Dear Editor,
THERE is a claim by opposition Members of Parliament that the recently passed bill relating to the National Resource Fund (NRF) and assented to by the President was not properly legislated because the Mace was missing when the vote was taken. The Mace has nothing to do with passage of laws. It has to do with the functioning of Parliament.

I studied and taught comparative and international politics. I also studied and taught American politics. In all of the many courses I took in political science and countless readings on legislative procedures in several countries and American constitutional law while studying for the doctorate, legislatures have a Mace. But the Mace has nothing to do with voting and legal passage of legislation. The mace refers to the authority of the Speaker. It is a symbol of power and respect to the Speaker and is usually placed at the rostrum in front of the Speaker, signalling his or her authority. Members of legislatures rarely defy the Speaker because of the respect they display for the Mace. What took place in Parliament in Guyana on December 29 was shameful and disrespectful to the authority of the Speaker, especially by the attempt to grab and remove the Mace from the chamber.  The Speaker said the Mace in the chamber was a duplicate and that it was present when the vote was taken for the NRF bill. Whether the Mace is original or a copy and whether it was in the chamber or outside is immaterial to voting and passage of legislation.

Even if the Mace is required for passage of a bill or for its presence when legislation is being debated and or passed, its absence from a proceeding does not make voting void or passage of a law unconstitutional if the Mace is deliberately removed from the assembly. If the preceding were the case, then all that a MP had to do to prevent a legislation from passing is to grab the Mace and leave the House with it. No court would support such an act or rule against passage of a law under such circumstances and declare it unconstitutional. There was a deliberate attitude of members of the opposition ignoring parliamentary practices and traditions and majority rule. The opposition deliberately sought to disrupt the proceedings of the House and when that failed, members tried to remove the Mace as they believe that without a Mace, no law can be voted upon. There is nothing further from fact.

When I was a clerk in the Bronx Supreme Court in the early 1980s while a university student, I was privy to a case in which the judge ruled against a petitioner who challenged approval of decision in an organisation. The petitioner frequently walked out of the organisation’s meetings just before voting when he was opposed to a policy. He claimed that decisions made in his absence were illegal. The judge ruled against him, saying deliberate absence from voting and attempts to prevent a quorum of meetings through his walkouts of meetings does not void a decision taken by the majority of the rest of the members in attendance. His absence from proceedings was self-serving and against the interests of the majority of the members of the organisation. Thus, the absence of an original Mace deliberately removed, or the use of its duplicate during passage of a bill in an assembly does not make a law unconstitutional. It would take more than a procedural vote to render a law unconstitutional.

It should not be forgotten that the NRF that was passed by the then ruling Coalition was not debated by the then opposition PPP. That vote was also taken after the government had lost a confidence motion, making it illegal. Once a government loses a no-confidence motion, the life of the Parliament ends. No bill can be debated or discussed. Any bill passed into law would have been successfully challenged in court by the public or an opposing party (PPP). Challenging the current NRF bill over the Mace argument won’t get anywhere.

Yours sincerely,
Dr Vishnu Bisram