There isn’t much to say about the vote to extend the emergency orders, except this:

There is nothing legitimate about a vote that extends extra-constitutional powers when it’s cast by 37% of the house of representatives of the people of The Bahamas.

Understand me. I am not objecting—at this moment—to the extension of the Prime Minister’s powers. I’ll leave that for another time. 

I am objecting to the fundamental lack of respect shown by the vote itself for the citizens of The Bahamas, the role of parliament, the rule of law, the decisions of the very competent authority whose powers were extended by the vote, and of the supreme law of The Commonwealth of The Bahamas.

Let me break it down.

The parliament of The Bahamas is a lawmaking institution. Each member of parliament is a lawmaker—not in his or her own right, but a lawmaker who represents 4000-5000 Bahamian citizens.

The lawmaking institution has two houses: 

• the lower, elected chamber, whose members are the direct representatives of the people, elected by those people to make laws on their (our) behalf; 

• the upper, appointed chamber, whose members are selected for their seniority, their wisdom, their statemanship, and their supposed ability to ensure that the laws they review and pass are the best that can be crafted by the lower house. 

Shouldn’t lawmakers uphold their own laws?

Shouldn’t lawmakers who are also representatives of the people seek to act as a check against unrestrained and inordinate concentrations of power?

Shouldn’t lawmakers always, even though they are also members of political parties, remember that every vote they cast represents the 1-2 per cent of the Bahamian population whose interests they serve? 

Is that not the “honour” that makes them honourable members of the House of Assembly?

I want to know.

Because the vote that just “passed” in the House of Assembly, with 14 yeas and 24 absences in the lower house, was dishonourable. 

It was unrepresentative. 

From one point of view it was also, technically, illegal—it required the breaking of the law to cast it.

And, in practical terms, it flew against the very interests of parliament itself.

Why?

• The vote was called half an hour after the curfew set by the Competent Authority had passed.

• The vote was called in the absence of the vast majority of the members of cabinet, who are in quarantine.

• The vote that was called, therefore, limited the decision to that 37% of the members who were willing to break the edicts of the competent authority, since those members of the House of Assembly who followed the law of that authority were excluded from the vote. 

Fourteen votes were cast. The fact that they were all in favour of extending emergency orders is, to my mind, irrelevant.

To make any constitutional change, we are required to get either 50% + 1 of the members of the House of Assembly, or to get a full 2/3 of the members, depending on the change being sought.

Fourteen people is not half of the membership of the House.

Fourteen people is not even half of the membership of the governing party. 

In a vote that called to continue to remove parliament from its role as the primary governing and lawmaking agency in the land—to hand that responsibility over to one man alone—thirty-seven per cent of the members cannot be construed as consent. 

It is not representative of anything. Not the FNM administration, not the members of parliament, not the Bahamian people.

Don’t bring the technical reality that only ten members of the house are required to be sitting to make quorum. This was not an ordinary vote. It was a vote that had constitutional ramifications. It was a vote that suspended the powers of the House of Assembly to act on behalf of the people it represents as the maker of laws.

There is nothing democratic, nothing honourable, nothing legitimate about the result. 

The government should not have called for it. 
The speaker should not have allowed it.
The senate should not have entertained it.
The attorney-general should condemn it.
The governor-general should not honour it.

The fact that there is so little outrage about this is most concerning of all. The extension of the emergency orders is extra-constitutional—even, one could argue, anti-constitutional. And extending emergency orders on this travesty of a vote, without challenge to the outcome, opens the doors to dictatorship.

Watch that house.
Watch this space.