Join the new world

USA is a very exceptional country. But not only in the real life. In our very favourite New World we are just as unique in terms of the structure of the administration. If you just look at the ministries secretaries: SoD, SoS.. Even the traditional Ministry of Education/Youth is called Department of Education. Furthermore, we have this awesomeness called Department of Interior 😛 The exclusive nature of eUSA continues also in the legislative branch. The congress routine is so different from what people all over the world are used to that even young eAmericans need to take their time in order to look around and check how the congress is organised. This is what the current article will look at.

A short paragraph for myself. I have been a member of We The People party since late February and since March I’ve missed to take part in only one congressional mandate. For the very first for eUSA non-kongress congress (in August we were denied congress for first time in our history and added another check to the “new experiences” list of our great nation) I was also invited to be Deputy Speaker of the House, whose responsibilities I will present to you, dear reader, later today. Therefore, I suppose I have gained some experience and leverage to write the current article 🙂



The current article aims to outline the basic congress-related eAmerican activities and to get you to vote for WE THE PEOPLE on the Election Day.

1) Party delegations
2) Congress administration
3) Main activities
a. Congressional sign-up and quorum
b. Speaker elections
c. Budget debates
d. Other proposals


It all begins with the elections. Some US political parties hold .. pause .. primaries. This means that candidates for congress must state their intention to run for congress a little bit in advance. In WTP this is done via filling one of two google forms which the PAC opens each month. At a previously announced point the internal elections (a.k.a. the primaries) begin and people in the party vote the respective candidates. In WTP we have a special off-forum system, built by Mike Ontry. Here is how it works:

1) A special WTP team adds all players who have no known PTO-ties and are not suspected of being multi's to eligibility list for voting to ensure security of the elections and to prevent cheating.

2) The first step of the voting process is to submit your profile link. The system checks if you are on the whitelist and if you are, you will receive a PM (a.k.a. Personal Message) from Mike Ontry with a code. The aim is to ensure that it is actually you who is voting via the system.

3) After that you vote \o/
You are to allocate six points to three candidates. The first one will receive 3 points, the second one – 2 and the third one you chose, one point. If you are part of the WTP Leadership team or a current congress member, you get bonus points on top of your votes.


In the meantime candidates should not forget to run for congress in the game too. We had a month, where half of the candidates had actually not ran for congress and it was a crazy night for sure.

On the 24th the Party President (currently Talostastic) will set the congress list accordingly to the results from the primaries. In WTP the PP doesn’t allocate the congress seats on his or hers discretion at all.
In WTP the PP is a slave to the people \ o / And they seem to love it 😃

On the 25th takes place the actual vote. There parties compete for the votes of the sixth parties. Because they are the ones who actually make the difference.



Let’s assume you have been elected into the eUS congress. The easy part is over. Now is the serious business. Your first task will be to sign-up. Here is an example of a sign-up threa😛

click on the image to go to the actual thread, if interested

The purpose of this sign-up is the following:
1) First, forum admins get the full list of people to receive forum and irc masking for the congressional threads and channels.

2) Second, a quorum is being established.
A quorum is a very complicated political term. It indicates the minimum amount of votes that a proposal has to gather in order the voting on it to become legitimate. If the quorum is 10 and only 9 people vote, even if all of them have voted in favour of the legislation, it will be turned down in the end, because of the voting not reaching the respective quorum.


To close the topic on the congressional sign-ups, I will just add that there is one each week in order to establish new quorum. All congress members are meant to sign up. For a reason or two, however, only half of the congressmen have been succeeding to do so..

I must admit that the Code and Constitution of the eUS are not really friendly to new players, but after looking at them for 1242989 time I do find them very well structured! Here is a relevant excerpt from the Code:


After being elected the respective Speaker of the House is to appoint “at least one Deputy Speaker and any other positions (s)he deems needed (including another Deputy and Whip)”. The role of the Speaker is to moderate the congressional discussions, while the Whip is meant to make a big group PM in the game with all congressmen in it. There the Whip will inform congress members of new discussions, proposals and votings both on the forums and in the game.



Once done with those bureaucracies, the real work can start \o/ This is the budget discussion. The philosophy behind it is that congress has the rights to deal with the funds in the country treasury and that the executive has the opportunity to spend them. But how much will be spent is up to the congress to decide. Therefore, congress votes on a budget each month. Usually a budget consists of three lines:

1) MPP line – how much money will be spent for MPPs each week;
2) USAF line – how much money will be spent to fund the USAF;
3) Reserve – lately this is the “left overs”. Because we used to have quite an astonishing reserve, congress didn’t bother to increase it in times of heavy deficit spending (money would have come from the reserves anyway..).

It seems quite clear that the biggest disputes go about the second line. The USAF’s efficiency is always being put into question, criticism for not being as good as the independent militia never lacks and there is always a call for the USAF to be disbanded. However, in the end of the day for the last couple of months the budget from the previous month has been voted no matter the arguments in this “discussion”.

I won’t be destroying this article by including arguments about the USAF budget line. Instead, I will share an interesting proposal from September. In the most recent budget discussion congress had the opportunity to add one more line to the budget: a Combat Orders line. This would have ensured a competitive budget line to the USAF one, but would have also be in conflict (if I may express it in this way) with the SCI requests. Another discussion we had was about the newly implemented work tax. For numerous of reasons I don’t want to enlist, no change went through here as well. People are free to look at the public congress board for more information, of course 🙂

In the end I just want to thank to all of you who voted for me in the WTP primaries. I didn’t do any campaign this month due to real life restrictions, this doesn’t mean I don’t pay attention to things I’ve taken responsibility for in the game tho.