The Standing Rules

Section 1. When. The House sits every Sunday. The sitting opens when two Citizens are at the table and one of them says so.

Section 2. The Chair. The Chair rotates weekly in alphabetical order — Andrew, Lucy, Yiming — and does three things: keeps the order of business, keeps time, and signs the minutes. The Chair has no extra vote and no veto.

Section 3. Order of business. Fixed, every week:

Section 4. Remote sitting. A Citizen on a call or video line is present. A Citizen asleep in the next room is not.

Section 5. Minutes. One paragraph per sitting, written by the Chair, filed to the Registry. Minutes record decisions, not arguments.

Section 1. Quorum. Two voting Citizens are a quorum for all business. Three are required only where the Constitution says three.

Section 2. Absence. An absent Citizen loses no rights: bills they sponsor stay on the docket, their signature cannot be presumed, and nothing said in their absence may be entered against them.

Section 3. Postponement. Any Citizen may postpone one sitting per month by saying so before Saturday night. Postponed business moves whole to the next sitting.

Section 1. Introduction. A bill enters the House when it is filed to the Registry and receives its U.H.R. number. Filing is introduction; the number is permanent, even if the bill dies.

Section 2. First reading. Every bill is read aloud — the Summary and the Terms at minimum — at the first sitting after filing, before any signature is collected at the table. A bill already e-signed by two Citizens online is read anyway, for the record.

Section 3. Amendment before passage. Until the second signature lands, the sponsor may amend the bill freely; every amendment resets existing signatures to zero. After the second signature, the text is frozen — changes require an amendment law.

Section 4. Withdrawal. The sponsor may withdraw a bill any time before the second signature. Withdrawn bills keep their number and are marked withdrawn, not erased.

Section 5. Lapse. A bill with no signature activity for 90 days lapses. The Clerk marks it lapsed; refiling takes a new number.

Section 1. Who. Any voting Citizen may sponsor any bill. Yimei Beckmann sponsors through any voting Citizen, who must file it unchanged or explain the changes to her.

Section 2. Co-sponsors. A bill may name co-sponsors. A co-sponsor's signature counts toward passage like any other; repeal of a co-sponsored law needs any one of its sponsors among the two signatures.

Section 3. Duty of the sponsor. The sponsor answers questions on the bill, executes it once passed, and reports its completion or failure to the House.

Section 1. The template. Every bill uses the official template. Sections that don't apply are deleted, not left blank.

Section 2. Testability. Every milestone names its evidence: a URL, a dashboard, a statement, a physical thing that can be looked at. If two Citizens could check the condition and disagree, the condition is not written well enough to sign.

Section 3. Dates and amounts. Dates are absolute (YYYY-MM-DD). Amounts are numbers, not ranges. "About," "roughly," and "when possible" do not appear in Terms.

Section 4. Brackets. A bill still containing bracketed placeholder blanks cannot be signed; the Registry enforces this automatically. Brackets are for drafts only.

Section 5. Language. English is the controlling text. Every funding bill carries a 中文 summary so every signer reads the deal in a language they think in.

Section 1. The record. The Registry at law.mingllm.com is the single official record: bills, statuses, signatures, scans, rulings, minutes. If the Registry and memory disagree, the Registry controls.

Section 2. Statuses. PENDING (filed, gathering signatures) → SIGNED (two signatures or an ink scan on file) → OFFICIAL (reviewed and proclaimed). Also: withdrawn, lapsed, repealed. Repealed laws remain readable forever.

Section 3. Backups. The Clerk keeps the data store backed up; losing the Registry is a constitutional emergency and gets treated like one.

Section 1. Equal weight. An ink signature on the printed signing copy and a PIN-verified e-signature carry identical weight.

Section 2. Personal. A signature is personal. No Citizen signs for another, holds another's PIN, or signs a blank or bracketed page. A PIN written on a sticky note on the monitor is a violation of this rule, not a convenience.

Section 3. Free. A signature obtained by pressure, exhaustion, or ambush is void, and the Protection Code's cooling-off rights apply. The polite form of this rule: big asks come with time to think.

Section 4. Refusal. Declining to sign requires no reason and is never held against a Citizen. A bill that cannot find its second signature was not good enough yet.

Section 1. Office. Yiming Beckmann is Clerk of the House. The Clerk keeps the Registry running, custodies the submit token, rotates PINs on request, and maintains the website and its backups.

Section 2. Neutrality. The Clerk's technical powers confer no legislative advantage: the Clerk may not alter a filed bill's text, delay a rival bill, or touch the record of signatures except as these Rules direct. Registry tampering is a case for the Bench, and the presumption runs against the Clerk.

Section 3. Succession. If the Clerk is unavailable for 30 days, the House appoints an acting Clerk by ordinary law.

Section 1. Claiming. A Citizen who believes a milestone is met files the claim with its evidence to the Registry and tells the verifying officer the same day.

Section 2. Verifying. The named officer inspects the evidence within 3 days and records met or not met, with one sentence of reasons. An officer never verifies their own milestone; if the named officer is the claimant, the other non-claiming Citizen verifies.

Section 3. Paying. A verified milestone is paid within 7 days, and the receipt (transfer record, screenshot) is filed to the Registry. Payment completes the tranche; an unpaid verified milestone is a protected-debt case and jumps the queue at the next sitting.

Section 4. Disputes. "Not met" can be appealed to the Bench at the next sitting. The evidence rules; the burden sits on whoever wants to depart from what the evidence plainly shows.

Section 1. Amendment bills. An amendment bill names its target law by number, quotes each clause it changes, and states the new text in full. Amendments pass like any law: two signatures.

Section 2. Repeal. Repeal requires two signatures, one being an original sponsor's (Const. Art. IV §4). Vested rights survive: money earned under the old law is still owed.

Section 3. Revival. A forfeited tranche is revived only by an amendment to its own law, never by verbal agreement.

Section 1. Filing a case. Any Citizen — including Yimei Beckmann — files a case by stating, in writing to the Registry, what happened, what law it touches, and what they want. One paragraph suffices.

Section 2. Hearing. Both sides speak at the next sitting, uninterrupted, no longer than ten minutes each. The Bench may ask Claude for a written advisory opinion before ruling; the opinion is filed with the ruling.

Section 3. Ruling. Majority of the three, written, filed. Rulings bind the parties and guide future Benches; they do not rewrite laws.

Section 4. Recusal. In a case about a Citizen's own milestone or money, that Citizen still sits — the Bench is all three by the Constitution — but speaks last and writes nothing.

Section 1. The pair acts. Two Citizens acting together in a genuine emergency need no paperwork in advance (Const. Art. VI). The bar for "genuine" is: waiting until Sunday would cause real, named harm.

Section 2. The filing. The act is filed at the next sitting as a bill marked EMERGENCY, recording what was done, what it cost, and why waiting was worse. The filing is the record, not a re-vote.

Section 3. Abuse. An "emergency" that could have waited is a case for the Bench, and the remedy is that the actors bear the cost personally.

Section 1. Family funds. Family funds are the accounts the Secretary of the Household & Treasury designates in writing to the Registry. Personal accounts are never family funds.

Section 2. The $500 line. The constitutional threshold is per transfer, judged honestly: splitting one $900 purchase into two $450 pieces to dodge the line is a violation, not cleverness.

Section 3. Appropriated money. Money appropriated by law is spent only on what the law says. Leftovers return to the Treasury unless the law says otherwise.

Section 1. Declared interest. A Citizen with a personal financial interest in a bill says so at first reading. Interest never disqualifies a signature — in a three-person house everyone is interested — but hiding it is a Bench matter.

Section 2. Verification independence. The verifying officer of any milestone must not be its beneficiary. See Rule IX §2.

Section 1. Suspension. Any Rule may be suspended for a single sitting by agreement of two Citizens, recorded in the minutes — except where a Rule restates the Constitution, which nothing suspends.

Section 2. Change. These Rules are changed by ordinary law: two signatures. The change takes effect at the following sitting, never mid-meeting.

§Adopted to make the small procedures automatic, so the House argues only about things worth arguing about.