Upper House of Review Amendment

[Mic’haglh Autófil, O.Be]

I note that this bill would make the first sentence of the modified clause a lie.  "The Senäts shall have equal powers with the Cosa in respect of all proposed laws" will no longer be true.  There will only be two categories of bills for which the Senäts will be equal to the Cosa.  That might be something you want to fix.

Under your interpretation, the first sentence of the modified clause is already a lie -- the clause goes on to describe a class of bills in which the Senäts is already unequal to the Cosă. I'm interested in hearing what others think about the wording, though.

Can you explain to me why having an upper house that has the authority to reject bills or send them back down is a bad thing? I can perhaps understand the ability of the Cosa to override but do we need to strip them of power in order to accomplish the same purpose?

I thought this was still a good question that didn't actually quite get answered.  The explanation went into the nature of the change in detail, but without saying why it was desirable.  Why would we want to do this?

There are a few reasons:
- One, it does not allow truly vital legislation to be hung up forever on the Senäts. Since, of course, bills addressing a given issue can only be considered once per term, this allows the Senäts to effectively kick the can down the road on any issue they wish to obstruct the government on.
- The more overarching, "philosophical" reason is that Talossa is not a federal nation. I know we've compared our constitutional structure to Australia before -- and in fact I believe @Miestră Schivă, UrN-GC has stated that similarities are intentional -- but the reality is that we are more like Spain than Australia: a unitary state, divided into provinces that may legislate on certain areas on their own. A "strong" upper house (or at least one as strong as the Senäts) is incompatible with the concept of responsible government in a unitary state. To return to the Australian comparison, they are federal in nature, and this juxtaposition between responsible government and federalism precipitated what is likely their most dire constitutional crisis:

As in most Westminster system parliaments, Australia's government is ordinarily formed by the party enjoying the confidence of the lower house of parliament, the House of Representatives. Australia's Parliament also has a powerful upper house, the Senate, which must pass any bill initiated by the House of Representatives if it is to become law. The composition of the Senate, in which each state has an equal number of senators regardless of that state's population, was originally designed to attract the Australian colonies into one Federation. Some at the time of Federation saw the contradiction in the Constitution between responsible government, in which the executive owes its existence to the legislature or one dominant house of the legislature, and, federations with the houses of bicameral legislatures operating independently and possibly deadlocking. Certain delegates predicted that either responsible government would result in the federation becoming a unitary state or federalism would result in an executive closer to federal theory. For instance, delegate Winthrop Hackett stated at the 1891 Convention that as a result of the combination of a strong Senate with responsible government, "there will be one of two alternatives—either responsible government will kill federation, or federation in the form in which we shall, I hope, be prepared to accept it, will kill responsible government".

A few things I would ask sceptics to keep in mind:
- A "house of sober second thought" is the usual role for the upper house in parliamentary legislatures (House of Lords, Canadian Senate, the German and Austrian Bundesrats, the House of Councillors in Japan, etc.)
- This change will also likely lead to a "de-politicization" of Senäts elections, which is healthy if we're trying to make Talossa a more tolerable place for people to spend their time.
- I know you personally have expressed several points of opposition to unicameralism before, chief among those being a safeguard on excessive Organic amendments. Please note that the requirement of the Senäts' consent is not affected in cases of Organic amendment.