Presidential Parliamentarian (Discussion Open)

[Marokai Backbeat]

I don't want to draw up part of an article on executive powers just yet not quite knowing what they would/should have. What powers should the President and Prime Minister have individually and what powers would they hold that would contrast with the other?

[Marokai Backbeat]

I think that the plan we had devised was that the Prime Minister would be in charge of the legislature, leading legislative initiatives, picking cabinet members (who would function something like American committee chairs), and setting the national policy. The President, on the other hand, would be more of a popular representative of the people, in charge of kind of checking the parliament, given the ability to veto, some legislative abilities (either introducing his own bills in a special legislative slot or putting certain bills up to national referenda), and given some ability over dismissing prime ministers and dissolving parliaments.

     I must say this is better than the alternatives proposed.

Now all that has to be done is writing that more formally.

[Marokai Backbeat]

Okay.

Seeing as there has been no substantive debate for two days, I would like to amend this thread to be titled Presidential Universalism, which constitutes:

• A President and Vice-President similar to what we have now.
• An elected Upper House, a Senate, with 15 Senators, elected every two months.
• A universal Lower House.
• The abolition of Regions.
• Cabinet members must be selected from the Senate.

Those suggestions work work much better if you took it to an already existing proposal for universalism. Stop trying to be difficult.

[Marokai Backbeat]

    I wouldn't bring back the budget. It seems like it would get repealed again almost immediately.

I'm in complete agreement, the budget deal is too much.

[Marokai Backbeat]

Aye (There should be a vote notice in the title.)

[Marokai Backbeat]

This proposal has been dead for about a month and a half basically, and I've been doing something thinking.

Activity in Atlasia has taken a jump, even though of course some of the activity is from The 25's, I think that an entirely new government has lost considerable support amongst the people and this convention's activity, including mine here, has dropped to a record low. As such, I think we need to re-think our approach. We still have considerable problems in Atlasia and the best way to fix them IS through this convention, but let's take our current system as our model and make some improvements here and there.

• Take our current Constitution and combine it with all the passed Amendments so it's alot cleaner and more organized, and make some changes where necessary to deal with Regional Powers and other small areas, etc.
• Reduce the number of regions to three, the simplest way could be to divide the Midwest and the Mideast between the Pacific, Southeast, and Northeast regions. This still keeps the mode of some of the current regions but improves the system a bit.
• Expand the size of the Senate to 15, perhaps having two elected by each of the three new expanded (and consequently more active) regions, and the remaining six elected at-large.
• Deal with issues revolving around the GM, such as putting the position in the Constitution or putting it's responsibilities into a new job reminiscent of my "Department of Economic Affairs" or something.
• Fix other misc. problems such as Absentee voting, Presidential powers, or anything else we need to deal with.

We can do all of this within the framework of our current constitution without the need to build and entirely new government. So, if Lief is willing to hear me out, and PS is willing to possibly scrap and rebuild this proposal like we did with Presidential Universalism, I think we can fix Atlasia without building an entirely new house and get something we can all agree with.

[Marokai Backbeat]

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     Do you mean having three elected by each region?

Oh, sorry, I didn't catch that. I did mean three, but it could be two and we could elect 9 at large I suppose.

[Marokai Backbeat]

Argh, now someone is introducing the status quo as an option?

Well, congrats, you win the convention.

I'm afraid anything radically new is going to fail pretty badly. There's just not an appetite for it anymore. We can still fix many things and shrink regional government within the current framework and polish things up a bit.

[Marokai Backbeat]

I'm fairly surprised there's any lobbying for more Senate seats to be elected by regions considering the number of candidates who ran for Senate this time around.  In fact, if we're keeping the Regions, the number of Senate seats should be decreased, not increased.  Or perhaps put a cap on the number of people who can hold regional office.  Overall, we seem to have a shortage of people who want to run for anything.

Decreased? We have a record number of citizens and more voters now than we have previously. Perhaps we have uncompetitive elections in some regions but we have a ton of people participating now in comparison to a year ago. If we allowed people to perhaps serve in a regional role and a federal role, we could solve the problem.

I think we could sustain more seats, there are enough people out there who want in the process to fill them, and if they don't get the opportunity, they'll probably just leave.

[Marokai Backbeat]

Also, just for discussions sake here:

Guys, regional Senate elections, as evidence by the ones currently happening, are boring and awful. Why do we want more of them again?

Six months ago I might have agreed with you, but I think there are alot more people who would participate if given the chance and these elections aren't really unchallenged. The Mideast, Midwest, and Northeast each had at least two candidates for the seat. Duke ran for the Senate in the special election and probably would run for the Senate if there were other opportunities for him to do so. The Pacific is of course a special unfortunate case, but we would at least find more candidates, we have plenty of them.

The old canard of not being able to fill the spaces isn't so true now.

[Marokai Backbeat]

I would say that the Midwest election is competitive. It would be more competitive if you, Jas, and Lewis Trondheim voted for Fritz.

They're subversive types. It's "cool."

[Marokai Backbeat]

I would say that the Midwest election is competitive. It would be more competitive if you, Jas, and Lewis Trondheim voted for Fritz.

Ah, competition by compulsion, I hadn't thought of that

Well, with all due respect, Fritz is fairly close to your ideologies, and if you didn't spend so much time complaining about salads and talking about "loonyism" and more time taking things seriously and giving proper candidates due consideration, elections might turn out differently than they do now. You act like class clowns and then complain when the class doesn't turn out well.