Quebec’s proposal changes two words. Welly’s proposal changes four. I don’t think that’s over-legislating — and I think the issue here is concerning.
However ‘hypothetical and unlikely’ a rogue delegate is, I don’t see the harm in closing loopholes. As it currently stands, the Delegate can unilaterally decide any Regional Officer exhibited ‘unbecoming behavior’ and suspend their powers. If I were a rogue Delegate, I’d certainly want to use that authority. Why would I let the Prime Minister use Communications powers to send regional telegrams telling people I’m staging a coup? Why would I let the CRS use Border Control powers to block an invading force that’s coming in to support me? I wouldn’t.
This problem is also not solved just because the Prime Minister has the same authority. The law says that the Prime Minister or the Delegate can determine that a Regional Officer exhibited unbecoming behavior and should be removed. If the Delegate maintains their determination, then it remains true that the Prime Minister or the Delegate has made a determination of unbecoming behavior.
I do not think that issue is solved just because the Prime Minister’s “supremacy” is “very well established” or an “ingrained thing in regional culture” or a “precedent.” I don’t see the harm in putting it in law; at the very least, if this is so deeply ingrained in our culture, then we should change the law to match that culture. For the reasons above, I think the law as it currently stands does not.
I don’t really see why that’s relevant. If that’s dangerous too, why is the solution to allow something else that’s dangerous, instead of… fixing the other dangerous thing too?
Furthermore, we do try and counterbalance that danger through institutions like the Coral Guard and by promoting an endorsement culture more generally. There are influence costs to banjecting established nations from the region. There are no influence costs to dismissing Regional Officers.
I guess that’s one way to interpret it. It’s true that “all unused Regional Officer positions shall be allotted to the Council on Regional Security.” I don’t think it’s obvious that that priority also applies to regional members who aren’t CRS members but have instead been granted Border Control powers under the CRS’s discretionary authority.
I thought it’s been common with the OWL Director for a while now?
I will also mention, in the brief moment of the lucidity the the prior forums offered me, the exact provision being proposed for repeal were explicitly added on September of 2016; right after the 2016 Coup.
If there was ever a time to be wary of delegates seeking faux legitimacy, it was then in the immediete aftermath of Hileville doing just that. The Assembly of the day proceeded anyway.
I am unfortunately not able to access the old forums, but the legislative history on these forums suggests that provision must have been removed at some point because granting this authority to the Delegate was only (re)added in May 2023.
In any case, I don’t think our law needs to be frozen in 2016 nor are we bound by decisions that legislators made at that time.
The issue with that framing is that it assumes a fully rogue Delegate who is willing to ignore norms, suppress other actors, and act in bad faith across the board, and then treats statutory tightening as the solution to that scenario. At that point, you’re already outside the bounds of ordinary compliance. The limiting factors aren’t just the wording of the law, they’re endorsement levels, influence mechanics, and the ability of other actors to respond. I don’t think changing a few words meaningfully constrains someone who is already disregarding the framework entirely.
On the RO side, the lack of rigid priority hasn’t produced conflict in practice because the system operates through coordination. Even where discretion overlaps, it’s been resolved through simple alignment rather than escalation. There’s no operational history here suggesting a breakdown that needs to be corrected. So from my perspective, this isn’t closing a demonstrated loophole; it’s legislating around a hypothetical edge case without evidence of failure in practice.
In my opinion, responsiveness is better than hamstringing the region; and I’d much rather see codified coordination between the person that has de facto control of the region and the person that has de jure control than a brick wall that doesn’t exist anywhere but our laws.
The Assembly can of course vote as it sees fit (and if its between two words or four, I’d choose two), but I view this as a trivial amendment that doesn’t solve a demonstrated problem, and instead removes a discretionary, non-damaging authority from the Delegate without clear benefit.
I agree with everything that Pronoun has said, but I did want to address this point about the Delegate supposedly having greater, more dangerous “discretionary” powers. The reality is that the powers conferred by the Border Control Act are not actually discretionary, at least not in the same sense as RO Act powers that these amendments modify.
The Delegate can exercise their powers under the BC Act only for specific reasons as provided by law. Exercising those powers for other reasons–e.g., banning a nation because the Delegate personally doesn’t like them–would be unlawful, subject to reversal by the Court, and the basis for an impeachment motion. Of course, determining whether a given situation meets one of the criteria for the Delegate to exercise their BC powers may require judgement, but that does not make the decision a discretionary one in the sense that the Delegate can do whatever they personally feel is best.
The RO Act is different. With respect to appointment of ROs, the Delegate’s power is entirely discretionary and subject to literally zero legal standards or limits–the Delegate “may grant Communications, Appearance, and Polls powers to regional members as they see fit.” In other words, if the Delegate “saw fit” to grant RO powers to a member of the region simply because the Delegate personally liked that individual, that would be entirely lawful under this provision of the RO Act. The Delegate’s discretion with respect to suspending ROs is more cabined, but barely. “Behavior unbecoming of a representative of the South Pacific” is an extraordinarily vague standard, even more so than determining what constitutes spamming or trolling for purposes of the BC Act. These are truly discretionary powers, the “much more dangerous” BC Act powers are not.
Uh, at least it makes it harder for them to claim that they aren’t disregarding the framework?
What coordination is codified? For the reasons I stated above, I believe that, currently, even if the Delegate and Prime Minister disagree, just one of them has to decide that a Regional Officer exhibited unbecoming behavior and should be removed. That doesn’t require any coordination between the two.
I’m glad we’ve progressed from a piece of over-legislation to a triviality
