THE CONGRESS OF MICRONESIA NORMAN MELLER with the assistance of Terza Meller THE CONGRESS OF MICRONESIA Development of the Legislative Process in the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands Open Access edition funded by the National En- dowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. Licensed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Inter- national (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits readers to freely download and share the work in print or electronic format for non- commercial purposes, so long as credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/li- censes/by-nc-nd/4.0/. The Creative Commons license described above does not apply to any material that is separately copy- righted. Open Access ISBNs: 9780824883683 (PDF) 9780824883690 (EPUB) This version created: 5 September, 2019 Please visit www.hawaiiopen.org for more Open Access works from University of Hawai‘i Press. v COPYRIGHT 1969 BY UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII PRESS Foreword IN ORDER TO WRITE a book about the development of leg- islatures in the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, it was first essential to determine how to identify a legislature. Obviously, reliance could not be placed upon names, as evidenced by the Olbiil era Kelulau, the body which functioned in the Palau dis- trict between the years 1955 and 1963: translated into English, this would be “meeting place of whispers!” Looking at functions proved equally ineffective. Belying the etymology, early in their histories institutions now referred to as legislatures “had little or no concern with legislation.”1 Even today, if it be accepted that law-making is the measure of a legislature, how can we reconcile the facts that in quantity of output, legislatures are eclipsed by the sheer bulk of quasi-legislation issued by administrative agencies and that the drama of their impact is overshadowed by judicial de- cisions setting impersonal precedents as binding as statutes for all to observe? Viewing the same problem from another perspective, at the 1234th meeting of the United Nations Trusteeship Council in 1964, Mr. Shakov, the representative of the Union of Soviet Social- ist Republics, declared “no representative legislative body as yet existed in the [American Administered Trust] Territory [of the Pa- cific Islands] … since the Council of Micronesia had turned out to be a purely consultative body” and that the then proposed Terri- tory-wide, bicameral Congress of Micronesia “would be only a consultative body, like the body that already existed … [because] no legislation could enter into force until it had been approved by the High Commissioner….”2 There can be no quarrel with the 1 Carl J. Friedrich, Constitutional Government and Democracy (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1950), p. 268. See also Charles A. Beard and John D. Lewis, “Represen- tative Government in Evolution,” American Political Science Review, 26:2 (April, 1932), 231–235; A. F. Pollard, The Evolution of Parliament (2d ed.; London: Long- mans, Green and Co., Ltd., 1926), pp. 44–60; George L. Haskins, The Growth of English Representative Government (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1948), passim. 2 Trusteeship Council Official Records, 31st Sess., 1234th meeting, June 8, 1964, pars. 14, 15. In future references, these reports will be referred to as TCOR. vii contention of the Soviet position if it implied that the exercise of law-making is insufficient per se to identify a legislature. However, the further constraining of the definion of a “legislature” to those bodies in which “the last word about what the law is to be rests”3 or whose “decision is both necessary and sufficient for the final enactment of a law”4 ignores the integral involvement of the exec- utive and fails to face the reality of the initiative, referendum, and recall. Such attempts to define a legislature by assigning it a quota of functions or residual powers reawaken the unfruitful attempts by political philosophers of yesteryear to identify the locus of sov- ereignty. Clearly, the classifier “legislature” carries no undisputed meaning nor necessarily describes any single institution common to various systems of government. None of the foregoing denies that it is principally through the enactment of statutes that the modern legislature has derived its saliency. A comparable inquiry into primacy put during Cromwell’s Long Parliament would probably have prompted a reply referring to the redress of grievances and the subordination of the king. In- deed, there is a strong probability that there are no functional de- limitations to the activity of a legislature, be it granting divorces, conducting wars, choosing chief executives, or molding a nation’s opinion. Rather, in any political system the legislature performs functions appropriate to that system as they have evolved by virtue of the legislature’s representative nature and its character- istic group process. Of all political institutions, the legislature as a corporate body is most aptly designed to bring the element of representation to political decision-making. Even when the legislature is no more than the agent of a particular stratified level of society, with the legislators bespeaking themselves as well as their class in accor- dance with its mandate, to that extent their action is bindingly representational. Similarly, the skewing of the legislature’s com- position through selection of its members by a narrowly restricted suffrage does not prevent it through political fiction from func- tioning as the representative of the entire constituency. So long as the represented endorse, accept, tolerate, or at least do not openly reject the conduct of deliberations in their name, the deci- 3 K. C. Wheare, Legislatures (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 3. 4 Inter-Parliamentary Union, Parliaments (London: Cassell and Co., Ltd., 1961), p. 116. viii Foreword sions of the legislature psychologically are theirs and this in turn legitimizes the legislature’s actions. The King’s Curia becomes a nascent legislature when to its membership are added those who are recognized spokesmen for the views of others beside the King. Even in the absence of all powers of initiation, a pro forma concurrence with an executive-determined program in no way pre- cludes a legislative body possessed of representative character from sanctioning the proposed course of action. Representation is not confined to the legislative institution. In view of the manner in which constituencies are geographically con- torted, fields of candidates partisanly narrowed, and the psycholog- ical processes of identification cultivated by modern mass media techniques, on the American scene many constituents may consider the elected chief executive to mirror the views they hold more aptly than do the members of the legislature. However, this constitutes more a dissatisfaction with the style and product of representation than a transference of the basic acceptance of the legislature as the prime representative institution. Not even in the new American state constitutions does the elected chief executive participate in the most fundamental of law-making functions performed by the legislature, the enactment of constituent legislation; and in the case of the United States constitution itself, there has not been any effort to modify the sharing in the task by legislatures on two levels of gov- ernment, to the exclusion of the executive. The other distinguishing characteristic of the legislative institu- tion is its collegial nature and the attendant processes it observes. The legislature’s structuring reflects its group character by the minimizing of formal hierarchy and the wide internal dispersal of power. In the parliamentary system of government, legislative direction rests in a committee, while Mr. Speaker ought more fit- tingly be referred to as umpire than as the spokesman his title implies. But whether adopting the British or the American pat- tern of leadership, the legislature meets collectively and moves to collective decision, be this by simple majority, extraordinary ma- jority, or through consensus to unanimity. When not acting as a body, the legislature typically utilizes smaller groups rather than individuals to further its functions. Committees screen and refine legislative proposals, or at least the latter; when it becomes nec- essary to reconcile policy differences between the two houses of a bicameral legislature, a conference committee serves the purpose. Duties associated with the administration of the legislature are as- ix signed to accounts committees, rules committees, and a host of other sub-collegial bodies. Delegation is to groups, specialization is formalized through groups, and the individual legislator shapes his conduct accordingly. The member unobservant or defiant of legislative norms soon finds himself subjected to group sanctions and, if the degree of his flaunting warrants, formal censure and expulsion expressed through vote of the legislature. In short, to the extent that all institutional effort embodies both individual and collective aspects, the legislature in its process emphasizes the collegial. It is against this backdrop of the universal nature of the legisla- tive institution5 that the legislatures of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands may be identified and the development of the leg- islative process delineated. 5 For a more complete