Dear Editor,
Reference is made to Politickles (Dec 31) on the Opposition parliamentarian attempting to run away with the Speaker’s Mace and the Speaker as well as a ruling party MP running after the culprit. It pertains to the passage of the NRF bill. There is also an Opposition claim in the public domain that the NRF bill was not properly passed because the mace was missing from its allotted spot in parliament. Readers also seem to believe that claim. The mace refers to the authority of the speaker. It is a symbol of power and respect to the Speaker. Some assemblies don’t have a mace. Whether the mace is original or a copy is immaterial to 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 a legislative act unconstitutional if the mace is deliberately removed from the Assembly. If the preceding were the case, then all a MP had to do to prevent legislation, 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.
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 passage of decision in an organization. The petitioner frequently walked out of the organization meeting just before voting. The judge ruled that his deliberate absence from voting and claimed ignorance and attempts to prevent a quorum through his walkouts of meetings, does not void a decision made by the majority of the rest of the members. Thus, the absence of an original mace deliberately removed during passage of a bill in an assembly does not make it unconstitutional.
Sincerely,
Vishnu Bisram
