Quorum rules vary in some respects within the Committee as a whole. If, for the first time, the Committee of the Whole does not have a quorum for one day, the President shall order the request for the list by electronic means, unless he orders the convening of the Commission. However, the President may refuse to raise a point of order in the general debate which does not constitute a quorum. If there is a quorum (100 members), the Committee shall continue its work. If there is no quorum, the committee shall meet and the President shall inform Parliament of the names of those absent. The rules of procedure shall provide for the prompt implementation of quorum requests throughout the Committee. The Chair may suspend the quorum after 100 members have announced their attendance. In the event of such a short quorum, the Committee will not rise and quorum procedures will be abolished. In this case, a roll-call vote, if ordered immediately after the end of the short quorum, shall last at least 15 minutes.
The Chair may also decide to authorize a full verification of the 15-minute quorum, during which all members are recorded as present or absent, followed by a five-minute vote on the outstanding matter. Once a quorum of the Committee of the Whole has been established for one day, a quorum on the committee shall be established only if the committee is operating in accordance with the five-minute rule and the Chair has voted on the outstanding matter. The Rules of Procedure prohibit a point of order without a quorum against a vote in which the Committee of the Whole agrees to speak. However, a vote rejecting a request for an increase would be subject to an appropriate item without a quorum. The Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration, prepares the bordering laws and provides marginal editorial notes that include the statutes mentioned in the text and other explanatory details. The marginal notes also include the classifications of the United States Code, allowing the reader to immediately determine where the law will appear in the code. Each bill also includes an informative guide to the bill`s legislative history, including the committee report number, the name of the committee in each chamber, and the date of consideration and passage in each chamber, with a reference to the minutes of Congress by volume, year, and date. A reference to presidential statements regarding the approval of a law or the veto of a law when the veto has been overturned and the law becomes is included in legislative history as a quote from the weekly compilation of presidential documents.
The rule of law is often cited as the key to nation-building and the establishment of new democracies. In fact, it is often argued (e.g., Barro 2000) that a new state needs constitutional institutions—effective courts and commercial laws that can guarantee property rights and treaty enforcement—more or even before it needs democratic institutions such as an elected legislature. It is said that a legal system in a developing country dominated by legislative measures will not create the confidence or stability required for modern governance and investment. (For a discussion of these arguments, see Carothers 1998 and, more critically, Carothers 2009.) This once again raises the question of the relationship between the rule of law and legislation – but it now also leads us to consider a rather unpleasantly direct trade-off between constitutional values and democracy. A procedural motion in plenary does not concern a measure notified by a committee on the grounds that the hearings on the measure were not conducted in accordance with the required comitology procedure. However, certain procedural motions may be made by a member of the committee that reported on the measure if it was presented in good time during the committee`s consultation on the measure (1) and (2) was not dealt with properly. In addition to a number of states and territories, there is a huge gap across the continent between the rhetoric of the rule of law and reality. In Thailand, the police are popular with the rich and corrupt.
In Cambodia, judges are representatives of the ruling political party. Whether a judge harbors political bias or applies the law unevenly is the least of the worries for an ordinary defendant in Asia. More likely, will the police fabricate the evidence? Will the prosecutor bother to show up? Will the judge fall asleep? Will I be poisoned in prison? Will my file be closed within a decade? [62] The rule of law may be impeded if there is a gap between legal and public consensus. Intellectual property is one example. Under the auspices of the World Intellectual Property Organization, theoretically strict copyright laws have been introduced in most parts of the world. But because the attitude of a large part of the population does not comply with these laws, a rebellion against property rights has manifested itself in endemic piracy, including an increase in peer-to-peer file sharing. [96] Similarly, tax evasion is common in Russia and a person who admits not to pay tax is not condemned or criticized by colleagues and friends because the tax regime is considered unreasonable. [97] Corruption also has different normative implications in different cultures. [90] The old member matching system, whereby a member could agree in advance that he or she was for or against the issue by “matching” with another absent member who had opposing views on the issue, has largely been abolished. The rules still allow “living couples.” In a living couple, one member votes as if they were not matched, then withdraws that vote, then asks to be marked as “present” to protect the other member. The most common practice is for absent Members to submit statements in the Minutes indicating how they would have voted if they had been present at certain votes.
In his 1964 book The Morality of Law, Fuller articulated the principles of what he called “the inner morality of law”—principles that require laws to be general, public, forward-looking, consistent, clear, stable, and workable—and argued that these were essential to legislation. H.L.A. Hart (1965) reviewed Fuller`s book and wondered in what sense these principles could be called “morality.” They seemed to be more instrumental principles for effective legislation and, in Hart`s view, they were as moral as the enterprise they facilitated. The Statute of the Council of Europe makes the rule of law one of the fundamental principles on which the establishment of the organisation is based. Paragraph 3 of the preamble to the Statute of the Council of Europe states: “Reaffirming their attachment to the spiritual and moral values which are the common heritage of their peoples and the true source of individual freedom, political freedom and the rule of law, principles which constitute the foundation of any genuine democracy”. The Statute establishes respect for the principles of the rule of law as a precondition for full membership of European states. [68] As citizens, we respect the law because it is clearly communicated and fairly applied.