Ziu Reform Possibilities

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

You can't really make a statutory provision that's especially difficult to change.  Any future Ziu will have equal power to this Ziu, and we can't "tie their hands."  I think the principle is called legislative sovereignty.

It occurred to me that we could make a provision of the OrgLaw saying "any change to statute that affects so-and-so must be agreed upon by a supermajority of the Cosa" or something like that.  But we've never done that before, and the immediate problem that presents is that it might make it really easy to impose new laws about that topic by just looping in something about that provision and then really hard to change them once they exist.  Plus it creates a new category of law, which makes me nervous after we spent so much trouble on going to a single legal code.

That said, I bet a lot of this can be put into statute or made so that statute can guide it or something.  I'll take a look.

[Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial, UrGP]

The Organic Law already imposes a special condition on statutory changes to the Cosă size and that seems to work well enough (i.e., resizing the Cosă via statute takes at least a year, resizing the Cosă via amendment takes one term like normal). What I was suggesting wouldn't be too different from that in my opinion.

[Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial, UrGP]

Okay, the change sounds good to me.  I'll make it: "3. No person shall hold more seats in the Cosă than thirty times the total number of seats in the Cosă divided by two times the number of ballots cast for the Cosa in the most recent General Election, rounded up to the next integer."

Under this formula, the seat limit in a 20-seat Cosă is 4 if turnout dips below 100, which as far as I could tell is the normal case. This has to do with how the limit strictly rounds up. Perhaps the following would future-proof things somewhat:

"3. No person shall hold more seats in the Cosă than thirty times the total number of seats in the Cosă divided by two times the number of ballots cast for the Cosa in the most recent General Election, rounded up to the next non-zero integer."

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

There's a time limit before such changes come into effect, which is already significant and which I'm not 100% happy about.  We worked really hard to get dozens and dozens of laws assembled into one legal code, and it took months, and it turned our laws from something impenetrable that only a few people knew their way around into something that was actually useful to people.  And it's still legalese, but it's relatively simple.

If we start making special categories of provisions inside of it... well, I'm a little nervous about where that can lead.  Regular Talossans (sometimes MLLs, sometimes not) still sometimes say to me that they don't understand how to read our laws very well.  "Make the laws simpler" is an explicit goal for my party, and there's a bill we'll be putting on the Sixth Clark which has some wording changes for just that purpose.  I'm uncomfortable making them less simple at the same time.

We can do a lot with "as guided by statute" and putting what we can into statute, so let me take a crack at this.