On the order of business: those reported
I'm picking up the thread of the interventions on the order of business (the first was here ) to tell you a detail that might help you understand where we are with the budget law, and which is in any case of general validity.
The Chamber of Deputies and the Senate have two opposing approaches to managing, as rationally as possible, the debate on a measure to which hundreds of amendments are submitted. In the Chamber, Article 85-bis of the Rules of Procedure provides:
That is, before moving on to the examination of the articles (and the related vote on the amendments), the groups must indicate the amendments they absolutely wish to put to the vote. In the Senate, Article 100 provides that:
That is, after the examination of the articles has begun, the President may decide to set aside amendments that are less essential to the debate. This paragraph concerns the examination of the articles in the assembly, but Article 43 specifies that:
Postponement (and therefore the setting aside of amendments) is permitted in the relevant bodies, obviously provided that it does not jeopardize the work of the Assembly.
In summary: in the Chamber, you decide in advance which amendments you want to vote on and report them; in the Senate, you decide later which amendments you don't want to vote on and set them aside (at the end of the examination, the proposers of the amendments that weren't voted on withdraw them).
A charming pantomime ensues. Just as a bill is approved at least five times:
- when an information operator gets the idea to propose it in a bar
- when it is deposited in a house of Parliament
- when it is assigned to the Commission
- when it is approved by the Commission
- when it is approved in the Chamber ( rectius : Assembly)
so even an amendment has several lives:
- when it appears in some lobbyist file
- when it is presented
- when it is reported
- when it is highly reported
- when it is approved (if it is approved)
This is to say that when the provincial honoree issues a press release proclaiming to the world that he's submitted an amendment, he's actually very likely deceiving his potential voters (for a good cause, of course! ), because the submission is worth nothing and sends out an important political signal! There's already a lot to discuss about whether or not to report it (and those reported are roughly one per person…), but the fact remains that it's a penalty when the referee blows the whistle. And yet, those two lines in Mazzangrugno's Eco, or Battiferro's Gazzetta, make those who commission them feel alive, even though they flow over the minds of potential recipients like dew on a block of granite…
The real amendments, just so you know, are those presented by the Government by "absorbing" the proposals it deems most viable, or which it inserts, often (without malice) without the knowledge of parliamentarians and even its own, into the maxi-amendment, that is, into that legislative monstrosity that summarizes the budget bill in a single amendment, thus allowing it to be brought to a single roll-call vote, transforming its articles and paragraphs into paragraphs of a single article, which is ultimately why the budget law, when you go to consult it, looks like this:
That's the way it seems to you, and I really believe it does, since if a parliamentary republic functions according to this logic, it's because its citizens, in the name of sacred social envy, have deprived their representatives of some banal means of resistance to this logic.
The deadline has been extended to tomorrow afternoon, so I can get on with other things now, but in the meantime… now you know what I'm working on!
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/2025/11/sullordine-dei-lavori-i-segnalati.html on Tue, 18 Nov 2025 16:46:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.