It is shown how two tools developed in argumentation theory are useful for AI systems for electronic democracy [2,3] and more generally for formal dialogue systems representing deliberation. The novel part of this analysis is that it represents the speech of proposing as a small dialogue exchange in which one party practically reasons with another, based on premises that both are committed to, as collaborative participants in a deliberation dialogue. The structure of practical reasoning as a type of argument as analyzed in [6] is brought to bear, to bring out special features of the speech act of proposing that make it a nice fit with the formal framework for deliberation dialogue constructed by [4].