Constitution of the Caldan Union

The Constitution of the Caldan Union is a supreme law that establishes the union between the various Provinces of the Caldan Union as well as the form of the federal government and the basic rights and liberties of the citizenry. The constitution was originally drafted at the Riverton Conference, featuring delegates from all over Caldas, acting at the invitation of the Congress of the Resurgent Dream. It was subsequently enacted by the legislatures of Tasat, Edina, New Arundel, Anata, Arcadia, and Prince James Island. Although the various legislatures acted on different time frames, King Henry granted the royal assent to all six acts on 18 March 1841. Although the Constitution has been amended 35 times since, there has been no radical or wholesale alteration of document or its framework. Caldans usually speak of themselves as having had the same constitution since 1841.

History of the Constitution

The original provinces of the Caldan Union each have a constitutional history predating Caldan federation. Prior to the Jacobite Wars, Anata, Edina, New Arundel, and Prince James Island were governed by variations of the General Council system where an appointed royal governor ruled in consultation with an appointed council. The appointment of councilors was in the hands of the governors themselves. During the Jacobite Wars, each governor was presented with delegations claiming to represent the people in favour of both James II and VII and William III and II. The Jacobite governors, who ultimately prevailed, accepted these loyal delegations as General Assemblies, called to express popular support. While it was impossible to hold an orderly election in the conditions of the Jacobite Wars, historians generally agree popular opinion was with the Jacobites. The opposite was the case in neighbouring Laneria, which was then grouped together with Caldas as part of British Vasconia. After the restoration of civil peace, new constitutions were passed which created bicameral legislatures. An elected General Assembly served as the loyal house and an appointed General Council as the upper. In Tasat, the Duke governed with a Senate of local landowners whose consent was needed for the appointment of magistrates and the levying of taxes. In Arcadia, a National Assembly was elected on the basis of universal male suffrage and the King already could not act other than through the National Assembly or ministers with the confidence of the National Assembly.

During the Jacobite Wars, what would become the provinces of the Caldan Union created the Congress of the Resurgent Dream to coordinate their military activities. The members of Congress were representatives of their respective governments and answerable to them. After the Jacobite Wars, when Caldan kings had an established court and capital in Tarana, Congress also met there and the King was frequently invited to address the members. However, the formalities observed on those occasions stressed that the delegates, while sharing a sovereign, did not recognise a united Crown. Early Caldan monarchs reigned in Arcadia as kings; in Tasat as dukes; in Anata, New Arundel, and Prince James Island as kings of England; and in Edina as kings of Scotland. As Caldas began to develop its own identity and a local, rather than imperial, politics, a movement grew to federate the various Caldan governments into a federal state with a genuine national legislature, directly representing the people. Thus it was that Congress proposed the Riverton Conference which convened on 21 October 1839.

No official records of the Riverton Conference were kept aside from those documents actually submitted for a vote. However, the delegates agreed on the original outline of the Constitution, including responsible government at both the federal and provincial levels, a bicameral parliament consisting of a House of Representatives and a House of Lords, an ongoing commitment to recover the Crown of the Three Kingdoms, and a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Although the King had originally given his blessing, believing a union in Caldas would make governance easier, he was wary of the constitution which actually emerged, feeling that it too greatly restricted royal authority and even referring to it as "that Whig constitution" in correspondence with political allies. Caldans organised for or against the Constitution. Caldans for the Constitution described themselves as Jacobites and opponents as Royalists, terms that has previously been used more or less synonymously. The Jacobites identified their cause with groups in Caldas and in the Three Kingdoms which had been disenfranchised or marginalised by what they viewed as an aristocratic coup usurping their rights and liberties remembered through the lens of a then thriving Romanticism. The Royalists, on the other hand, considered any such causes incidental to the near Absolutist claims of the Stuart monarchs. However, when the Constitution separately passed the legislature of each province, the King grudgingly gave it his assent.

The Caldan Constitution was first amended as early as 1849 to require proportional districts for the House of Representatives. Many subsequent amendments also concerned representation. It was amended again in 1863 to require householder suffrage for male householders over 21 and again in 1874 to guarantee universal manhood suffrage. In 1891, the constitution was amended to guarantee manhood suffrage and householder suffrage, allowing women and young men to vote if they were homeowners. Women's suffrage without qualification was won in 1911. In 1941, preferential voting was introduced. The voting age was reduced from 21 to 18 in 1976.

In 1871, there was an amendment codifying the collective and individual privileges and immunities of Parliament. Members were guaranteed freedom of speech and could not be sued or prosecuted for anything they said in Parliament nor were they subject to civil arrest. Each house of Parliament was the judge of its own rules and members. In 1971, this was amended again to provide that either house could only expel a member with a majority of two-thirds and neither house could otherwise suspend a member's right to vote in Parliament.

The Constitution of the Caldan Union contains provisions regarding provincial government. Originally, this was limited to denying them certain powers reserved to the Union, such as minting coins, declaring war, or entering into treaties. However, in 1904, the federal constitution was amended to guarantee every province "parliamentary government" within the range of accepted convention. This required significant changes to the constitutions of Arcadia and Tasat. In 2014, the constitution was amended again to provide for a general election in each province whose parliament had been sitting for at least a full year any time a general election to the Parliament of the Caldan Union was called in an amendment which also provided that constitutional amendments could only be placed on the ballot during a general election.

The maximum term of Parliament was originally seven years. This was reduced to five in 1913 and to three in 1943.

In 1937, an amendment was ratified clarifying several important cabinet positions. The role of the prime minister was laid out expressly in the text for the first time. The role of attorney general was given ex officio to the "minister of the Crown primarily responsible for law and justice or his designee" provided that none could hold the office not admitted to the bar in the Caldan Union. The designee provision has never been used and every attorney general since has been a government minister. Before the amendment, the attorney general was routinely appointed from outside Parliament but summoned to sit in the Lords upon appointment. The same amendment abolished the largely ceremonial Lords Commissioners of the Treasury and replaced them with the Treasury Board, whose members must sit in one of the houses of Parliament, the president of which must be a member of the House of Representatives, and which cannot include the prime minister.

The Constitution originally established the House of Lords as the upper house. In 1914, the constitution was amended so that a bill passed by the House of Representatives in three successive parliaments over at least five years might become law without ever being approved by the Lords, except that if a majority of both the entire House of Lords and the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary opposed a bill on the specific grounds that a bill was unconstitutional then their written objections should also be sent to the Queen who would be justified in denying assent. In 1944, this was changed to two successive parliaments over three years. In 2012, the House of Lords was replaced by an elected Senate, one which could be overridden by the House of Representatives only with a two thirds majority. The reference to withholding assent was dropped. Instead, the judicial powers of the Lords were transferred to a newly created, appointed Supreme Court and certain formal and ceremonial functions to a College of Peers.

In 2013, the constitution was amended to end Dominion status. Four former dominions became provinces and three became independent.