Link to the original news post
I have made it a sort of habit for myself to write a short news article on or around the end of the term of each Senate and Presidency summarizing and perhaps even analyzing the events of the term. Now, this one admittedly was released a bit late, after the 147th Senate was already dissolved, but other than that I see no reason to discontinue this tradition.
To begin this article, the 147th Senate was quite a bit smaller than the 146th, going from twelve seats to just seven. The amount of seats in every Senate is calculated by entering the amount of valid votes into a formula, which then usually gives out a number roughly equal to a ninth of the amount of votes. Thus, the forty-nine ballots gave SimDemocracy a seven-seat Senate.
For comparison, the last Senatorial Election saw ninety-four votes being submitted, which was considered a very high amount by many political commentators at the time, surpassing the sixty-one ballots of the election prior to that one. The 147th’s results indicate that this was a one-time high, rather than a continuous trend. Thus, SimDemocracy returns to its usual habit of slowly decreasing voter turnout
Taking a look at the election winners themselves, there are only two incumbents (DemocracyForYou and Tech Support) leaving much room for new faces, such as Lucas (MMTM), Muggy (MUGGY), and Thyme (IND) all who recently re-entered the SimDem legislative after not serving in it for a longer period of time.
When focusing a bit on the parties that won, rather than on the individuals, we can observe a sharp decrease in Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) seats. The LDP previously was bestowed the honour of being able to send three of their members to the Senate, now not even a single seat belongs to them. In stark contrast, the Momentum Party (MMTM), the LDP’s long-time political rival, hasn’t lost even a single seat, despite the lower amount of overall seats available.
While this may seem like the Momentum Party finally cementing its win against the LDP in the parties' weeklong rivalry, on second thought that seems to be far less the case, as the trend toward partisanship within SimDemocracy politics has gone down significantly since the last few weeks, with the general public seeming to have grown largely disinterested in the topic due to there simply having been no new party drama for a while now. Furthermore, the two “major parties” seem to both be losing in relevance, putting an end to some citizens’ fears of SimDem becoming a “two-party-state”. In the previous Senate, they together controlled more than 40% of the seats, whereas in the 147th it was only roughly 25%, with many minor parties or even independents being able to secure an election victory.
Despite this, there was still lots of drama during this Senatorial term, as is to be expected in SimDemocracy politics. Interestingly though, that drama was rather between two branches of government - the legislative (Senate) and the executive (Presidency) - instead of between parties or conferences. Speaking of conferences, the new Speaker of the Senate thought they weren’t needed for this term due to the relatively low size of the chamber, which might have contributed to the dwindling effect of partisanship on national politics.
To name an example of the aforementioned “drama”, on the 12th of August, the Senate passed the “Separating the Department of Voter Registration from the Executive Act 2025”, or in short the “SDVRE”. The law sought to make the Department of Voter Registration an independent agency not part of the President’s executive in order to ensure it remained neutral due to its key role in SimDemocracy’s election process as the only agency other than the Electoral Commission that could technically rig an election.
One day later though, President Notcom decided to veto the Act due to her disliking the fragmentation of executive power it introduced, which was followed by the Senate overriding said veto another day later with 2/3rds majority as per §2.1 Art. 5 of the Constitution.
An important thing to mention at this point is that while the original SDVRE Act made the DoVR independent from the President, the President would still appoint its Secretary, she just wouldn’t be able to give them direct orders. The President though, still disliking the Act, didn’t do this, publicly stating that they would refuse to appoint a Secretary.
The Senate’s response to this was quick and to be honest also rather chaotic: They first passed a law suspending the Executive Bill Approval Act (EBAA), the law that prevented bills passed by the Senate from immediately coming into effect after their passage, but rather only after the President had signed them. Then, they went on to amend their recently passed SDVRE Act to allow the Senate itself to appoint the Secretary instead of the President, and lastly then used their rushed amendment to appoint Hmquestionable.
After this whole debacle which only lasted a few hours had transpired, concerns arose (even among sitting Senators) that the suspension of the EBAA might have been illegal either due to the suspension itself being unconstitutional or due to the Senate not having followed the right procedures. This conflict was then resolved by a Supreme Court ruling in favour of the Senate, deciding that all the actions taken by the legislative during the event had been legal.
Interestingly enough though, some Senators, such as Tech Support, publicly expressed their disagreement with this ruling due to the aforementioned reason of there having been procedural errors. This is an opinion they share with Justice Sparty, who wrote a dissent on the court ruling, not without insulting Senators as “being some of the only people idiotic enough to willfully invert logic to serve their own gain”. Some Senators, especially Sen. Lucas, saw this as a potential reason to impeach the Chief Justice, but decided to take no action as at this point the Senatorial term was already coming to a close.
Speaking of impeachments, the Senate also attempted to impeach two other government officials, but failed due to completely different reasons, namely Judge Ben and Chief of Staff Moved. For more details, you can read the two respective articles.
Now that we’ve thoroughly retold the SDVRE drama, barely leaving any room in this article for other stuff, let’s list some of the Senate’s notable legislative achievements:
- First off, it managed to pass the SDVRE Act which removed the Department of Voter Registration from the purview of the executive, thus ensuring that no President could use their authority to rig elections by manipulating voter registrations, but we already talked about this bill for six whole paragraphs.
- Secondly, it passed the Salaries Act, which standardized government pay for various positions, something that had previously been chaotically spread out across various laws and executive orders, but now was finally all in one place and standardized.
- Thirdly, it has reformed its own rules through the “Rules of the Senate” which replaced Ppatpat’s previous Senate Rules and Procedures Act. One notable change that this reform has made is that every impeachment is now preceded by an investigation by a special investigator, ensuring accuracy and factualness in Senate impeachment hearings.
Usually at the end of such an article, I’d talk about which incumbents are seeking re-election and what new faces are throwing their hat in the ring, but seeing that the 148th Senate has already been elected, that would be rather pointless so I’d just like to congratulate all election winners of the 148th Senatorial Election except Tech Support because I hate him on their victory.