User:Dss16/Minority rights (legislature)

Minority rights in legislative bodies include parliamentary procedures and practices that deviate from the traditional principle of majority rule that generally applies to the legislatures of democratic nations.

Some minority rights are afforded to any individual legislator, while others require a minority of sufficient strength to be asserted. In legislatures with well-defined groupings of members such as political parties, minority rights can be analyzed with respect to overall membership in a legislature, or with respect to the outcome on any particular decision or topic.

Some minority rights, such as supermajority requirements, the ability of leadership to block legislation despite overall majority support, or systems to force consideration of minority bills, may be outcome-determinative on particular issues. Other minority rights, such as the right of debate or the right to demand a publicly recorded vote, may affect short-term outcomes less directly while also providing information for voters to consider during future elections.

Purpose
In general, parliamentary procedure is based on the principles of allowing the majority to make decisions effectively and efficiently (majority rule), while ensuring fairness towards the minority and giving each member or delegate the right to voice an opinion.

Relationship to electoral representation
Minority rights in a specific legislative body may be related to the representation in the body afforded to certain groups or administrative divisions. For example, the Parliament of Lebanon is divided equally between Christians and Muslims under the 1989 Taif Agreement. However, supermajorities are required to amend the constitution or to impeach the President, Prime Minister, or Ministers, thus requiring support from different religious constituencies to take those actions. Under the United States Constitution, two-thirds of the United States Senate must approve treaties, which under the original design (in which senators were elected by state legislatures) effectively required two-thirds of states to approve a treaty, despite states having different populations.

In bicameral legislatures, one chamber is usually considered the upper house, while the other is considered the lower house. The two types are not rigidly different, but members of upper houses tend to be indirectly elected or appointed rather than directly elected, tend to be allocated by administrative divisions rather than by population, and tend to have longer terms than members of the lower house. In some systems, particularly parliamentary systems, the upper house has less power and tends to have a more advisory role, but in others, particularly presidential systems, the upper house has equal or even greater power.

In federations, the upper house typically represents the federation's component states. This is a case with the supranational legislature of the European Union. The upper house may either contain the delegates of state governments – as in the European Union and in Germany and, before 1913, in the United States – or be elected according to a formula that grants equal representation to states with smaller populations, as is the case in Australia and the United States since 1913.

Supermajority requirements
Supermajority voting requirements are commonly used to provide legislative minorities with the right to participate in or block certain changes that are deemed to be fundamental or structural. For example, two-thirds or other supermajority requirements are often implemented for the following actions related to amending the rules or removing elected officials:
 * Amending or suspending the rules of the legislature
 * Amending the constitution of the government
 * Removing members of the legislature
 * Removing government leaders prior to the expiration of their scheduled term

Practices vary considerably. At one end of the spectrum, some bodies do not impose any supermajority requirements, even for structural changes. For example, the United Kingdom lacks a written constitution and follows a principle of legislative supremacy vested in its parliament. Thus, Parliament does not require supermajorities even for removal, and "constitutional" changes can occur via legislation enacted through ordinary means. Minority rights are protected largely by convention and tradition.

At the other end, some legislative bodies require supermajorities for regular business, not just structural actions like amendment or removal. For example, the United States Senate has evolved since the 1970s to require three-fifths supermajorities (via the routine threat of filibuster) for most regular legislative business. The U.S. Constitution also imposes two-thirds requirements for some substantive business, namely ratification of treaties. However, the Senate's de-facto three-fifths rule has been eroded in recent years through its elimination for approving nominations, and via the use of reconciliation to enact major legislation with a simple majority. Meanwhile, the two-thirds treaty requirement is often sidestepped via the use of congressional-executive agreements.

Quorum requirements
Each chamber of legislature consists of a number of legislators who use some form of to debate political issues and vote on proposed legislation. There must be a certain number of legislators present to carry out these activities; this is called a quorum.

Recorded votes
vote Legislatures often allow for members to cast their votes viva voce, or by voice, and individual members’ positions are left unknown. While often more efficient, this lack of transparency can limit the amount of information available to voters. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1540-6237.2012.00892.x Specifically, it could potentially allow a majority to take action while avoiding specific individual accountability for that action.

To address this, legislatures may adopt rules allowing a minority to demand a recorded vote. For example, the U.S. Constitution requires each House of Congress to keep a journal, to periodically publish the journal, and to record the "yeas and nays of the members of either House on any question ... at the desire of one fifth of those present...." Similarly, any vote to override a presidential veto must also be by the yeas and nays and entered on the journal.

Leadership prerogatives
Some of the responsibilities of a legislature, such as giving first consideration to newly proposed legislation, are usually delegated to committees made up of small selections of the legislators. Committee chairmen often have the ability to block consideration of particular legislation simply by never bringing up a bill for consideration.

Anti-majoritarian tactics can also be used at the full-body level. For example, in the U.S. House of Representatives, the Speaker and the House Rules Committee exercise strong power to control what items are brought to the House floor for a vote. In recent years, Republican speakers have followed the so-called Hastert rule by requiring that any item have support from a "majority of the majority" before being considered, thus preventing consideration of some measures which might otherwise be passed by the full House.

The House discharge petition procedure theoretically limits these prerogatives by allowing any bill to be discharged from committee and considered on the House floor if a majority of all members (i.e., 218 representatives) sign. However, the procedure is rarely used because members of the majority caucus are typically reluctant to publicly oppose the procedural leadership of their own party.

Rules vs. norms
The internal organization of a legislature is also shaped by the informal norms that are shared by its members.

Legislative power
In systems where the legislature is not solely supreme, excessive assertion of minority rights can weaken a legislature's perceived ability to act and enable accumulation of power by other actors.

In the United States, rising political polarization coupled with the evolution of the routine three-fifths supermajority requirement in the Senate may have contributed to significant policy decisions increasingly being made by the President alone or by the Supreme Court. For example, in 2010 the DREAM Act was blocked despite receiving 55 yea votes (55-41) to advance the bill. President Barack Obama later implemented the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program by executive order, saying that "if Congress won't act, I will," despite suggesting earlier that he believed doing so would be unconstitutional. Similarly, the Respect for Marriage Act apparently had simple majority support in the Senate — although likely not 60 votes — when introduced in 2009, 2011, and 2013, but never came to a vote. The issue of same-sex marriage was ultimately decided by the Supreme Court in United States v. Windsor (2013) and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).

Political stability or instability
Some political systems follow the principle of legislative supremacy, which holds that the legislature is the supreme branch of government and cannot be bound by other institutions, such as the judicial branch or a written constitution. Such a system renders the legislature more powerful.