Quoting Zefram <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
Ed Murphy wrote:
I considered basing the renaming on Parliament, but I don't know
how the houses' votes are weighted;
In the House of Commons each member represents a constituency, which has
sane geographical boundaries and represents an approximately equal number
of people. The constituency boundaries are redrawn piecemeal, year by
year, by an independent body (the Boundary Commission). Each member has
one vote. So this approximately matches the US House of Representatives
in theory, but the electoral politics are more like the Senate because
there is no gerrymandering.
In the House of Lords the members are mostly appointed. Bishops of the
Church of England sit ex officio. The Law Lords are senior judges who sit
due to the constitutional status of their job. There are 92 members who
hold hereditary titles of nobility: such titles used to entitle the holder
to a seat in the Lords, hence its name, but now only this limited number
sit, elected by all the hereditary peers collectively. The remaining
members, the life peers, are appointed by the monarch on the advice
of the prime minister, notionally on the basis of personal merit (but
sometimes on the basis of political donations). There is no geographical
aspect at all. This doesn't correspond to anything in the US system.
It comes close to representing specialist interests by occupation.
The composition of the Lords is in flux at the moment. The removal of
most hereditary peers only occurred a few years ago. The Law Lords will
be removed soon, as the position of the House of Lords as the ultimate
appeal court is going to be replaced by a separate Supreme Court.
There are some other separation-of-powers changes in progress too.
(I also don't
know the short version of "bill originating in the House of ___".)
We don't have short terms for these, because the distinction is not often
significant. Most bills are introduced in the Commons, and those that
are introduced in the Lords are done so basically for timetabling reasons.
Money bills are required to start in the Commons, and the Parliament Act
(whereby the Commons can overrule the Lords) can only be used on bills
that start in the Commons. Apart from that it really doesn't matter
where a bill is introduced.
Bills are referred to by name, not number as in the US. We also don't
get the radical divergence between versions of bills in the two houses.
Each house amends the bill and passes the revised version on to the
other. Occasionally a section will be repeatedly amended back and
forth, but there's no formal process to reconcile the two versions:
it's a question of who gets bored first, or whether the Lords gets
sufficiently intimidated by a threat of the Parliament Act.
-zefram
What about all the devolved governments?
--
Peekee
