In the House of Representatives, the right of amendment can also be used for budget drafts. However, because budget drafts are only requests for funds to be spent, amendments to these drafts cannot entail anything other than increases or decreases in certain budget items.
Motles
As a result, the right of amendment is of limited significance in this area. How the work for which the money has been requested is carried out cannot be regulated or only partially regulated in the budget itself. An item such as the expansion of energy production can, for example, be spent on the construction of conventional power stations or on the construction of nuclear power stations; There will be different opinions about the desirability of one or the other expenditure, but nothing can be determined about this through amendments to the budget draft.
In the parliamentary debate on bills, the right to amend is of no value whatsoever. Memorandums are nothing more than detailed letters, not bills, which, after becoming law, have binding force. A memorandum contains policy intentions but does not lead to certain rights and obligations of citizens and government. Nothing can be amended on a bill.
Nevertheless, the parliament has an opportunity to express its desires and judgments when dealing with budgets and bills. That option is the motion, which is a statement by the chamber in which a specific wish or a specific assessment is included.
The government is not obliged to implement wishes stated in a motion. In this respect, a motion is therefore of less force than an amendment. After all, an adopted amendment becomes part of the bill and, in due course, the law and therefore has legally binding force. If the government does not implement the (amended) law, it is in breach of the law and thereby violates its constitutional duty to implement the laws.
Motion of censure
However, the House has a stick behind it that can give more force to a motion. Ministers who, even after repeated pressure from the chamber, refuse to implement an adopted motion may lose the confidence of the chamber by accepting a motion of censure, after which they must resign in accordance with an unwritten rule of constitutional law.
Sometimes such a motion is also called a motion of no confidence; That is not entirely correct, because in a motion of censure no confidence is expressed in so many words. A real motion of no confidence has almost never been adopted in our parliament. The House will not use this weapon anytime soon, but the government is aware that the House is not powerless.
If ministers do not implement adopted motions, they must have strong motives for doing so. These may be motives that have to do with the policy itself (for example, what the motion proposes may be incompatible with other parts of the policy), but they can also be considerations that have to do with the political balance of power. For example, the government can assume that the House has more objections to the resignation of a minister with the risk of an entire cabinet crisis than to the contested policy part. Once given the choice, the majority in the chamber would prefer to retain the minister and accept the objection to the policy component.
Naturally, this choice is strongly influenced by the political prestige of the minister involved or of the entire cabinet, by the cabinet’s overall policy. The fear of a cabinet crisis, possibly followed by elections with a chance of losing seats, and the cabinet’s term of office that has already expired also play a role in this decision.
Form of a motion
Any member of parliament can submit a motion on a topic that is under discussion, but a submitted motion can only be considered if it is co-signed or supported by at least four other members. Just like amendments, submitted motions are also multiplied and distributed.
No amendments can be submitted to motions; Anyone who wants to amend a motion must persuade the submitter of the motion to make that amendment or else submit their own motion.