Opinion: A Unified Executive is the Start – Not the End


Opinion: A Unified Executive is the Start – Not the End
By Deepest House
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(Europeia - June 10, 2020) - The Senate recently passed the executive modernization bill to remerge the executive branch and we now will rightly go toward a referendum where, in the finest Europeian tradition, the people themselves will have the final say. I look forward to that vote.

Passing the bill to remerge the executive is not the end of the road for regional and governmental reform. It is but the start! Unifying the executive provides a tremendous foundation on which we can, and will, continue to build and improve our government. This first positive step that we have taken together as a region, built through genuine and meaningful debate and compromise in both the Grand Hall and the Senate, is truly just the first step that we will take to improve our executive branch.

If we are to be the region of professional governance in NationStates, which we have always strived to be and on which we have always prided ourselves, we should model efficient and professional forms of government. We should prioritize appropriate authorities and accountabilities. We should prioritize that we have one government and one executive, for one Europeia.

Merging the executive fixes the efficiency challenges of the executive split (just one example: we will no longer need to nominate superfluous cabinet posts to address the inefficiencies created, and that labor can be put toward more substantive and meaningful projects), as well as the significantly mismatched accountability system. I have said it before, and I have asked why many times, but it doesn’t make any sense to have a system of government where there is no central authority and accountability figure. Where does the buck stop?

On top of a system with an amorphous accountability system, we also have a system of government where one side of the executive branch can make commitments on behalf of the Europeian government but not have the authority to carry out those commitments. Not only is that greatly inefficient, from a public administration and governance perspective, it defies logic.

There is simply no getting over these gigantic governance hurdles if we maintain a split executive. We will continue to be without a single accountable chief executive officer, continue to have superfluous nominations resulting in wasted labor, and we will continue to have mismatched accountability systems. I can’t imagine anyone in the region truly believes this to be the best form of government.

I have thought very long and very hard about the executive split and merging the executive. In the end, merging the executive is what this part of reform and this referendum is about. Yes, there are ancillary issues that some may think could be improved – and those chances will come as we continue to optimize our executive branch going forward. Even for me, there are areas where I have had to find compromise because the value of merging the executive greatly outweighs my current concerns over secondary and tertiary issues. But ultimately, just as McEntire and others have said, this is the start, it isn’t the end. Work will continue going forward as we fine-tune the system. However, only by passing this referendum, will we have solved the major structural challenges we currently face. It is clear there are calls for more, and those calls will be heard by those seeking office in the future – both in the executive and legislative branches.

If, like me, you are unable to find any logical reason why we should have a system of government where one side of the split executive can obligate the Europeian government to fulfill an action, but not have the authority to implement that action, then I ask you to join me and the countless others in the region who recognize that if we are truly to restore Europeia as the preeminent political and governance simulator in NationStates, that a unified executive is the first step toward returning to that preeminence.

Some will say that the split executive has never caused accountability challenges, and while I may disagree, even if I grant that point, it greatly misses the mark. The success of our executive branch shouldn’t depend on avoiding potential pitfalls that are baked into the structure of a split executive. Rather, the success of our executive branch should be based on the fundamental foundation on which it is built, a unified executive with the appropriate authorities and accountabilities. The success of the executive branch should be purposeful, not accidental.

To be the best Europeia, Europeia needs a centralized executive branch, with a single chief executive officer, with the authority to both obligate the government to perform certain actions and the authority to perform those actions, and the accountability to be held responsible. To be the best Europeia, Europeia needs a centralized executive branch to avoid superfluous cabinet nominations and positions created simply to overcome the fundamental structural deficiencies of the split executive. To be the best Europeia, I ask you to join me in voting in favor of restoring Europeia to its rightful place as the preeminent political and governance simulator in NationStates.
 
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I have thought very long and very hard about the executive split and merging the executive. In the end, merging the executive is what this part of reform and this referendum is about. Yes, there are ancillary issues that some may think could be improved – and those chances will come as we continue to optimize our executive branch going forward. Even for me, there are areas where I have had to find compromise because the value of merging the executive greatly outweighs my current concerns over secondary and tertiary issues.
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I am of two minds on this referendum. I agree that the Executive branch should to be remerged under a unified Executive. it emphatically should. However, it is not clear to me that this referendum is only about spliting VS remerging the executive precisely because of the choices the Senate made in how it combined other reform agendas with remerge. I am not sure that all other changes to the law are ancillary (though I agree other pieces are). Numerous Senators have stressed that this referendum also critically addresses issues of oversight and of the role of the Vice President under a unified Executive, and indeed last minute language was added to essentially force the Executive to explicitly mark out boundaries between the President's responsibilities and the Vice President's responsibilities. This is being touted as improvements - perhaps this is what the Senate considers an improvement, but it makes the Bill worse in my mind and more difficult to vote for.

Additionally, while you describe other issues as secondary and tertiary concerns - things that the Senate was able to compromise on - I would describe these issues differently. I would say that Senators... don't care or dont know about these secondary and tertiary issues. . There are numerous Senators who have explicitly admitted to not knowing what is in the reform package they voted on. After 47 pages of debate (more now), Senators just... don't know what is in the referendum. Senators have misstated what the nomination threshold in the Bill is. Other Senators do not know that they modified language about honorifics and think the compromise reached is the literal opposite of what was actually agreed upon! I agree that compromise is good. But not when no one knows or cares what they even compromised on, and then these compromises are sold as part of this referendum.
 
Regarding the conduct of some senators, this is a nine-person Senate, and the actions of a small minority of senators do not overshadow or eclipse the true spirit of collaboration and compromise that got us to where we are.

Saying nobody knows or cares based on the actions or statements this small minority of the senate is an exaggeration of reality.

It sounds like your issue might be more with one or two senators than the Senate as a whole, which I think by and large approached this with the seriousness it deserved.

Regardless of how we may each characterize the other issues (I think reasonable people can disagree on something as subjective as that), I am glad that we are in agreement that it is imperative that we remerge the executive.
 
It is the very public comments of a Senators who dont know what is in the legislation, as well as private conversations with Senators who also don't know about other parts of the Bill, that makes me wary about the degree to which compromise is reached. I am also concerned that it appears like Senators actually think that compromise was reached in their favor on a number of issues... when in reality it was not! And then Senators have also expressed disappointment that the public has not followed along with the debate and are only bringing up issues now. Well apparently, some Senators do not even know what is in this Bill, so perhaps they should have followed along as well.

Yes, when a referendum is offered to the citizens, votes can be won and lost on the conduct of Senators and on the other issues that are in the legislation. I am not the only one who has expressed serious reserves about the confusion within the Senate about the actual compromises reached, or who is in favor of remerge but confusion about other portions of the Bill. If the Senators I described in my previous post had voted Nay then this Bill would not have passed, so I think it is unfair to say that it is just a small minority here that has caused concern. If there is a single issue that is so imperative, why risk the passage of the Bill with substantive but in your mind "secondary and tertiary" issues that reasonable people can find serious objection to? If the main goal of the Senate was to present to the people a Bill that could definitively pass a referendum that remerged the Executive , I dont understand the political strategy of including "secondary and tertiary issues" that "reasonable people can disagree on" and which some Senators do not know are in the actual legislation.
 
Again, it sounds like your issues are with one or two senators, not the entire senate. You could call those senators out by name and hold them to account rather than try to paint the entire senate with your broad brush of disappointment.

It is the responsibility of every senator to know what is in a bill when they vote for it. It is not the responsibility of fellow senators to do homework for their colleagues.
 
If there is a single issue that is so imperative, why risk the passage of the Bill with substantive but in your mind "secondary and tertiary" issues that reasonable people can find serious objection to? If the main goal of the Senate was to present to the people a Bill that could definitively pass a referendum that remerged the Executive , I dont understand the political strategy of including "secondary and tertiary issues" that "reasonable people can disagree on" and which some Senators do not know are in the actual legislation.
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Again, I will quote this portion of my comment which is explicitly not just about one or two (or three) Senators. It is more of a broad issue about choices made by the Senate in this Bill - explicitly choices made regarding the VP position, the Cabinet, and the nomination process.
 
It’s simple. The major focus of this from the start, for me and many others, was the remerge.

Additional things were included based on the broad regional discussion we had, with many inputs and desires considered, debated, and eventually included.

That’s where we landed. That some senators may not have followed as closely as they should is on them.

If you have issues with how certain senators handled this, you have recourses outside of pithy comments in an EBC thread.

With a nine person senate, which is what the region decided it wanted, you’re going to end up with bills reflecting a lot of different interests.
 
It’s simple. The major focus of this from the start, for me and many others, was the remerge.

Additional things were included based on the broad regional discussion we had, with many inputs and desires considered, debated, and eventually included.
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Yes, and since those things are in the referendum they play a role in how people vote on the referendum. If the Senate wanted this to be only a referendum about the remerge, then the Senate should have limited this referendum to that. If the Senate wanted to make this a singular argument about the merits of a remerge then don't include (important and contentious) "secondary and tertiary" issues in the Referendum, as well as issues that some Senators don't know about. I think that the "many inputs and desires" that were added to the final product make it harder to support the final product., and therefore makes it more difficult to pass remerge reform in the first place.

Should the Referendum pass, I look forward to working towards improving those "secondary issues" in the future. I just disagree that the "merging the executive is what this part of reform and this referendum is about." It has chosen to be about other things as well, to the detriment of the final product.

It is the responsibility of every senator to know what is in a bill when they vote for it. It is not the responsibility of fellow senators to do homework for their colleagues. ... If you have issues with how certain senators handled this, you have recourses outside of pithy comments in an EBC thread.
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I completely agree that Senators have a responsibility to know what they're voting on, and to know what in front of the People in this Referendum. If Senators want to run for reelection on their record this term, then yes, it is reasonable to raise it there as well - I dont consider pointing this out in the EBC the only recourse. The process of politics is part of making Europeia "the preeminent political and governance simulator in NationStates." Senators not knowing about the compromises that were reached doesn't fill me with confidence that the best product was created. An individual Senator isnt responsible for doing anyone else's homework, but the Senate as a body shouldn't get graded on a curve either. When someone doesn't do their homework, the class didn't do as well as it would have otherwise.
 
Well, I think the best way to judge what is in it is to read it and come your conclusion based on the content, and not the actions of a minority of Senators.
 
PhDre said:
Senators have misstated what the nomination threshold in the Bill is.
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I want to address this directly, because I'm not going to have people thinking that this is a broader issue than it is. In a private conversation with PhDre, I misstated the confirmation threshold as 66% rather than greater than 2/3. It's not an indication that "Senators don't know what's in the bill," and I'm not going to have it thrown around anonymously. In one of several extended private conversations we have had about the bill, I misstated an aspect of it.

Regardless, I support the current confirmation threshold in the bill, and if you want to oppose it you should find a better reason than "Senators don't know what's in it," because that's untrue and insulting. I won't have you making it seem like this is a broader issue than it is, and I wish you'd talk about the substance rather than making a strawman out of this Senate.

And I have made an effort to talk through this bill at length with you privately, and assuage your concerns. At the moment that I said that wrong in our private conversation, I knew that it would be used against me publicly, because that is your way. Argue on the substance. Don't take things out of context. It isn't 2011 anymore, Three Eyes.
 
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Good job on this article, DH. I know we don't see eye-to-eye on this, but your article is still well-written and reasoned. Thank you for getting the "hot take," as it were.
 
McEntire said:
And I have made an effort to talk through this bill at length with you privately, and assuage your concerns. At the moment that I said that wrong in our private conversation, I knew that it would be used against me publicly, because that is your way. Argue on the substance. Don't take things out of context. It isn't 2011 anymore, Three Eyes.
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I am not trying to take anything out of context or trying to attack any Senator in particular. If you "said that wrong," then you said it wrong, ok. You can say that without trying to score points by... invoking one of the most successful news outlets in the region's history while you do it.

if you want to oppose it you should find a better reason than "Senators don't know what's in it," because that's untrue and insulting
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I have raised concerns with the current threshold, with the VP position, and with the package as a whole (and I am not the only one to have done so).. It is definitely untrue that my "better reason" is just that Senators keep "saying [it] wrong" about what is in the Referendum. I have made my concerns about the "secondary" issues clear - in public, and in "extended private conversations" with you - I have repeatedly "talk[ed] about the substance" of the issues I disagreed with. Am I also worried that people keep using 2/3 and 2/3+ interchangeably? That there are Senators who are cavalier or wrong about extraneous issues that somehow ended up in this legislation? Yes, those are additional concerns.

I am going to weigh the full Referendum. Do I like the remerge? Yes. Do I like the bathwater that comes with the remerge? I am less excited about the bathwater.
 
McEntire said:
In a private conversation with PhDre, I misstated the confirmation threshold as 66% rather than greater than 2/3.
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I also used "66%" as a shorthand in Eurochat when referring to our Greater than 66% threshold -- you know, because it's a pain in the ass to write that whole phrase out each time, and I would have hoped people would be knowledgeable enough to understand what we were talking about. But I guess if someone is looking to have a bad faith argument about this bill, small things like that blown up into larger issues could be a path to take to needle the bill, perhaps. It just seems a bit petty and shallow to me.
 
Well the fact that the first argument against the bill in this thread didn’t start with the content of the bill, but the actions of senators, is informative Prim.
 
Deepest House said:
Well the fact that the first argument against the bill in this thread didn’t start with the content of the bill, but the actions of senators, is informative Prim.
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It is very informative that my first comment is being misrepresented here. I refer you to the first paragraph in my first comment in this thread. You could even call it my first argument against the bill in this thread!

I am of two minds on this referendum. I agree that the Executive branch should to be remerged under a unified Executive. it emphatically should. However, it is not clear to me that this referendum is only about spliting VS remerging the executive precisely because of the choices the Senate made in how it combined other reform agendas with remerge. I am not sure that all other changes to the law are ancillary (though I agree other pieces are). Numerous Senators have stressed that this referendum also critically addresses issues of oversight and of the role of the Vice President under a unified Executive, and indeed last minute language was added to essentially force the Executive to explicitly mark out boundaries between the President's responsibilities and the Vice President's responsibilities. This is being touted as improvements - perhaps this is what the Senate considers an improvement, but it makes the Bill worse in my mind and more difficult to vote for.
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Oh, you got me! Well done, sir.

Actually no. The first bolded sentence is really just a question about the essence of the bill. It isn't an argument against the bill at all.

The second bolded sentence also isn't an argument against the bill. All you've posted is your conclusion that you don't like it. That's not an argument either.
 
It...looks like an argument to me. Maybe I would shorten the bold statement to just "the choices the Senate made in how it combined other reform agendas with remerge". An argument against the reform is that there is concern over items placed into the remerge alongside the remerge.

Now I'm not personally concerned with 66+ or 66. I did understand what was meant, but there were other items Senators seemed surprised were or were not included in the bill. Fine. Mistakes can be made. It's a hude endeavor and I admitted openly I had missed stuff. I don't mind that as long as it doesn't break anything. I don't think it does.

Deepest House said:
Well the fact that the first argument against the bill in this thread didn’t start with the content of the bill, but the actions of senators, is informative Prim.
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Is it? That's not how you acted to me in dms. I know Phdre is poking at your sore spots and angering you guys, but let's be fair, eh? If that feel that way about him, DH, you feel that way about me. Fair, I guess, but I wish you'd been a bit more honest in your dms to me.

I know this isn't supposed to influence my vote. I surely wish I wasn't leaning against the remerge because a handful of Senators were being just unfair, but there it is. That's my feelings coming into play. They can influence people, including me, sometimes. I am trying to give myself some time away from my initial anger at serious questions and concerns I had when the general response to those concerns was 'well if it doesn't pass now, it isn't going to because I won't work on it'.

And that brings me to what should be a story title relationship, I don't see in this article. Yes, it is informative. I like it. It's impassioned and it's not wrong. Do I want a remerge? Fuck yes. Do I want this act to be the one that remerges us? Eeeeh, not really is my initial response. You approached me well, DH, really you did. You could have convinced me. But I had the bad taste of the experience of being told I was 'speaking up last minute', 'wanted perfection how ridiculous!', and 'well if it doesn't pass this time....'. Honestly these things really just pissed me off. And then you approached me.

So I've been resting on it, and now...now this. What should I make of all this? It certainly doesn't clear up anything, and I entered your article hoping you'd show me how this isn't the end. But I don't see that....

I just know if I don't vote yes for this now, I'll essentially be blamed for not wanting the remerge to go through, and all that does it piss me off. I believe my concerns are legitimate, and at this point it just feels like they're being hand-waved off.
 
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