Presidential Appeal 2017-01

I, the President, request sitting Prime Minister Abdoa to explain the unhautorized (by the Undersigned) approval of construction of embassies between Our Region and the Multinational Union Of States. After the PM has responded, the embassy shall be left opened, but he must write an excuses letter to the Chief Executive Rhone Island, the leader of the MUS, wich shall be reviewed by I before being sent.

Rt. Hon. Lhistonia, President, Senator

Constitution of the PUSN, III.D.5: "[The Prime Minister] Must obey the President when asked to accept an embassy request or asked to send an embassy request."

The Constitution clearly implies that the PM does the actual day to day embassy management (and this is confirmed by years of precedent), but that the President can tell him to accept a request while it is offered.

This is much easier to understand if you have the NationStates meta-history behind it: before the introduction of regional officers (only about a month after our founding), only the Founder and WA delegate had administrative powers in the region, which meant that the PM had to do all the embassy management anyways. Now, even though the President can directly deal with embassy requests himself, I would like to forward you to a discussion me and Libertarian Democracy had on the WFE some time ago:

Abdoa:

Libertarian Democracy wrote:
I would agree with the President making use of the Cabinet, but I struggle to find a Constitutional justification for the Prime Minister being involved.

Because a) the PM, as Chair of Parliament, coordinates most projects that involve several ministries, and b), the Constitution says that the PM must accept embassies when the President tells him to, but that implies that the PM has everyday authority to deal with embassies, and therefore by extension with foreign relations. This is inevitable since I regularly get TGs, as WA delegate, from other WA delegates, about embassies and interregional projects, which i then forward to the President with my recommendation.

Libertarian Democracy:

Then I ask, what is, in your opinion, the role of the Presidency? Is it merely to provide assent to legislation? Does the President enjoy no other exclusive powers? In my opinion, the Presidency is separate from the office of the Prime Minister for a reason. As the sole Head of State, the President should exercise full authority when it comes to FoPo. As Aralunya explained, the purpose of having the Pres. direct the PM to answer embassies was not because of an implied authority on FoPo, but because of past feature limitations. Therefore, the authority of foreign policy should lie solely with the President and perhaps the Cabinet, but the Prime Minister should have very limited or no authority on this matter.

Abdoa:

I disagree: the role Head of State almost universally means that the position is a figurehead and potentially a source of non-binding counsel, whereas the Head of Government actually wields most of the power theoretically vested in the Head of State. Even if the reason for the odd way the PM and President share embassy authority is for a purely logistical reason, the fact that that language still stands in the Constitution, which has not changed since the addition of regional officers in NS, means that we still operate under that old system where the PM has limited power with respect to the logistics of FoPo, though not, I emphasize, with FoPo itself. I don't argue that the current system is one that should continue (one of the many reasons I'm calling the Constitutional Convention), but as things stands, according to written law and considerable precedent, the President has very little absolute power over anything other than war.
To mention also that the PM also is limited considerably by parliament, which can theoretically undo everything he does, while the President can limit the Parliament to a certain extent. It's not a balanced circle, but it's still a circle.

The Constitution has not been changed since the introduction of regional officers, which means that we still operate under the system that was in place back then.

Therefore, I will respectfully refrain from following the order of the President on jurisdictional grounds: according to the weight of precedent (which is important in our Union, see the Parliament before the PPOs) and implications in the Constitution itself, the Prime Minister has full authority to act on his own initiative when dealing with embassies, albeit while keeping in mind the general Foreign Policy that the President and precedent has set out.