routine maintenance

Yesterday, deputies of the Rodina faction announced their intention to reduce the number of Duma committees, as well as to abolish more than half of the posts of vice speakers. The draft resolutions were submitted to the House yesterday. True, it will still not be possible to implement these proposals, since the Duma majority represented by United Russia has already rejected them.
The Duma has 26 specialized committees, the work of which is supervised by nine vice-speakers. The number of committees and deputy chairmen of the chamber is not regulated by any laws: deputies, starting work after the next elections, usually decide for themselves which committees they need for better legislative work. True, concern about the quality of future laws usually results in heated debates about the number of committees, behind which in fact lies a struggle for the seats of their chairmen.
The current Duma, in which the constitutional majority of votes (308) is controlled by United Russia, is no exception. The same United Russia members in the last Duma (where, together with their allies, they had a simple majority of 234 votes) talked about an unreasonably large (27) number of committees, the functions of which are often duplicated. In 2002, the Unity faction even developed an entire program for the administrative reorganization of the Duma, according to which only 16 committees should have been retained. United Russia promised to engage in reconstruction after the 2003 elections. However, having won these elections, the party in power actually reproduced the previous number of committees in the Duma and, moreover, noticeably expanded the staff of vice-speakers.
Previously, the winning faction of the party received the post of speaker, and the second largest faction received the post of first deputy speaker. The rest of the parliamentary associations were entitled to the portfolios of ordinary vice-speakers. For the “rest”, the rules have not changed in the current Duma: the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the Liberal Democratic Party and Rodina each have one vice-speaker. But United Russia, having traditionally received the post of speaker, endowed itself with six more seats of ordinary vice-speakers, as well as two (before Alexander Zhukov left the government) posts of first “vice”.
The Rodina faction expressed disagreement with this distribution. The structure of the Duma, as explained by faction leader Dmitry Rogozin, needs to be brought into line with the administrative reform that has begun in the country. Therefore, Rodina proposes to reduce the number of committees to 17 in accordance with the number of ministries in the reformed government. In addition, only four vice-speakers should remain in the Duma according to the principle of “one faction - one vice-speaker”.
The reaction to this proposal on the part of United Russia was not difficult to predict. First Deputy Speaker Lyubov Sliska considered Rodina’s initiative to be “pure PR.” In her opinion, “it is too early to draw conclusions about how effectively the Duma committees are working—a year will pass, then we will evaluate their work, and those that work poorly will be cut.”
The communists (who in the last Duma, during the reorganization arranged by United Russia, lost almost all leadership positions in the committees) now do not see any particular need to cut committees. “Otherwise, the remaining ones will be overloaded,” says Ivan Melnikov, deputy chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Unlike the Rodina leaders, he does not consider the administrative reform scheme implemented in the executive branch to be good and effective, “and if so, then it should not be transferred to the Duma.”
The only ones who supported the reduction were supporters of Vladimir Zhirinovsky. “We consider this proposal reasonable and correct,” said one of the leaders of the LDPR faction, Alexey Ostrovsky. However, the capabilities of Rodina and the Liberal Democratic Party (74 votes) are not enough even to include the issue of reorganizing the Duma on the agenda.
VIKTOR Kommersant-Khamraev

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 64 dated 04/09/2004, page 3

Authors:

Victor Khamraev

They want to make the Duma like a government