Join the new world

As your new Speaker, I look forward to working with each of you this month to continue to improve and set the course of our nation. Joining me will be my Deputy Speakers of the House, Pfeiffer (Henry) & S3RO. Both have come to me with great ideas that they want to implement this month and I know the three of us together will make a very active and dedicated team. I will also be retaining Athanaric & Glove as Congressional Whips. They did an excellent job last month and I appreciated the ability that at any time one of them would be on if I needed them. I'm glad both of them have decided to come back.

I'm going to keep the next part brief but here is a summary of areas I plan to work on over the next month:

1) Communications (It needs to be fixed!)
- I'm bringing back the congressional newspaper. Dan Heylin will be our head writer for this month, but I'm sure you may see pieces out from your entire leadership team. Much of the public see congress as “elitist” or looking out for their own; I want to show them that this is not true. Our newspaper will shed light on many of our actions and discussions we hold so the masses realize we work to help them.
- Last month we had a number of issues with the eUS Forums. Most of the time we have had very little forum downtime, but I believe we need a backup option. We cannot go another 3+ days with limited communication, especially when everyone is not on IRC.
- IRC, lots of issues to address here. For the moment I plan to keep two separate channels (one public and one private). Some may think the private one is not needed, but I plan to hold weekly congressional meetings which will take place in the #eus-senate channel. I may also play around with the idea to make IRC mandatory and determine if we can have penalties or a bad review of people who never use it or are inactive.
- I’m bringing back the congressional exchange program and am hoping to expand it to other allied countries.

2) Cleaning up the forums (figuratively and literally)
- Over the next 4 weeks, I want to clean up our forums. At the moment we have boards and threads that are no longer used which can be removed to the Library of Congress. The LoC will also be getting an overhaul as I work to rearrange material from the past 5 months and categorize it into the appropriate archives.
- One of the items brought up many times in the peer review the last 2 months is how inactive people are in congress and how parties keep putting terrible candidates into office. I want to try and place penalties on congressman that perform poorly or receive a low percent of votes (for people who want them back into office). I’m not sure if I can get Party Presidents to agree to terms, but I believe we can determine stiff enough penalties to encourage parties to bring in positive and active congressman (ie. Removal of access to the congress section).

3) The Constitution
- Based on recent discussions, there are a number of vague points we need to clarify in the constitution
- We need to determine the best way to handle a tie in voting
- Based on a current discussion which has not been approved, possibly add an auto-impeachment vote for SoH inactivity

4) Auditing
- Last month we requested an audit from Goalie on government organizations which he has been providing in the private section of the forum. Most of the data is there but needs to be cleaned, which he’ll be working on as soon as real life doesn’t have him so busy.
- A lot of congress want to get a better understanding of how the military works. I’m working with them at the moment to see if we can “demystify” some of their budgeting process and determine how it is spent without revealing secrets that can put our military or country at risk.

This is just a few of the items that I hope to address this month. If anyone has any comments, ideas, or concerns please feel free to PM me.

Much Love,
SGGHays