defying a no win scenario

Chancellor Palpatine grinned to himself, as the situation was finally going as he had foreseen. With Senator Amidala no longer publicly trying to shoot the army measure down, the senate was in a deadlock, with only two ways. Ether they would enact a vote of no confidence in him like he pulled with Valorum, a possibility he had ensured would not work as he had his fingers in far too much blackmail that if he went down he would bring most of the senate with him. Or they would give him emergency powers, and a way to control the direction of the war so he could play both sides. The carefully engineered deadlock in the senate would just keep the pressure growing, he had wondered slightly when Senator Amidala placed that Gungan as the Naboo representative for this vote, taking a back seat on the issue she was so vocal about. Though after a long day of nothing getting done in the senate, the whispers of admiration on how she put forward a military expert in her stead on this issue showed her ability to take the issue rationally. Though this ruined some of his plots to discredit the Senator, he could respect the savvy move, the young Senator had come a long way politically since he nudged her into getting him his current position... perhaps he could do so again with the new representative. The ironic allure of getting away with such a move under the noses of those self-righteous political annoyances was overwhelming, so he sent a note to his Aide to get a meeting scheduled.

After the meeting with the Chancellor Jar Jar was feeling a bit weird, he walked out of the powerful office with the thought that the only way forward with the senate was to give Palpatine emergency powers, but as he walked he knew that there was at least one more way. If there was another way, could there be even more, maybe, but he would have to check some things out before he could be sure. A deep memory percolated to his mind, an old bit of trivia, that there had once been an ancient archive of senate information that had been destroyed when the senate was abolished under the empire. At the time he had not heard of it before the destruction, it was a comment by a friend bemoaning the loss of history. But if it was destroyed then... then it should still be around, and as a representative, he should be able to take a look if there was a solution.

Binks managed to get into the archive and using the small army of information droids in the place began to search. He dug in the archives, going back, past the dust-up that was the hyperspace war that catapulted Valorum to power, past the chancellor before him, past even when Naboo joined the Republic 870 some years before. It was in the deepest darkest corner of the archives of the current republic that he had found a hard copy of a series of treaty's and acts that had helped establish the shape current form of the galactic republic itself. With this, he could find a third path out of this intolerable situation.

Jar Jar stood and fiddled with the cuffs of the formal robe as the Naboo senate pod slowly and silently slide forward into the open air of the Senate Floor. The last few days had been filled with pointless bickering and sniping with words and procedures, factions wheeled and dealt, where before some pushed the creation of an army, now they stonewalled, and some that once wanted to stop the motion, now made polite suggestions on how things could be changed to push it through. Throughout this swirling process, like the eye of a storm Jar Jar sat and listened, the swing votes of semi-independent systems taking their cue from the calm Gungan.

As the current deadlock seemed to be a chain around the Senate and Republic itself, with no new business able to be put forward until the contentious issue was settled, there were only three options Binks was able to see.

The first was to give unilateral emergency power to the Chancellor, but that would only fuel the cries of corruption from the separatist faction, and Jar Jar remembered flashbacks of the result of too much power, even if he did not remember how it came to be in the first place, just that one day there was a republic, the next, a soulless uncaring empire. This was something Binks did not want to have happened again. The additional fact that if he suggested that, then whispers of cronyism and corruption would abound, making the separatists seem to be in the right.

The second was to call for a vote of no confidence, but as shown a decade before, that would take a long time for things to settle down, and with the factions like the Trade federation ready to strike with their droid armies, it would leave the republic defenceless in its time of need.

The third was to repeal an ancient disarmament act, one that got rid of the galactic military, and limiting the number of forces a single system could have, a limit that even peaceful Naboo skirted with the captured fleet from the adventure a decade ago. The only reason why Naboo got away with keeping the fleet was the conversion of the massive ships into infrastructure and trade stations. This option would help strengthen the Republic as a whole, following the old Gungan tradition of if one wanted peace, they had to be prepared to defend it. Also as the philosophy of many things being harder to break if they stand together, however, if each thing was a soggy noodle, then no matter how many you had, they would not stand up to a stiff breeze. This would also make any try at forming an empire harder as all the power would not be concentrated in one spot.

An additional side benefit of choosing the option of repealing the old act was the fact that it required fewer votes to accomplish then giving more power to the Chancellor, and if the option to give more power failed to go through then the senate be even more bogged down and ineffective. With the planets and sectors straining under the threat of separatists and pirates, as well as the swing votes, never mind those that wanted the deadlocked senate to do something, then Binks knew he could count on more then enough votes, especially if he sprung it at the right time as a surprise vote to not give any shenanigans of those that wanted a deadlocked senate.