The Legal Committee of the Constitutional Chamber was referred to by its contemporaries in more vindictive moods as “Q’s Advisory Council.” While uncharitable, there is a significant degree of truth in this accusation. Q Loakh was the unquestioned leader of the Legal Committee, to a level of deference that surpassed even Generald Lorkisian. Lorkisian may have had literal command over a majority of his committee, but Q had loyalty that Lorkisian lacked. By pure luck or the Emperor’s machinations or both, every individual on the Committee was a Q loyalist and ally. Even those that were not initially were complacent enough to easily be brought into Q’s circle, through charisma and charity.
This obsequiousness by the other members of the Legal Committee would allow Q to run the Committee essentially as they saw fit. They had an unfettered ability to recommend and implement any changes to the legal system of the entire Empire that they saw fit. For the moment, while this may have made a few delegates uneasy, this was not thought to be particularly controversial or concerning by the other delegates. Q’s Dream was shared by nearly everyone in the Chamber, they were still the most significant member and the de facto leader. They were at the height of their power, a power so strong that there was not yet anyone seriously considering questioning it. Everyone allowed Q to run the Legal Committee as their fiefdom.
What they would do with this fiefdom was obvious: dismantle the massive and obvious loopholes everyone knew existed in the Imperial codes. As expected there would be some elimination of localism in the legal application (as can be seen, centralization of authority was a trend in every committee), but so-called Two Loops were the most important elements of the codes that Q aimed to change. The first of these was the Interplanetary Loop. The loop allowed a captain of any ship (or, the legal owner of a ship) to commit actions that would ordinarily be considered a crime, as the owner of a ship was technically considered outside of any planetary jurisdiction (even while in orbit), bestowing them with the power to declare their own laws, so long as they did not break any of the very few Empire wide statutes. This would be the easier loop to close, as the universally agreed upon solution of making every ship subject to the laws of the planet is last docked and had been proposed only a few centuries ago, its adoption only halted by lethargy of Imperial legislation.
Much trickier to close, and by its nature making the Interplanetary Loop harder to close with any attempt to solve it, was the Intraplanetary Loop. This loop was the result of a simple oversight in two pan-Imperial dictates: planets themselves decided the best way to impeach a ruler and planets were not allowed to remove a leader without impeaching them. These dictates were seriously upheld, as the example of Morroth showed everyone. The issue was that if a political actor secured the reins of power on a planet strongly enough, it could declare a functionally impossible mechanism of impeachment. So long as the actor came to power legally, once they made impeachment impossible there was no way to remove them. As planetary governments were often allowed to take whatever structure they liked, there was nothing wrong with a democratic government transforming into a dictatorship or even a personal vassal state. The Imperial codes gave no avenue to remove such a figure from power. This was not a hypothetical – it had happened several dozen times throughout the Empire’s history. Occasionally it came undone over time, but there were several prominent instances of planets still held captive in this way.
Q’s solution to the Intraplanetary Loop was to eliminate the second clause that formed it. Planetary leaders could now be disposed of when they were acting “opposed to the principles of justice that govern the Empire.” Whether or not a planetary leader was acting opposed to the principles of justice could be termed by “an outburst of popular will.” Q had just legalized political revolution.
This was a radical step, but there are a few reasons why it went by with little comment by the delegates in the Vaird. For one, it seemed to many of them to be in keeping with the Legalist principles Q had previously laid down. While the Imperial government would never provoke revolutions or topple leaders on their own, it was not the Empire’s responsibility to support unjust rulers, so long as they were toppled by a truly popular coalition. At the time this was passed, this was not taken for instance to support any side in the Mawrian Civil War, but it was taken to support a rejection of the Imperial Military’s role in it (although by the time the reform had reached the level of policy, the Mawrian Mutiny had already made this interpretation irrelevant). The initial revolt against the planetary garrison was seen as a true expression of the Mawrian popular will against an unjust occupation, while in the proceeding civil war no faction represented the whole of the Mawrian people and so no faction really represented the planet.
All that being said, it continues to amaze those with the benefit of hindsight that Q did not understand what they were doing. For around a century after the Revolution, many historians simply assumed that they did and were planning the revolutionary wave that would end up following their new statutes, but events do not bear that conclusion. By every account, even from the most counterrevolutionary or ultrarevolutionary primary sources, both of whom made Q into one of the arch-villains of the Revolution, Q never once showed any indication that what followed was from an elaborate scheme of theirs. While it is easy to claim that Q “intended for the revolutions, if not for how far they went,” as was the standard line among the first generation of revolutionary historians, there is no evidence for this. Q was consistent in every context prior to the Revolutionary Wave that they did thought the changes in the Imperial code would result in “a half dozen changes in planetary government at most, in only the most unjust of regimes.” When the Wave materialized, it was Q’s infamous rejection of the Wave, a rejection that formed almost immediately and was unaltered in intensity throughout the remainder of their life, that earned them the scorn of the ultrarevolutionaries. There will be more to say on why Q became too resistant to the Revolutionary Wave next chapter, but for the moment it is enough to note that the consistency in their positions, something rare throughout Q’s career, should be seen as emblematic of the strong idealism hidden beneath their veneer of hyperpragmatism.
There was one notable opponent to Q’s reforms though, although his concerns were not pressed strenuously and they would go unnoticed in the otherwise unanimous acceptance. Ghale Thusif was the only remaining true believer in Sara Heartsbane’s Dream, or at least a watered down version of the rigidity the original had required. His vision for this was not fully fleshed out and at the time that Q proposed their reforms, Thusif was still engaging in nightly debates with Leaf Rivers that would prove extremely influential in the formation of Neo-Humanism (more on this in a future chapter), but he did hold strong enough principles contrary to Q that he was willing to speak out against it.
Thusif’s primary criticism of the Legalist backed reforms had nothing to do with the fundamental shortcoming that would make them unworkable under the Legalists’ own framework, but was rather that they weakened the power of the Empire in favor of the planets. By Thusif’s explanation, the solution to the planetary despots was not to trust in local power to overtake them, which would be just as likely to install something similarly and could not be relied upon to exclusively rise up against the unjust in any case, it was to keep a check on them from the Imperial bureaucracy above. Giving more power to an interplanetary elite compared to the much more patchwork locally focused system that existed would allow them to identify local tyrants and install more just leaders. For Thusif, the more centralized system was preferably precisely because those interplanetary elites would be less caught up in the affairs of the planet than any popular uprising would be. What the Legalists deemed to be their reforms’ greatest asset was condemned by Thusif as its greatest flaw.
All of these concerns would go unheeded at the time and indeed some of them look naive in retrospect. Thusif’s claim that it would be very difficult for popular revolts against unjust rulers to breakout was proved incorrect within the month (or, as some historians have argued, any truth the criticism may have had was unsuited for such a tumultuous time that made those revolutions easier than they might otherwise have been). However, the simple fact that Thusif was willing to criticize what would eventually be seen as disastrous policy gave him immense retroactive credibility among his peers. His stance here would help him to create his image, and sometimes myth, of a highly principled individual, one who would be relied upon to say his convictions no matter how unpopular they were. It was the first brick in crafting the “Great Conciliator.”
But none of this would yet happen. For the moment, Thusif’s criticisms were ignored and barely remarked upon. Even as a person he was irrelevant, shunted off to the apparently uninteresting and unimportant Esoteric and Religious Groups Committee. And it probably would have remained uninteresting and unimportant, if not for the Revolutionary Wave introduced by the Legalists’ reforms.