Is the Solarian League actually run by bureaucrats?

SWM wrote:One reason that we do not see the Mandarins act like bureaucrats is because they are the very tip-top of the bureaucracy. They do not have to report to anyone, and they basically only deal with things that are handed up to them by their immediate underlings. Beneath each one of the Mandarins is an immense complicated structure of superiors and underlings. I imagine that the total manpower in a single bureau reporting to a Mandarin is equivalent to the population of a city or two.

Yes and no the mandarins report to someone but they could careless about that person says or does. IIRC Kolakostlov reported to the PM or FM and informed him of what he and the other mandarins were already going to do.

n7axw wrote:snip

Ah, fallsfromtrees, have you kept track of the number of times your own legislators have been absent from voting?

And that doesn't address the issue as to whether or not a no vote is automatically a veto, or for that matter the effect of abstaining. Kind of a nit, I know, but IIRC textev says that every member has a veto without explaining the nuances of how that is carried out.

Don

Not comparable situations. First of all, every legislator does not have veto power over every piece of legislation, if they did, there would be far fewer absentee legislators on significant votes, particularly if they wanted to make sure the legislation would fail. I thought it was pretty clear that a no vote was a veto, or are you saying that there are 4 vote types, yes, no, abstain, veto? and does an abstain result in a veto, and does a non vote (caused by not being present) count as a no or an abstain.
The second reason that the situations are not comparable it that many of the members have multiple member delegations. Which means that even if one member of the delegation is not present, the delegation can still cast its vote yea, nay, veto, or abstain. The mechanics of how each delegation decides its vote with multiple members is undoubtedly left to the individual delegations.

fallsfromtrees wrote:

n7axw wrote:snip

Ah, fallsfromtrees, have you kept track of the number of times your own legislators have been absent from voting?

And that doesn't address the issue as to whether or not a no vote is automatically a veto, or for that matter the effect of abstaining. Kind of a nit, I know, but IIRC textev says that every member has a veto without explaining the nuances of how that is carried out.

Don

Not comparable situations. First of all, every legislator does not have veto power over every piece of legislation, if they did, there would be far fewer absentee legislators on significant votes, particularly if they wanted to make sure the legislation would fail. I thought it was pretty clear that a no vote was a veto, or are you saying that there are 4 vote types, yes, no, abstain, veto? and does an abstain result in a veto, and does a non vote (caused by not being present) count as a no or an abstain.
The second reason that the situations are not comparable it that many of the members have multiple member delegations. Which means that even if one member of the delegation is not present, the delegation can still cast its vote yea, nay, veto, or abstain. The mechanics of how each delegation decides its vote with multiple members is undoubtedly left to the individual delegations.

I am indeed suggesting something more or less like you outlined. I have no textev to suggest that. But the possibility of a bit of nuance does make things a bit more interesting along with offering more possible outcomes, does it not?

Don

fallsfromtrees wrote:I thought it was pretty clear that a no vote was a veto, or are you saying that there are 4 vote types, yes, no, abstain, veto? and does an abstain result in a veto, and does a non vote (caused by not being present) count as a no or an abstain

I don't think it's clear either way whether veto=no, but it seems reasonably certain abstain is an option. When the Beowulf delegation sent someone back to "guard" Ambassador Carmichael the head of the delegation felt it necessary to remind the member leaving to give her his proxy, thus implying that said action could equally have not happened. And surely "not present" == "abstaining"?

As to whether veto=no, I suspect not because it would be ludicrous. Now one could argue that the Solaria Assembly is ludicrous, but I doubt the people who created it meant it to be? Thus having "no" (I vote against this legislation, but the rest of the house can vote in favour if they wish) and "veto" (this legislation is so repugnant to me that I cannot allow you to pass it) as separate possibilities doesn't seem too strange. I would imagine the framers might have expected the veto to be used sparingly in extreme circumstances, rather than as no but writing constitutions is hard work and a few errors are to be expected!

Writing constitutions isn't that hard if the framers are willing to give up something in order to be part of a larger whole. That is what the framers of the League constitution were unwilling to do. They were unwilling to give up their sovereignty in order to create a League that was governable by political assembly.

They would really have been better off with trade agreements and a mutual defense treaty. But, then, they did make it work for centuries. That's something, I guess.

Don

n7axw wrote:Writing constitutions isn't that hard if the framers are willing to give up something in order to be part of a larger whole. That is what the framers of the League constitution were unwilling to do. They were unwilling to give up their sovereignty in order to create a League that was governable by political assembly.

They would really have been better off with trade agreements and a mutual defense treaty. But, then, they did make it work for centuries. That's something, I guess.

Don

That was my thought also. RFC does make a sort of political commentary about the fact that in many governments, despite best intentions, the bureaucrats almost invariable attain more power than a constitution EVER envisioned. I think that the founding fathers would be horrified by the size of the US Gov't and state governments if they came forward in time to see it. Likely they'd have put something in the US Constitution to prevent alot of the current abuses.

The Mandarins themselves say "it hasn't worked for 700 years, but the League itself was quite a bit older -- and my reading is that the Mandarins dominated and abuse the verge and protectorates MUCH more thoroughly than the half-asleep core worlds, simply because that's where 70% of their revenues are coming from and where the better fighting ships are located.

n7axw wrote:Writing constitutions isn't that hard if the framers are willing to give up something in order to be part of a larger whole

Given the arguably broken in various ways examples of the US, Australian and Austrian constitutions to give three examples off the of my head, I think I'd beg to differ!

* The US constitution is flawed IMHO because of the way the Commerce Clause apparently means that the federal government can regulate anything anywhere because it might affect inter-state commerce somewhere. (See also, all the debates about what the 2nd Amendment means!)
* The Australian constitution is flawed IMHO because of the unconstrained nature of section 96 which lets the federal government run roughshod over those areas which are meant to be the sole preserve of the states.
* The Austrian constitution is flawed IMHO because it can be amended by the government of the day, and because the government it describes isn't the government Austria has!

Finally, IIRC the constitution of the USSR guaranteed freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and freedom of religion? Since it failed to actually provide those freedoms I think it was probably flawed too!

I don't want to get into a political debate about those, or other, real world constitutions since it would be way off-topic but given the shortage of real world good constitutions I think writing them must be hard!

SharkHunter wrote:

n7axw wrote:Writing constitutions isn't that hard if the framers are willing to give up something in order to be part of a larger whole. That is what the framers of the League constitution were unwilling to do. They were unwilling to give up their sovereignty in order to create a League that was governable by political assembly.

They would really have been better off with trade agreements and a mutual defense treaty. But, then, they did make it work for centuries. That's something, I guess.

Don

That was my thought also. RFC does make a sort of political commentary about the fact that in many governments, despite best intentions, the bureaucrats almost invariable attain more power than a constitution EVER envisioned. I think that the founding fathers would be horrified by the size of the US Gov't and state governments if they came forward in time to see it. Likely they'd have put something in the US Constitution to prevent alot of the current abuses.

The U.S. Constitution is one of the sacred documents of the American Civil Religion (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_religion ). Accordingly, it's held in a lot more veneration than it really deserves, and RFC does not appear to be immune to that effect.

Remember than in 1776 the easiest way to get from South Carolina to Boston was by boat up the east coast. I suspect that the Founding Fathers would be much more astonished by the size of the country, and how little autonomy the several states have in actual practice, given the way the country has actually developed.

The shift in peoples' attitude between being citizens of a State, and only secondarily of the United States, to being citizens of the United States, and only secondarily of a particular state, happened gradually during the 19th century, and was heralded by the gradual shift of the phrase "United States" from a plural to a singular.

SharkHunter wrote:The Mandarins themselves say "it hasn't worked for 700 years, but the League itself was quite a bit older -- and my reading is that the Mandarins dominated and abuse the verge and protectorates MUCH more thoroughly than the half-asleep core worlds, simply because that's where 70% of their revenues are coming from and where the better fighting ships are located.

Please remember that hyper travel wasn't really practical until sometime in the 1200s, when Adrianne Warshawsky invented a means of detecting grav waves, which allowed using the impeller drive in hyper, and also of using hyper bands higher than the alpha band. That's the 700 years the Mandarins are talking about. Before that, the League Constitution would have been quite practical since there wasn't any significant way of tying different systems together - the transit times were still way too long. Trying to actually govern from Old Terra would have been absurd on its face.

Don't forget there is a difference between the League, Earth, the other member systems and the protectorates.

The 5 key departments and the Navy between them control the links between the star systems but its unlikely that they control within individual star systems.
That would be up to the local governments (what every model they went with) in the old League and corporations in the New League.
The actually hands on control of the bureaucracy would probably be very light as it has limited power to control but lots of power to influence.

PalmerSperry wrote:

n7axw wrote:Writing constitutions isn't that hard if the framers are willing to give up something in order to be part of a larger whole

Given the arguably broken in various ways examples of the US, Australian and Austrian constitutions to give three examples off the of my head, I think I'd beg to differ!

* The US constitution is flawed IMHO because of the way the Commerce Clause apparently means that the federal government can regulate anything anywhere because it might affect inter-state commerce somewhere. (See also, all the debates about what the 2nd Amendment means!)
* The Australian constitution is flawed IMHO because of the unconstrained nature of section 96 which lets the federal government run roughshod over those areas which are meant to be the sole preserve of the states.
* The Austrian constitution is flawed IMHO because it can be amended by the government of the day, and because the government it describes isn't the government Austria has!

Finally, IIRC the constitution of the USSR guaranteed freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and freedom of religion? Since it failed to actually provide those freedoms I think it was probably flawed too!

I don't want to get into a political debate about those, or other, real world constitutions since it would be way off-topic but given the shortage of real world good constitutions I think writing them must be hard!

A single Constitution running 220+ years would have shocked the writers of the one the U.S. has. The intention there was a lot more practical: work up something that the states would all tolerate that delivered a more effective central government than the Articles of Confederation. Amendments and continued jurisprudence would shape it as needed; more constitutional conventions would do more thorough work or replacement as needed. And as possible: the final document wasn't delivered as the Commandments from Sinai, it was as good as we can get now, with better as we can, and the problems they couldn't fix, they hoped their children could.

The best we can do is the best we can do, after all. I'm sure they all hoped that issues of slavery, the frontier, and federal versus state power could be worked out by lawyers and politicians in the following decades instead of by civil war, but I'm confident they were certain that they couldn't work out those things themselves at the time. I'm sure the framers of the Solarian League constitution thought the same way. Maybe they figured that the growth of a Solarian national identity and the improvement of communications would make for another convention for a more perfect union down the road. Maybe they figured that under the aegis of the League's constitution, customs with the force of law would fill that skeleton of political function out to a real live polity. Maybe they were counting on the growth of regulation and bureaucracy to do it, and that the Assembly would serve, if not as an actual government, as a powerful watchdog agency to make the real bureaucratic government a responsible one.

I don't think a constitution will ever be written that covers all the bases, so that a bunch of devil-children will be able to use it to make themselves act as a bunch of angels. It's just a tool, something real people with real clashing interests can use to reach livable compromises - sometimes, when the interests do not clash too much and when enough of them do want to reach livable compromises. I do think the League constitution would have taken a whole lot more luck or devoted effort to run too many centuries without running the League into the ground. But that's not strictly hopeless except in hindsight - it was just the best they could do.