6th Clark of the 47th Cosa post-mortem

Last April, the 6th Clark of the 47th Cosa concluded with 116 votes against 53 in the vote of confidence, a moot point since this was the last Clark of the Cosa.

16 Bills were Clarked, including 11 amendments (two of which even required 2/3 of the Senate) and all of them save 2 were adopted by both the Cosa and the Senate.

The two failed bills, 47RZ34 The Election Mega-constitutional amendment Part III – The seats, and 47RZ35 The Election Mega-constitutional amendment Part IV – The Hopper both failed in both the Cosa and the Senate, RZ34 didn’t get a single Senate vote in favor of the bill!

That 47R34 failed was no surprise as the author of the Bill, Secretary of State Marti-Pair Furxheir no longer even fully believed in it. He had also resigned himself to 47RZ35’s failure, but was happy that the other 5 parts of his Election amendment passed, as well as his bill (47RZ31) solving the issue once and for all on the relationship between the Secretary of State and legislative duties.

One of the issues in the Clark was that Secretary of State, in his reforms, had introduced a contradictory clause between 47RZ35 and 47RZ37, a fact put to the light by the Interior Minister, C. Carlüs Xheraltescù. Both amendments, born from the split of the failed 47RZ27 from the 5th Clark, included by mistake almost the same amendment to the Organic Law (changing the word “will”) to either “can” for 47RZ35 or “may” for 47RZ37…

Fortunately, with the failure of 47RZ35, that issue is solved. That also solves and apparent contradiction betwen 47RZ31 and 47RZ35. All in all, not a great Clark for consistency on the part of the Secretary of State.

What is even more interesting is that 4 bills passed without a single Contra Vote in either Chambers. These are:

• 47RZ31 – Allowing the SoS to be apolitical amendment
• 47RZ39 – The Judicial Merry-Go-Round Amendment
• 47RZ43 – The Delicious Burritos Act
• 47RZ45 – The Sartorello Immigration Act

On the other bills, Sir Alexandreu Davinescu posted a few very interesting comments, as he always does while voting:

He notably opposed 47RZ32 which restricts Senators from only being elected in their own province with the very appropriate comment:

No reason to eliminate this possibility, when it’s already set to only work if there’s no resident running. It saved our bacon in the past.

He did also object to 47RZ41:

I vote an extremely emphatic contra, but with regret. As I have previously said, I would be delighted for Txec to return to the bench, but I cannot in good conscience vote to put the currently serving A-G in that position!

This quickly prompted Txec to resign as Attorney General, causing AD to change his vote to Per.

In the Senate, only Munditenens Tresplet did similiar comments.

Of interest are his comments on his abstaining on 47RZ32:

Although I do support what this does, I’m holding true to my resolve not to vote on any of these election amendments. Are our elections really so messed up we need seven different amendments (or one single amendment/bill that is so large it had to be split into seven) to fix it?

He also opposed changing the ceremonial “will” mentionned above with a quite interesting note:

I will also note that the ceremonial MC portion was in fact resolved by statute. This is, once again, an example of how we can resolve problems without amending Organic Law all the time. Quite frankly, it was never really a problem to begin with, and it especially isn’t one now. Given that no one claims any ceremonial status currently, and it’s already been resolved by statute, is this really necessary?

47RZ38 prompted from him another interesting comment:

I don’t like bulleted points in what is basically our Constitution, especially given that this should (and I’m like a broken record here) be in El Lexhatx rather than OrgLaw. We shouldn’t need to come back and amend Organic Law (which, FYI, is supposed to be rather difficult to do) every time we need to add, remove, or change something that a registered party needs to provide the Chancery with before every General Election. If we wanted to change 50 words to 75, why is it necessary to have such a proposal approved by 2/3rds of the Ziu, then voted on by the citizens as a referendum? Yes, it was already in there to begin with, but once again, see generally the comments made above.

Preßeu Zespenat would like to report other comments from Ziu members but these were the only 2 commenters for the last Clark.

Since this is the first article in this series, I would like to comment on the fact that the Post-Clark Analysis articles are about the results of the Clarks, and not the content of the bills themselves.