As promised for nearly a year, I’m here to present legislation that would reform the Citizenship Committee. This bill would make three primary changes:
(1) Establish a “conspicuously ineligible” standard to govern CitComm’s determination of whether an individual is eligible for citizenship. In short, unless an applicant is “conspicuously ineligible” for citizenship, their application must be promptly accepted. As discussed here, this should speed up the citizenship application process by eliminating the need for two CitComm members to review each pending applications. Unlike earlier proposals to eliminate CitComm entirely, this bill retains the CitComm’s screening function but eliminates one layer of review. In doing so, it seeks to strike a balance between our legitimate security need to screen citizenship applicants and the equally compelling need to promptly process applications and not lose potential new members to long wait times.
(2) Place CitComm under the authority of the CRS. CitComm is fundamentally a security institution, not a political body. Thus, it makes more sense to have it be selected by and accountable to our highest security institution, the CRS, rather than a political official. In other words, CitComm is more like the Coral Guard and Election Commissioner, both of which are chosen by the CRS, than it is like the Cabinet, chosen by the PM. More importantly, by lowering the bar for up-front scrutiny of citizenship applications, this bill implicitly requires greater back-end scrutiny of potential security threats. The CRS is the institution best positioned to conduct that scrutiny and take action if necessary via its proscription. As such, it should be more tightly integrated with CitComm for purposes of information sharing and threat monitoring.
(3) Empowers the CRS to exercise CitComm’s powers for purposes of running security checks. Again, this bill implicitly relies on the CRS to ensure back-end scrutiny of potential security threats. This change gives them the tools needed to do so without the added bureaucracy of liaising through a CitComm member.
How often do you believe CitComm would actually be called upon to conduct security checks? With the “conspicuous ineligibility” standard, I imagine the answer would be “not very often.” You could probably automate the application process at that point. But it leaves the door open to relatively trivial ways of exploiting our system such as creating two accounts to get two votes without even a check for whether they come from the same IP address (and I think plenty of people know how to, at the very least, log into one account on their computer and another on their phone).
I like the change to “conspicuously ineligible” as the legal standard, but I’m not a fan of moving responsibility for appointing Citizenship Committee members from our elected political leadership to the less accountable CRS.
Could those opposed to moving the Committee under the CRS explain a bit about why they’re opposed to that? Not necessarily disagreeing with you, just trying to get a sense for the arguments against that.
Well, citizenship is a regional security matter. Who better to deal with regional security matters than the Council of Regional Security? I’m all ears.