sexta-feira, 11 de novembro de 2011

The Rubber-Stamp Parliament

Jardim’s party is proposing to alter the rules of Parliament once again, reducing the quorum from one half to one third of MPs; i.e. to 16 MPs. The reduction in numbers of MPs elected by the PSD made absenteeism more of an issue. The PSD also proposes to move all voting to the last session of each week, basically so that its MPs would not have to sit through the debates. But the debates themselves have long ceased to be debates: parties with a single MP have only 2 minutes to intervene on each issue.
The PSD privileges ‘efficiency’ over debate in the functioning of the Parliament. An example of this efficiency is the occasion when all opposition members abandoned parliament in protest at a PSD proposal to submit the then opposition leader, João Carlos Gouveia, to a sanity exam. The PSD took advantage of the absence of the opposition parties to debate and vote through 17 motions in 15 minutes.
The CDS has proposed an alternative, more democratic version, which also obliges the President of the Government to go to Parliament for a monthly debate – Jardim has always refused to answer to Parliament and only sets foot in the building once a year to get the budget approved.

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