Parliament of Lower Columbia

The Parliament of Lower Columbia is the federal legislative branch of the Federal Kingdom of Lower Columbia, which meets in Parliament House in the national capital, Kendall. It is the supreme legislative body in Lower Columbia, nominally headed by the King, Zachary, but presided over on a day-to-day basis by the Lords of Parliament. It is bicameral: its upper house is the Council of States, and its lower house is the Federal Assembly.

By convention, the Assembly is the dominant house of Parliament; the King and the Council rarely oppose its will. The Council therefore normally takes the role of reviewing bills proposed by the Assembly, while the monarch provides the necessary royal assent to make bills law, as well as open and dissolve Parliament, and make the Royal Address every year. The current Parliament is the 75th since the federal constitution was ratified in 1715, having been opened by King Zachary on November 5, 2011.

Council of States
The Council of States is Parliament's upper house. It consists of seven Councilors from each state, who are elected by the state assemblies after they come to power. By law, state legislatures must elect Councilors in roughly the same proportions as the political parties that they are composed of, using the single transferable vote system. Councilors must be at least 30 years of age under the national constitution, although most Councilors are usually much older than this minimum due to the practice of electing elder statesmen more often than junior statesmen to the Council.

Federal Assembly
The Federal Assembly is Parliament's lower house. Its members are apportioned to each state according to its population, with each Assemblyman currently representing about 100,000 people. Assemblymen are directly elected in their constituencies with instant-runoff voting: voters rank candidates on their ballots in order of preference, with the candidates receiving the fewest votes eliminated and their votes redistributed to the voters' next choices until a single winner emerges in each constituency. Assemblymen must be at least 25 years old as of Election Day, which is the last Wednesday of every fourth September.

History
Parliament came into being after the Constitution of Lower Columbia was ratified on February 4, 1715. Following the Constitution's ratification, the first Parliament was elected on September 30, 1715, when the citizens in each of Lower Columbia's three states elected new state governments (who subsequently elected the first Councilors of State) and the first Federal Assemblymen. This first Parliament began its first session on November 4, 1715, when King Edward opened a joint session.

As originally written, the Constitution named the King as the Council of State's president, while allowing both houses of Parliament to choose their other officers (including the Federal Assembly's speaker, an office which the Assembly created during its first session). However, King Michael I frequently missed sessions of the Council of States, often sending a palace aide to preside over the Council in his place. After Parliament exiled Michael I in 1799 and appointed Brandon Bodker as the country's new king, members of both houses drafted a new constitutional amendment to eliminate the King's direct oversight of the Council and create new presiding officers over both houses. This amendment, which became the Third Amendment to the Constitution, established the Lords of Parliament &mdash; one over each house &mdash; and tasked the King with their appointment after each election.

The original text of the Constitution also set a maximum ratio of one Assemblyman per 10,000 residents in each state. This ratio remained unchanged until the annexation of Upper Columbia in 1862, which would have resulted in the Federal Assembly having over 600 members if the ratio remained unchanged. Since the Assembly's chamber in Parliament House could not accommodate more than 540 seats, Parliament passed a law reducing the ratio of Assemblymen to one per 20,000 residents. However, this law did not impose any upper limit on the Assembly's size, so when the states acquired from the Republic of Gudland elected their first Assemblymen in the 1887 election, the Assembly grew by 117 members, to a total of 597 members. Besides making the Assembly chamber rather cramped for the next four years, most of the new Assemblymen belonged to the new Progressive Party, giving that party its first Parliamentary majority and upsetting the previous balance of power. To reduce the Assembly's size to a more manageable number and ensure that it would never again exceed a comfortable size, Parliament passed (and the people ratified) the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. This amendment fixed the maximum size of the Assembly at 540 members and required the population of Assembly districts to increase by 20,000 whenever the national population would otherwise force the Assembly to have more than 540 members.