The Constitution requires that the Budget must be approved before the Senate can "move on to any other matter." Thus, I feel compelled (unfortunately) to delay the hearings until the Budget is approved.
No one anticipated this problem during the drafting of the Constitution? Unbelievable.
I believe I remember stating something like this when we were debating the budget amendment in the Senate, I am not certain since I have not been able to look at that thread. Since the Constitution copies that amendment almost word for word I would ask Sam if you have any problems with it.
That omission is clearly my fault. I don't know whether you mentioned it during the debate of the amendment, Colin, but if you did, then I apologize. I thought that I had covered every matter in the amendment, but I guess I made a mistake.
Right now Section 8, Clause 6 (the relevant clause) reads:
"The Senate must approve each and every Budget before moving on to any other matter."In order to clear up the problem, I would urge the clause to read:
"The Senate must approve each and every Budget before moving on to any other matter, except for Presidential nominations, PPT elections. or other similarly urgent matters at the beginning of a session of the Senate."My suggestion to Emsworth is to bring up the nominations, and let's have a vote on them (damn the Constitution).
My rationale for this is that I doubt that anyone would object to us holding hearings in the same way that no one is presentlyobjecting to us holding a PPT election vote (which is technically illegal under the way the clause means right now).
As for right now, I will introduce a relevant amendment to the Consitution on the Legislation Introduction thread.
