On the other end of the power spectrum
December 14, 2006I’m in a dilemma.
Dutch politics is in a weird position right now. As you know, there were elections a few weeks ago. Right during the election, the sitting secretaries send in their resignations to the Queen; the Queen then withholds these resignations, asking the secretaries to take care of running business. They are not allowed to make policy changes, to make new policy, or whatever. When the formation period is over and a new cabinet has been created, the Queen accepts the resignations, ending the government’s service. The whole point is that the Lower House is also not supposed to force policy changes or make new policy. And yet, this is exactly what they did the past few days.
You see, in The Netherlands there has been a lot of discussion concerning a general pardon for 26000 asylum seekers who still fall under our old (pre-2001) asylum policies. These people have been living in this country for years, and many of them have gotten children born here, and not in the country where they originally came from. These 26000 people are now supposed to be thrown out of the country.
Now, before the elections, there was no majority for this general pardon. After the elections, there was, and the left wing has used this sudden majority to press this general pardon through.
I am a proponent of this general pardon, but I am against the way they pressed this through. The general pardon is an important point in the ongoing formation process, and hence it should have never been pressed through like this. It is not unconstitutional or anything, but it is simply wrong. They are throwing out 170 years of parliamentary customs, just like that. Political games– for a good cause, but with the wrong means and at the wrong time.
During the debate, the lower house also accepted what is called a “motie van wantrouwen” against the Secretary of Integration (Verdonk, responsible for asylum policies), which basically means that the Lower House withdraws confidence in her, meaning she has to either resign, or change the policies until the Lower House finds it acceptable. But– how can she resign when her resignation is already withheld by the Queen, because of the elections?
The prime minister has jumped through a major set of hoops; the throwing out of the 26000 group is being put on hold for a subset of this group until the formation process is over, and Verdonk has transferred the responsibility for asylum policies to the Secretary of Justice.
Stuff like this pisses me off. The cabinet should’ve just put the throwing out of the 26000 group on hold until the formation process was over and a decision had been made on the general pardon. On the other end of the power spectrum, the lower house should have never abused its power like this. It is appalling, and damages the face of politics even more.
Politics | 
Stuff like this happens in Britain, too; it’s a major feature (and consequence of the flexibility) of parliamentary democracies, I suspect - of course, this doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen in presidential democracies: an American friend reports that an outgoing US Congress usually tries to force through a raft of legislation that they suspect won’t be passed in the next. But at least (for example), when an American President wants to shift around or create a new department, he has to do it through legislation; in Britain it seems the PM can create a new department simply by assigning or reassigning the minister in charge to a previously non-existent one.
And, it’s very, very annoying. I chalk it up to the hypocrisy of politicians in general, though. Though my sympathies are clearly more towards New Labour (actually, even farther left) than towards the Conservatives, I’ll be unusually non-partisan and point out two telling incidents:
In the 1990s, then Conservative Prime Minister John Major launched a campaign to go “Back to Basics”, basically including an appeal to traditional values. He was later found to have had an affair with an ex cabinet secretary.
More recently, the New Labour government brought in a Human Rights Act. Due to the nature of the British constitution (viz., there isn’t a document called “The Constitution”), Parliament can in theory change any and all aspects of the governmental structure of the country as easily as, say, introducing a dog licence. However, by the Human Rights Act, the courts can overrule actions of the government and laws (or parts thereof) which are in conflict with that Act.
And guess who keeps breaching it?
Comment by Jeff Rollin — December 14, 2006 @ 3:25 am