Link to the original news post
It has been exactly three weeks since 146th President Thyme signed Executive Order 146-03 “tau4bills” on the 13th of July, fulfilling one of her main campaign promises of incentivizing regular everyday citizens to engage with SimDemocracy’s legislative/political process. When I initially interviewed her about the programme, she cited the people’s implicit right to legislate and wanting to get more people involved with government as reasons for issuing the EO.
In concrete terms, it established a new forum channel in which ordinary citizens could submit bills written by themselves to be commented on and reviewed by both the President herself (now himself) and the general public. If the President approved of a bill, they would petition the Senate to put it on the docket, hold a debate on it, and eventually vote on whether to pass it or not. Writers of a successful bill would receive a compensation of 150 tau.
As already mentioned in my original article about tau4bills, ex-President Thyme initially was very unsure about her programme’s potential success, saying she “quite frankly didn’t know”. Today though, we have concrete data to evaluate her idea’s achievements.
To begin this with a few statistics, the programme has seen nine bills in its three weeks of existence, of which four are joke submissions, thus leaving us with five serious bills. They are:
- the Election Procedure Amendment written by Qrystial, which sought to increase security in relation to voter security,
- the Department of Expansion Establishment Act of Deus, which sought to statutorily codify the Department of Expansion’s existence and role,
- the Anti-Fun Act written by Quad, which sought to consolidate old joke legislation,
- the More Nonprofits - Less Taxes Act of Coffeezilla (aka Dont-Freepuff), which would have given certain tax benefits to nonprofit organization, and
- Quad’s Discord Reform Act (written by Quad, duh), which sought to update some of the old legislation surrounding the discord server’s structure
Now, taking a look at the Senate docket, only one of these five bills has actually reached the Senate, namely the Anti-Fun Act which then went on to be vetoed by President Thyme herself. While of course it has to be noted that for every single one of these submissions there were individual reasons, such as low quality or infeasibility, causing the President to either not even forward them to the Senate or to then later veto them, this also demonstrates a shockingly low success rate. Although, in the interest of fairness, it also has to be mentioned that one of the aforementioned Acts, the Discord Reform Act, was submitted rather recently and thus didn’t have the chance for further action yet.
On the other hand though, the programme did significantly boost citizen’s engagement with the legislative process in one way or another, as many have taken it upon themselves to comment on the proposed bills (rather than proposing them themselves), which would usually be a Senator’s job. Detracting from this, it also has to be mentioned that most of the people to discuss submissions were already more involved with SimDemocracy’s politics. While this still indicates the programme having a somewhat positive effect, it’s also far from its original goal as illustrated by former President Thyme.
It's my dream to have regular people get more involved with our government and the processes that make it what it is.
Concluding this article, the tau4bills programme was - in the most part - unsuccessful and didn’t achieve its initial goals. Still, it serves a purpose and exerts a marginally positive effect on SimDem’s legislative process, leaving the door open for potential greater success in the future.