A functioning legislature can give you a pink slip.
The thing I lament most is the absence of a functioning legislature.
Many Iraqi leaders have credited Mr. Bremer with helping transform the Governing Council from an unwieldy debating society into a functioning legislature.
In many ways, this is true: there have been several elections, and a great deal of political maneuvering, but there's still no functioning legislature.
The fact that Hamas won a legislative majority, that Mr. Fayyad has no mandate, that there is no functioning legislature and no democratic oversight are all the complications of necessity, Israeli officials and American diplomats argue.
In recent years, American anti-drug agents have tried to focus more on Haiti, but have been hampered by a political paralysis that has left the country without a functioning legislature for the last year and therefore prevented passage of money-laundering laws.
Even if Mr. Maliki meets the 30-day deadline in late December — which is not a certainty, given the chronic disregard for legal deadlines in Iraqi politics — the country will have spent more than nine months under a caretaker government without a functioning legislature.
This is something into which a functioning legislature, particularly one that is interested in working with Trump to pursue shared partisan interest, should look.
By acting prematurely and unnecessarily, as I view it, the Court has assumed a decisional responsibility at the very time when state legislatures, functioning within the traditional democratic process, are debating the proposed Amendment.
The modernisation of parliament that has been introduced over the past few decades has been consistently heralded as a means to give us the governance the country deserves: an efficient, professional institution fit for the 21st century operating in normal business hours – so that membership is accessible to anyone – and giving us the benefits of a fully functioning full-time legislature.
