Kerim Aydin wrote: > That authority has been pretty much stripped, >yet it is still the prize of winning.
I made a list of the roles the Speaker has: * R2128: can initiate a contest to determine a winner * R1006: default office holder * R1006: must attempt to change officeholders quarterly * R1551: able to ratify any official report * R106: vote collector for proposals * R2019: may veto or rubberstamp proposals * R911: serves on board of appeals * R1370: appoints a committee member for degrees These is, in this list, quite a bit of miscellaneous power. Mostly these roles involve an exercise of discretion without much slog work. To my mind vote collection is a glaring exception. It's mostly a mechanical job, with very little discretion involved. What it does involve is specialist skills that are developed by experience. These things are why I think it should be separate from the Speakership. As you can see from the list, I'm leaving almost all of the Speaker's present authority. With a separate Assessor the Speakership is still a prize worth having: if anything more so, because it would no longer carry that onerous duty. I originally made that list because I was wondering whether it would be feasible to abolish the Speakership. The Speaker originally did all the administration, which turned out to be a bad model, so the admin roles were quite quickly stripped from the Speaker. (When I first joined the game back in 1995, R402 required a three-way handshake with the old Speaker passing on all materials necessary for execution of the position, but already that was a null set and so outgoing Speakers would ceremoniously hand off an empty file.) While the Speaker's menial jobs were removed, I would not say that the authority was stripped away too. Rather, the Speaker has always had a motley collection of prerogative powers, varying from time to time. I was wondering whether the current roles could be converted to offices or abolished. Anyway, my conclusion for the moment was that we can't readily abolish the Speaker, because we still need someone to fill the various roles of authority that were in my list. Making the Speaker collect votes seems to be a recent aberration, and is the exception to my general finding. -zefram
