SB 104-02: Senate Terms Amendment (Tabled)

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I am not sure about this. While I personally found the two month cycle annoying at points when I was in the House, at the same time, I think more frequent elections for House and now At-Large Senate has been a positive aspect of the same since the reset.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Having the At-large elections in the midterms is actually beneficial on its own merits, even leaving aside the concern about lengthing the terms, cutting the number of elections there by half.

Right now, you have essentially an election every two months that is federal of some note in nature and gets people back focused again. However, with this proposal you would lose that aspect and have to hobble across a four month span with no such election.

Remember even pre-reset, the At-large Elections were always in the midterms going back to their inception, while Regional ones were in the Presidential years.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I would have voted Nay on the amendment.

This hang up over everyone being the same term length annoys me. The reason why the At-large were given shorter term lengths was so that they would be more in tune with the people and the popular majority (which is prone to shifting quicker than the interest of a region or a sub region) frankly that is the only reason why it makes sense. There are practical draw backs to short terms, which I have discussed previously.

That said if we are going to have everyone be the same, I would prefer everyone be four than everyone be two with the At-large in the mid terms as it was traditionally done.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I'd rather keep what we have now than have all 4 month terms. We saw just last election that regional or subregional races can be quite uncompetitive.

And that problem will be made worse by giving two month terms to regional and sub regional races, because you have to find enough candidates to make it competitive 6 times a year, instead of 3.

The sole activity benefit from two months applies to the At-large situation because you only need 1.25 times as many candidates as seats to make it competitive, whereas for a head to head race you need 2 times as many candidates as seats to achieve the same. Even then we had trouble finding 5 candidates six times a year as it was. Remember when I had to beg Lumine and Cinyc to run?

More elections in the regional category would have the opposite effect of what you are desiring, hence making the regional and sub regional seats two month terms makes absolutely no sense from this standpoint of competitiveness.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

The only alternative I can think of at this point would be to only allow regional and subregional senators to vote on, say, nominees and treaties.

Who would run for Regional or sub regional Senate at that point? You are just sitting and watching the wheels go round and round as John Lennon once said.

Imagine if you couldn't do anything on health care, anything on education, anything on making college more affordable, anything on climate, etc etc etc.

Would you have run for your current office?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Just because we no longer have the House, doesn't mean we need to forget why we have "People's Representatives" and even if the title doesn't exist officially anymore, the job and purpose is the same for those 9 members of the chamber.

I think instead of eliminating the differences between the representation types, we should maintain them to the furthest extent possible short of re-establishing the House. I said this in the discussions with Sestak and MB and I said it publicly afterwards, I even suggested still calling the People's Representatives, People's Representatives to emphasize the point at the expense of some obvious confusion that would cause.

DUKE'S LEGACY SHALL LIVE FOREVER!!!

I don't want us to return to the days of yore when half the country was gunning for one half of the Senate or the other desiring to make it all "their preferred way".

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

We are also giving half the chamber an advantage in becoming entrenched.

A partisan in at-large is safer than someone in a sub region or regional seat.

Look at Razze's or Deadprez's long tenure. Fhtagn back a year or two ago. It is very hard to lose at-large as long as you maintain your core base.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

The only alternative I can think of at this point would be to only allow regional and subregional senators to vote on, say, nominees and treaties.

Who would run for Regional or sub regional Senate at that point? You are just sitting and watching the wheels go round and round as John Lennon once said.

Imagine if you couldn't do anything on health care, anything on education, anything on making college more affordable, anything on climate, etc etc etc.

Would you have run for your current office?

I meant in addition to proposing legislation; the four-month senators having more power than the two-month senators in a unicameral legislature.

But that defeats the purpose of unicameralism if it's essentially just a perpetual joint session of the old House and Senate.

I wouldn't have had a problem with perpetual joint session, but you damn sure better believe that I would have insisted on equal rights in proposing legislation as well as voting on it.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Abstain ftr