates.

[Wells]

I am also opposed to this bill, but Truman said pretty much everything I wanted to say, only better.

I will say that this Assembly was elected with six candidates on the ballot. It's not that hard to imagine that in a midterm we could get considerably less, such as in the last midterm where we got four candidates. As Truman pointed out, under this amendment, all candidates would have made it in without a contest (which is not very democratic), and we would also have had a vacant fifth seat. So this isn't the best way to encourage activity.

[JGibson]

After reading this bill in more detail and Truman's speech, I am moving my vote from a yes to an undecided vote at this point.

[Drew]

As the debate period has expired, we will now have a 48-hour voting period.

[Drew]

Aye

[Wells]

Just another thing to add to what I said earlier: the three person Assembly elected in December went on to become more active than the previous five member Assembly.

Now you all can vote.

[JGibson]

Nay.

[Lachi]

Abstain

[Senator-elect Spark]

Abstain

[This account no longer in use.]

Nay

[Drew]

With 1 Aye, 2 Nays, and 2 Abstentions, this amendment does not meet the required threshold to be placed on the ballot.  This bill has failed.