How a Bill Becomes a Law in Russia

The Russian intelligent (public intellectual) Sergei Parkhomenko has written about an interesting discovery he made tracing the infamous file магницкий_ТЕКСТ_фз.rtf  -- the draft law on the Duma's website which is the tit-for-tat law meant to address "Russians whose rights have been violated in America by Americans" -- namely, adopted children.

This is actually something the whole Russian blogosphere is speculating about and Parkhomenko discussed it on an Ekho Moskvy radio show.

In case you didn't realize that this Duma law was in revenge for Magnitsky, the file is helpfully labelled "Magnitsky".  Well, that part was obvious - Putin has taken little children hostage.

But Parkhomenko also writes about what happens when you right click on the file and get "properties" and find out who drafted it, and it wasn't a law-maker.

He says it's one Sergei Valentinovich Tikhomirov, a referent or government analyst for the State Legal Directorate of the President of the Russian Federation, a "candidate of legal sciences" i.e. equivalent of a Juris Doctor, and a graduate school instructor. Co-author of text books Information Law, Military Law, and Administrative Law of Russia -- all skills that came in handy for drafting the Revenge Law or the "Nasty Law" (Zakon Podlosti) as the Russian public intellectuals are calling it. (The Duma co-authors of the bill called it the "Dima Yakovlev Act," after a Russian orphan who was left by his American adoptive father accidently to suffocate in an overheated car.)

Well, there have always been referenty and dissidenty, they have always been in a struggle, they have always gone to the same schools, and sometimes they have even been interchangeable at certain times...

Yes, surprise, surprise, Russian laws that the Duma passes are drafted at the Kremlin, in the president's office. The Soviets used to keep at least a chaste cosmetic difference, by having the Institute for State and Law, a government think-tank, do the drafting. Oh, wait, that was the cover story, because in fact as the democratic parliamentarians of that era eventually discovered, they were being drafted in the Kremlin even then...

Naturally, there are Twit-wits second-guessing this. Why, how could it be an RTF file, everybody knows they work in Word documents. Why, how could they be so obvious, and you can't really be sure and...

Vedomosti.ru writes about the existence of these files named outright as "Magnitsky".

SO I went to the Duma site itself. 

And I don't see "магницкий_ТЕКСТ_фз.rtf" -- and searching for it in Google turns up only blogs and news sites.

That doesn't mean that it wasn't there or isn't there -- maybe I'm not seeing it in the welter of text and names, or maybe it was renamed.

But whether or not it was written by gray referenty in Putin's office with Surkov steadying their hand, it still has all the hallmarks of a Kremlin-engineered piece.

Even so, with the "aggressive-obedience majority" in the Duma, you don't need necessarily to draft things in the Kremlin, the little tsar or commissar is in the head of each person themselves, it's like a hologram in that respect, break it up, the pieces keep reflecting.

Russia has web 2.0 goodness for tracking these things now, too.  Unlike news accounts, it has the vote count like this:   388 for, 15 against, 1 abstention, 46 no-shows.

So it turns out that there are three times as many good people as we thought in the Russian Duma, mainly from Just Russia. That's progress!

Someone can poke around these sites and see if there is "магницкий_ТЕКСТ_фз.rtf" -- I'm too busy decorating my Christmas cactus right now.

 

 

Comments

[Mr. X]

Kinda reminds me of Obama promising he'd veto Article 1031 of the NDAA authorizing indefinite detention of any American branded a terrorist by the President exclusively with no right to trial or hearing...when in fact Sen. Levin came out and said the White House lobbied hard to keep 1031 in there. Your buddy John McCain and that homo creep Lindsey Graham were all for it too, with Lindsey's infamous, "Shut up, you don't get no lawyer" line. But I'm sure your pal the Streetwise Professor can go on comparing Sen. Rand Paul who denounced NDAA to the genocidal Khmer Rouge. It'll make him feel better when BigSis comes for his guns.