Enabling act
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An enabling act is a piece of legislation by which a legislature grants an entity which depends in on it for authorization or legitimacy to take a certain action(s). The most famous such law is the German Enabling Act, enacted in 1933 at the beginning of the rise of the Third Reich.
- Main article: Enabling Act (Nazi Germany)
[edit] In the United Kingdom
Although there was never an enabling act in the United Kingdom resembling the one in Nazi Germany, the idea of an enabling act has been advocated by prominent British politicians.
In the 1930s, both Sir Stafford Cripps and Clement Attlee advocated an enabling act to allow a future Labour government to pass socialist legislation which would not be amended by normal parliamentary procedures and the House of Lords. According to Cripps, his "Planning and Enabling Act" would not be able to be repealed, and the orders made by the government using the act would not be allowed discussion in Parliament.[1] Cripps also suggested measures against the monarchy, but quickly dropped the idea.[2]
In 1966, Oswald Mosley advocated a government of national unity drawn from "the professions, from science, from the unions and the managers, from businessmen, the housewives, from the services, from the universities, and even from the best of the politicians". This coalition would be a "hard centre" oriented one which would also get Parliament to pass an Enabling Act in order to stop "time-wasting obstructionism of present procedure", as Mosley described it. He also claimed that Parliament would always retain the power to dismiss his government by vote of censure if its policies failed or if it attempted to "override basic British freedoms".[3]
Currently (February 2006), the highly controversial yet little-publicised Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill is passing through Parliament. This Bill will, if enacted into law, enable Government ministers to amend or repeal any legislation (including the L&RR Bill itself), subject to vague and highly subjective restraints, by decree and without recourse to Parliament. This Bill has variously been described as the "Abolition of Parliament Bill" (The Times) and "...of first-class constitutional significance... [and would] markedly alter the respective and long standing roles of minister and Parliament in the legislative process" (House of Lords Constitutional Committee, reported in The Times). The Bill is, in essence, an Enabling Act in all but name.
[edit] In the United States
An enabling act, in reference to the admission of new states into the Union, is legislation passed by Congress authorizing the people of a territory to frame a constitution. The act also lays down the requirements that must be met as a prerequisite to statehood. These Acts have usually been titled "An Enabling Act for a State of (Name)".
[edit] In Venezuela
In Venezuela, an enabling act was passed in mid-2000 by Hugo Chávez enabling him to enact economy-related laws for one year. Chávez did not take advantage of this act until shortly before its expiration, when he passed 49 decrees in rapid succession, many of them highly controversial.[4][5]
