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Recently, a form was created to screen ideas for congressional debate from the general public. It is an attempt to involve the public more heavily in the congressional process.

This is a worthwhile effort. It will allow the common man/cat/woman to voice their opinions and allow congress to revisit and thereby re-examine their policies. Many policies such as import taxes and MPP’s are simply formalities that don’t change much since the general public doesn’t see much of the effects of these policies. However, with anyone allowed to post their ideas and their rationale, congress will either explain the reasons behind their current policies or change them accordingly.

Dr.Luis Sentieiro, the creator of the form, and the Speaker of the House, commented that mostly congress discusses the constitution, code changes, and mainly the budget. He intended to change that to allow more citizen participation, so he posted the form as an incentive to debate and for the population to be more active when it comes time to ask congress to look over an issue.

It will encourage people to go to the eUS forums and watch their topics unfold. Many new players find the existence of the meta-game to be an elitist hassle. However, the forums allow for things that game mechanics just can’t. This makes getting new players comfortable with the forums an absolute imperative. With the form, players who submit ideas will be eager to watch their ideas move through the legislative process on the forums. This requires that they be on the forums, and therefore they become involved in said forums by the very fact that they don’t want to just sit there and just watch the discussion.

It will give people a greater reason to consider what party to vote for when they see the congressmen/woman/cat of a certain party voting yea or nay on their ideas. With the Parliamentary game mechanics, most people just vote along party lines instead of considering individual candidates. The candidates only jockey for the support of their PP, and not for the support of the public. But, with players having their own ideas debated, said players will have more incentive to consider individual candidates. This will go some way to democratize our current republic. As it is, we elect people to elect people, this may change that mechanic significantly.

Some people however, especially in congress itself, are critical of the new form. They say that new players will not think over their ideas and they will end up with many obviously bogus proposals. For example, someone might think that our work tax should be lowered to 1% to relieve business pressure, but since it is the main tax income contributor, this would be suicide. Congress would have to deal with many of these silly proposals, and it could just bog down the legislative process. You see, Aristotle had this crazy idea that the people who run the government should be intelligent, and this is why we don’t referendum every decision. Instead, we trust that our congress members will make the right decision. However, this reporter feels that this is not a compelling argument since congress does not have to discuss every suggested ideas. Only ones with merit and sound reasoning behind them will be moved to a forum discussion.

A different risk is trolling. There are those *cough*Serbians*cough**cough* who would spam this form with intentionally ludicrous proposals just to waste the time of our elected officials. For example, a form created earlier for WHPR measured the public opinion on what foreign alliance stance we should take after the end of CoT. This form became useless when some Serbian trolls spammed it massively, totally skewing the data. This could happen again, and it would bury the nuggets of real good suggestions in a mountain of the result of the thought process of the serbs, AKA, brain mush. However, this is a risk run with any form, so this reporter supports the form as an encouragement for a more democratic republic.

P.S. A big shout out to Gnilraps for his hard work in teaching I and the rest of the LAP media college how to write informative and compelling articles.