The petition committee out of the Varek Northern Forum has now been to nineteen jurisdictions. They have a route, a rota, and a laminated photograph of a river valley in evening light. Last week the table went up in Korda.

Korda Territory is on the southeastern lake shore. It is the place where two people were killed in the second Sunderland incursion, and where the roads out of the eastern settlements have been on a federal capacity list since Year 9. It is, for the purposes of §13.1, one jurisdiction of the Republic — which is to say it counts exactly as much toward the petition's one-third threshold as Varek does, or Aldenmere, or Kelvant.

Member Dessa Orin, one of Korda's Assembly delegates, was asked on Tuesday whether she had signed.

"I'm not going to tell you that," she said. "It's a private act and there are four hundred and ninety-nine other people in that chamber who'd like to make it a public one."

She was, however, entirely willing to talk about the table.

"We Count When Somebody Needs Us To Count"

"I want to be careful, because those young people have done nothing wrong and the ridge sounds lovely," Orin said. "But you asked me what I thought when I saw the table, and what I thought was: somebody drove eight hundred miles to Korda. Somebody looked at a map of this Republic and worked out that they could not have the thing they wanted without us."

"That's happened to Korda once before that I can remember, and it was an election."

The delegate's arithmetic is not in dispute. §13.1 requires a petition to clear its Phase One threshold in at least one-third of all States and Territories — a count of jurisdictions, not of people. Korda's population would not fill a mid-sized Verentum district. Under the petition provision it is a full share of the denominator, and there is no route to the threshold that lets a committee skip it because it is small or far or busy.

"So we count," Orin said. "For that. Absolutely we count, for that."

The Queue

What Korda does not count for, on Orin's account, is §12.8.

§12.8 requires the Legislature to establish a mechanism ensuring every State and Territory has fiscal capacity reasonably sufficient to meet its Social State obligations and the rights guaranteed under Article I. The Executive Monitor certifies annually whether that mechanism is operating as required, and publishes to the NRS. Two years ago the EM found that it had failed.

And here the provision does something people forget it does. It does not stop at the finding. Where the EM finds the mechanism has failed, the Legislature publishes its response to the NRS within 90 days. The Legislature is obliged to answer.

It answered. Within ninety days, as required, on the record, in full compliance.

"They responded," Orin said. "I want to be completely fair about this, because people hear me complain and assume somebody broke a rule. Nobody broke a rule. The Monitor certified, the Monitor published, the Legislature answered inside the window and put the answer on the permanent record where I can read it any time I like."

"The answer was that the mechanism is under review."

Orin's office has said before, and said again this week, that Korda's capacity requests — roads, mostly, and the eastern settlements' access to the lake road in particular — have been in a federal queue since Year 9.

"Four years," she said. "In four years I have written to the domain, I have testified twice, I have co-sponsored a bill" — the reference is to Member Thoss's border-infrastructure measure, which Orin co-sponsored in Month 7 — "and the finding is on the record being correct at everybody, and the response is on the record next to it being timely."

"§12.8 obliges them to answer me. It does not oblige them to fix the road. And I've read it enough times now to be sure that isn't an oversight — somebody chose that. You can compel a legislature to speak. Nobody has ever worked out how to compel one to mean it."

"And then a girl with a clipboard drives eight hundred miles to my Territory because the Constitution says she has to. And I thought — that's the machinery working. That is genuinely the machinery working. It made somebody come here."

She stopped for a moment.

"It has never once made anybody come here about the roads."

Two Provisions, One Territory

The contrast Orin is drawing is not a complaint that the Constitution is inconsistent. It is sharper than that, and she was careful about it.

"Both of those provisions are doing what they were built to do," she said. "§13.1 makes a national instrument require a national reach — good. Correct. I'd vote for it again. §12.8 makes equalization a standing obligation and not a favour, and it makes the Legislature answer for it in public inside ninety days, and the Monitor's job is to certify and publish and not to command. I would not give the Monitors teeth if you asked me tomorrow, because I have read what happens to institutions worth capturing."

"But put them side by side. One of them obliges a stranger to come to Korda and ask. The other obliges a chamber to send Korda a letter. So we get visited about a hillside and we get corresponded with about a road, and neither of those is a malfunction. That's the design. I just think somebody should say the sentence out loud."

Asked whether she would raise it in the chamber, Orin said she had raised it in the chamber, and that the record would show as much, and that the record was very good at showing things.

The Table

The petition committee got their signatures in Korda. The Territory's threshold under the statute is small in absolute terms — that is what a percentage of a small electorate means — and by the committee's own account Korda was one of their easier stops.

Orin was asked, finally, whether she thought that was fair: that a Territory of Korda's size should carry the same weight as Varek in a petition about Varek's own ridge.

"Fair," she said. "You're asking the delegate from the small place whether the rule that makes the small place matter is fair."

She did not answer the question. She did not really need to.