Heating the chair: theory and practice.

29 January 20231 year ago babelfish

The term is drawing to a close. I take advantage of the short interval between the intervention on Sky and the investiture of the Mastrogiurato di Lanciano to sum up four years of work, continuing in the wake of the many posts written here to give you some indications on how to evaluate your representatives (for example here , here and here ). A work of transparency that no other parliamentarian has done, because it is a waste of time compared to the objectives of the standard parliamentarian (to make a career), just as, moreover, no fellow economist had ever engaged in a dissemination activity in Italy breadth equal to that developed here, for the simple reason that such a work is a waste of time compared to the objectives of the standard teacher (to make a career).

But I made a pact with you when I started this blog, and I abide by that pact: a pact of mutual aid in the growth of our awareness. Sorry for those who don't want to get over it, but let's move on.

Parliament is in theory one of the most transparent institutions: everything is public and published (or almost, as we shall see). Just know where to look. For example, each senator has his own file, which can be reached from the list of senators . Mine is here :

and you will find what is written there: the personal data, the legislative initiatives (the bills presented as signatory or co-signatory), the activity carried out as a speaker of the DDL , the interventions carried out on the DDL (with videos of those carried out in the assembly), the presentation of documents (motions, interpellations, questions), interventions on non-legislative activities (for example, on votes of confidence ), and asset documentation.

These seem to be sufficient elements to evaluate the activity of your parliamentarian of reference, or of those of others, but unfortunately this is not exactly the case. Even net of the fact that the activity of a parliamentarian is not only a legislative activity, but a political activity in a broader sense, and therefore, for example, involves intervention at various informal tables (majority, coalition, etc.) to define the political line on measures on which perhaps your name will be missing because they are closed in the other branch of Parliament, private meetings to decide on which names to rely on in the various rounds of elections or appointments, meetings between local companies and the experts of the various ministries, etc., remaining within the perimeter of the legislative activity, the Senate website does not provide some essential information , and it is on this gap that smartass and turncoats speculate in order to gain false advertising. I hasten to say that this is not a shortcoming of the site itself: providing all the information would probably be equivalent to not providing any, so that's okay: but we are here to deepen and clarify.

The point from which to start is the one we have complained about several times: as I have explained to you many times, the habit of legislating only by decree has become established. It follows that ordinary legislative initiatives, in this legislature more than in the others, leave quite the time they find. I do not exclude that there is some Rodomonte villager who roams the moors of his territory to boast the merits of his bill on this subject, the one signed by him himself, a bill which perhaps has never even been incardinated (i.e. a rapporteur has not been assigned to him and the discussion has not begun in the Commission), and which therefore remained waste paper, good for duping the most distracted people.

The truth, easily understandable for you, is that in a world where legislation is made by decree law, the activity of the parliamentarian, rather than on the bills presented , must be evaluated on the amendments approved to the various decrees that have been converted or to the laws of balance.

So, by way of example, as far as I'm concerned, the report of the activity made by the Senate site is slightly deficient (I repeat: it's not a criticism, it's a fact) because they are missing (from my file, not from the Senate site some amendments approved:

the amendment 20.0.5 text 2 Bagnai to the 2018 tax decree ( AS 886 ) with which the institutional protection systems (unfortunately limited only to the banks of the autonomous provinces) were introduced into the Consolidated Banking Act (TUB), i.e. an aggregation tool among local banks widely adopted in Germany, which the Renzi reform had excluded, imposing the instrument of the cooperative banking group which today everyone complains about becausethey had not listened to us in due time.
the 1.055 Bagnai amendment to the 2019 budget law ( AS 981 ) with which the flat tax for foreign pensioners was introduced (which I will tell you about in more detail in a subsequent post, also because the "phantom" legislative interventions have been more than one: there was also an amendment to the Growth Decree, agreed with the Revenue Agency, therefore there were technical discussions with the Revenue Agency, etc., and because this tax regime has great potential for the college in which I was nominated);
the amendment 17.0.2 text 2 Bagnai, Pillon to the law decree "PNRR recruitment" ( AS 2272 ), which extended until the end of 2024 the application of the modifications inherent to the judicial districts of Chieti and L'Aquila (a theme which will be framed and reconsidered in the context of an overall assessment of the age-old theme of the revision of the judicial geography );
the amendment 149.125 Bagnai and others to the 2022 budget law ( AS 2448 ) which brought the extraordinary contribution for the city of L'Aquila back from 7 to 10 million.

and so on (I won't bore you, but if the topic interests you, there's something for all tastes: from the tax regime for immigrant workers to shares in the capital of the Bank of Italy).

We agree that if you are not in the sector, finding this stuff, which in some cases may seem trivial or local (but a parliamentarian still represents the interests of a territory!), and in others has led to significant changes to the legal system tax or banking, that would be like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack, right?

There would be a novel to write about each of these amendments, and the first in particular, but now there is no time to do it. I have to move soon. I'll leave you to your afternoon, and I'm going to finish mine in a city founded in 1179 BC (two years after Chieti).

(… ah, of course today we talked about what's not on my card, but when you want we can also talk about what's there …)

This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2022/09/scaldare-la-poltrona-teoria-e-pratica.html on Sun, 04 Sep 2022 12:55:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.