Agenda-setting theory has an uncomfortable result, known since Romer and Rosenthal, the economists who first modelled the power of whoever sets the agenda: in any voting system, the actor who controls what gets voted on is more powerful than the actors who vote. Legislatures know this, which is why the real power in them hides in committee chairs, calendars, and leadership offices — unpriced, unaccountable, and invisible to the public. This design does the opposite: it makes agenda power explicit, budgets it, and charges for it.
Each leader holds a fixed, small proposal budget per term at each scale they operate in — on the order of three to five proposals, use-it-or-lose-it, tunable by the meta-rules. Every kind of legislative act draws from the same budget: ordinary policy, budget moves, repeal of existing law, and subsidiarity shifts (moving a matter up- or down-scale, chapter 9). Scarcity does the filtering that committee gatekeepers only pretend to do. When proposals are unlimited, drafting a bill is free messaging — legislatures fill with symbolic bills designed to die. When each proposal spends a scarce budget, every one is a costly signal of genuine priority. Spam becomes irrational; quality becomes the equilibrium.
The budget can bind harder than a simple count. Proposal costs can be made convex — the second proposal in a cycle costing more than the first, the third more still — and leaders stake standing on what they bring (chapter 7 covers what happens to that stake when the public later reverses their work). A proposal is not a press release here. It is a bet.
Proposals are also how institutions are born, and this is where lifecycle management starts. A proposal that creates anything persistent — an agency, a program, a standing rule — must carry its lifecycle terms at birth: what it is for, the horizon on which its effects should be measurable (chapter 7), and the review schedule it will face (chapter 8). Credibility is earned through the same gauntlet everything else faces: passage by delegates, then survival under the public verdict. Nothing is grandfathered; being old is not a mandate. An institution in this design is best understood as a proposal that keeps getting reconfirmed.