Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: The European Union has a bicameral parliament
I claimed yesterday that the council of minister looks very much like an upper house of a bicameral parliament. It is somewhat unusual in that the members are not chosen for a certain term but serve by virtue of holding an office in a member state, but it is not a decisive unusuality.
Martin-Éric
Racine countered: No, it is not. The council is bureaucracy overruling
the Parliament, thus invalidating the very principle of democracy. We have seen
this in action with the new EU Patents law: the Parliament had passed several
amendments to the original proposal, yet the Council ended up ignoring those
democraticly voted amendments and passing an even worse legislation than the
original draft. This is clearly different than what happens between a higher
and lower chambers each examining new legislation before it is ratified.
Wouter
Verhelst already said most of what I would have said myself; the bottom
line is that Martin-Éric is mistaken about the powers of the council of
ministers. Does he by any chance confuse the council of ministers and the
commission? It would explain his calling the council a "bureaucracy", which
it really is not.
The power balance between houses in bicameral parliaments varies. My claim cannot be dismissed just because the two organs do not work exactly like the English parliament, for example. An important thing is that the lower house is almost always directly elected and the upper house comprises often representatives of areas or member states.
Finally, I would like to note that the bicamerality of the EU parliament system is independent of my claim that the EU is a country; if a non-country can have a parliament, it certainly can have a bicameral parliament. So you don't have to rebut it just because you don't believe in my claim about the countriness of EU.
Oh, BTW, Martin-Éric, please don't mess with your posting dates. It makes your postings to appear more recent in PD than they actually are and to float to the top, where they obscure legitimately new postings by others. For example, your response to my previous posting appears much later in PD than Wouter's reply to it.
2004-06-22T23:07+0300 - /en/politics
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