A constitution is only as good as the quality of the institutions that exist to defend it. Undermine the institutions and a constitution is no more worth than the paper it’s printed on.
Yes but the institutions are defined in the constitutions.
In the Republic of Ireland we have a relatively good constitution, fairly active, that has a vast hole in the first paragraph of Article 45:
ARTICLE 45
The principles of social policy set forth in this Article are intended for the general guidance of the Oireachtas. The application of those principles in the making of laws shall be the care of the Oireachtas exclusively, and shall not be cognisable by any Court under any of the provisions of this Constitution.
This obviously both deliberate and insane. We should remove it. It is the biggest institutional flaw in our constitution. But Bunreacht na hEireann is worth so much more than the paper its printed on, or the jurisdiction of the courts it defines. It is the code of the country, the will of the people, enacted, modified and attained. It is the source of our of our law, our shared hope, and our sense of gathered self. We are our constitution, we are free.
The Irish superior courts do review legislation, though.
"The judicial power of government of those courts includes the power to review the compatibility of statutes with the Constitution and to judicially review subordinate legislation, decisions or actions of the Government or State bodies with a view to determining their legality and compatability with the Constitution, and principles deriving from the Constitution such as due process" [0]
I don't understand how Article 45 is interpreted but it's clearly not seen as a loophole where the Oireachtas can be the final arbiter over whether its laws are constitutional.
I'm curious but to me it reads like its meant to avoid legislation happening through usage of the courts like what often happens in the us? Is Ireland a common law system?
The hole is the lack of access to the courts to to appeal decisions of the Government on maybe 90% of the business of the Governement. If you read the rest of the article it's actually pretty cool if old fashioned. If it was justicable it would be awesome.
No, this is good. If the people want something they can vote a government in to do it. Otherwise you get abominations like when the Taiwanese Supreme Court legalized gay marriage after a referendum rejected it. If you’re going to go that far you might as well just drop the democratic pretense from liberal democracy and just go with liberalism.
If making gay marriage illegal violates the Taiwanese constitution, the people had already decided they want it to be legal. If they don't want that, they can change the constitution.
1 The State shall strive to promote the welfare of the whole people by securing and protecting as effectively as it may a social order in which justice and charity shall inform all the institutions of the national life.
2 The State shall, in particular, direct its policy towards securing:–
i That the citizens (all of whom, men and women equally, have the right to an adequate means of livelihood) may through their occupations find the means of making reasonable provision for their domestic needs.
ii That the ownership and control of the material resources of the community may be so distributed amongst private individuals and the various classes as best to subserve the common good.
iii That, especially, the operation of free competition shall not be allowed so to develop as to result in the concentration of the ownership or control of essential commodities in a few individuals to the common detriment.
iv That in what pertains to the control of credit the constant and predominant aim shall be the welfare of the people as a whole.
v That there may be established on the land in economic security as many families as in the circumstances shall be practicable.
3 1° The State shall favour and, where necessary, supplement private initiative in industry and commerce.
2° The State shall endeavour to secure that private enterprise shall be so conducted as to ensure reasonable efficiency in the production and distribution of goods and as to protect the public against unjust exploitation.
4 1° The State pledges itself to safeguard with especial care the economic interests of the weaker sections of the community, and, where necessary, to contribute to the support of the infirm, the widow, the orphan, and the aged.
2° The State shall endeavour to ensure that the strength and health of workers, men and women, and the tender age of children shall not be abused and that citizens shall not be forced by economic necessity to enter avocations unsuited to their sex, age or strength.
Is there something special about "the institutions" or does it have more to do with the people themselves? Both what citizens will tolerate and what politicians will try to get away with?
Institutions (strong ones, the ones that really work) have a way of transcending the desires of their members. An functioning institution won't stop functioning because of a few members with un aligned goals - this is similar to the way distributed systems are deigned, where you want to have redundancy and a quorum to ensure that the cluster survives network partitions and problems with the leader node.
Of course, an institution won't survive a certain percentage of its members being malign. The stronger the institution, the larger that number is.
To give some ideas of the mechanisms that make this possible, internal reviews are one of the most powerful forces for making sure that rules established yesterday are still respected by people who join tomorrow, even at the very top.
Yes, both. You need institutions strong enough to, for example, stop a president that exceeds his authority. But you need people who make the institutions do what they're supposed to do.
The actual structures of power have changed quite dramatically roughly every 70 years in the US, from getting rid of the idea of states as sovereign with the Civil War to gutting the interstate commerce clause of all meaning under FDR or there President arrogating all war making powers to himself against the quite explicit provisions in the constitution. Most recent huge change would be either the administrative state after WW2 or getting rid of freedom of association.
>or getting rid of freedom of association.
What are you specifically referring to? I ask, because our constitutional right to freedom of association has not been eliminated in any way.
I invite you to open a business that caters only to black people, or some other protected class then. People in the US are not free to associate (or not) as they see for.
The three branches are the formula, but the real work was in establishing them and making sure they actually work independently. The real work also continued in the many men and women who powered these institutions during the early years and kept true to their purpose.
There are plenty of countries that have the same nominal separation of powers, guaranteed by a constitution and a Supreme Court, but where the nominal separation of powers matters little in the face of political games. Hungary and Poland are relatively well known recent examples of countries that have subverted strong constitutional guarantees by inventing exceptions or finding reasons to oust people who are opposing political will for institutional reasons. In more corrupt states it can happen more egregiously.
A big problem, especially in young states, is the natural tendency to dislike red tape. Institutional power is all about red tape, though - doing something through the proper channels, with the proper oversight, even if it takes 3 times as long and costs twice as much as it should. This is the biggest hurdle that a young democracy has to overcome - learning to trust the apparent inefficiency of complex institutions (and knowing how to reform institutions that really don't work).
Not just ineptitude and lack of planning. A bunch of judges wouldn't go along, even ones that Trump appointed. In the end, Pence wouldn't go along, and neither would a number of Senators and Representatives. Neither would the governor of Georgia, nor several other officials of various states.
Now, you could say "lack of planning" includes not getting the right people in place, and that's kind of tautologically true. But getting the kind of people who will go along with this, in all the necessary places, may be harder than you think.
In the end, the system held because the people who believed in the system did what the system said they were supposed to do.
But a large number of senators and representatives did go along. And others didn't, because they thought his cause was hopeless, and they decided that there was more profit in quietly sitting on the sidelines.
A more capable, less politically radioactive leader for a cult of personality might have had more success with this. There are a lot of systemic advantages in the mechanisms of how the United States operates, that assist with this sort of thing. (The best example of which is how the losers of an election have a transition period of two
freaking months, where they retain all the guns and all the power, and apparently an utter immunity to the rule of law - because the president wields pardon power, and can only be held accountable by a court that's packed with his supporters.)
It should go without mentioning, but I will also note that elections aren't a function that optimizes for people who believe in the system.
I knew it wasn't going to work when the NYT's published Senator Tom Cotton's editorial calling for the Army to crush the BLM's protests and the generals pointed told them all to go to hell.
Apparently the Army isn't very happy with one political party.
Not really, if you consider the source of these beliefs.
One group got their perspective from the cultural monopoly in media and academia.
Another group got their perspective from mainstream conservative media.
Another group got their perspective from social media trolls, charlatans, and grifters.
Another group got their perspective from cross-sectional media and/or social media.
There's some blending between groups, of course, but given the highly polarized nature of the last few months and years, they're mostly distinct.
As a cross-sectionalist, I believe that the extremity of all perspectives presented are hugely inaccurate.
Of course, this perspective is not welcomed here. In part because most that visit HN subscribe to the cultural monopoly's narrative, and in part because the general dislike of a highly abrasive, tactless, outspoken former president.
But, trying to be as unbiased as I can, I stand by a rejection of the extreme perspectives. I hope nobody feels offended by what I write here.
Here is my attempt - real and imagined concerns around the integrity of the election got enough people riled up to exhaustively challenge it through the courts and bum-rush the Capitol. The court cases mostly failed (some are still on-going), a lot of elected officials started to drop support when they realized not much evidence existed to overturn results and the crazies were coming out of the woodwork.
I don't. I haven't really found any, and this is the conclusion of my own observations over the last year.
Prior to lockdowns and work from home, I didn't pay much attention. Once I was forced to stay inside, I tuned in a lot more. As I noted the polarized views expressed, I intentionally sought countering expressions.
Over the year, I ended up following a wide spectrum of people on social media and consumed articles by a variety of publications.
From there many patterns emerged. Larger entities—unsurprisingly—influenced the topics du jour. Sometimes they were unique to that segment; sometimes retorts to another group's topic.
I noted the frequency of real, substantiated information went down over time, by all sources. From "sources close to the matter" to right-wing influencers making grandiose claims, practically every group fell into this pattern.
Ironically, the most extreme groups (relegated exclusively to social media) were among those that made the least exaggerated statements or observations. (From Antifa to Proud Boys.) They seemed to stick most to their prescribed beliefs and didn't really utilize the inflammatory stories and rhetoric from traditionally more moderate sources, such as mainstream media and influencers.
By that same token, it was the more middle-aligned groups that became more polarized and extreme, but even that was skewed more heavily to the left of center.
If I had to characterize it, I'd say the most extreme political sources maintained their extreme views and spoke softly. The middle-most sources often far exceeded inflammatory rhetoric of the extreme edges.
I'm not sure if this is because extreme viewpoints were simply unspoken among the extreme groups, but the intensity with which they spoke was much more moderate the further out from center they got; not exactly an inversion, but darn near close.
While Antifa accounts would do deep dives on police tactics or communist groups would discuss building fund pools for other communists out of work, left-leaning mainstream media—like the Guardian—would run story after story about the existential threat of white supremacy, for example.
For most of the year, left-sided groups were on the offensive, while right-sided on the defensive. When the election insanity took place, the offensive/defensive roles briefly switched, but then both ended up taking an offensive position up until the 6th. After that, both sides slowly ramped down.
In broad strokes, it became apparent to me that mainstream left-sided media was the most expressively extreme, both in rhetoric and reach. Right-sided social media reached a similar extreme following the election.
While the narratives emboldened by Trump following the election were by far the most extreme, the impression that I got from the right-side was "talk big", not "act big". On the flip side, left-sided extremists were "talk soft" and "act carefully": they would devise plans and act on them.
Of course it's impossible to suss out the intention of any given individual. There were, no doubt, individuals on the right that wanted to overthrow the government that they perceived to be insurgents of democracy, just as there were individuals on the left that wanted to create lists of Trump supporters in order to punish them for their crime of supporting the brash president.
The president's behavior—especially amplifying absurd claims of election fraud espoused by Sydney Powell—was unquestionably dangerous. By the same token, the persistent vilification of the right-wing—to such extremes as to characterize them as white supremacists or Nazis—by the left-sided mainstream media is also unquestionably dangerous.
As someone who holds values reflected across the political spectrum—though admittedly subject to bias—I am far more concerned about the utter cultural monopoly held by a single party than I am about a handful of undereducated "patriots" that felt their election was stolen from them.
If I could counter the concerns raised about the threat the "insurgents", some n-hundred people breached the threshold of the capitol and were met by practically no resistance inside... and what occurred? Not a single shot was fired by the "insurgents", nothing was burned down, nobody was taken hostage or overcome.
On the flip side, the "damage" done was reported by the cultural monopoly to be some tens of millions of dollars. However, sussing out the actual figures, there was about $30,000 damage to historic artifacts, and some $10,000-20,000 miscellaneous damage. The remainder of the tens of millions in damage is the cost of the existing + additional security services, including a fence that costs hundreds of thousands a month. (I'll leave it an exercise to the reader to figure out how much their normal security detail costs, already.)
This utter violation of truth by the most powerful institutions in the world strikes me as a more flagrant threat than the "insurgents" who accomplished exactly nothing of substance.
I bring this up because both sides are filled with ignorance and dishonesty. But certain groups with a certain threshold of power engage in expressions of extreme views that are hard to unpack from truth.
It's easy to take a member of Antifa with a grain of salt, just as it is a legitimate white supremacist. It's much more difficult for people to distinguish truth from false narrative by groups who proclaim to be the arbiters of truth.
After seeing characterizations from these groups over the last year and how they characterize what occurred on January 6th, along with the rhetoric among the people engaged in the "insurrection" and extensive footage captured during the event[1], I find the extreme characterization of the events on that day to be exaggerated. In short: I believe at no point was the apparatus or continuity of the US government under any threat. At all.
Of course, this is subjective. And I am under no illusion that I'll change anyone's mind. But I will assert that a thorough review of each of these groups will yield a vastly different reality than what each present. And, within this reality, it will be shown that the only extreme behavior exists among the institutions and individuals that espouse extreme distortions of truth to the determent of everyone.
I know this doesn't really answer your request, but I hope it characterizes how I came to these conclusions. I think this is one of those cases where one truly has to look through what's passed around to find the truth. Not to confirm an implicit bias, as is usually done, but to really try to understand what's going on.
At this point, I treat every source and group as suspect. For all major claims, I now try to find counterpoints from the other side, and then further try to find as much real data as I can. Only then do I feel that I understand what's actually happening.
I treat every source as hostile to truth, because after a year of fact checking, they pretty much all are.
I strongly suggest you do, too. Fact check the fact checkers, as it were. The very presence of such extreme views should warrant skepticism.
1: There was, at one point, an excellent compilation of some 2 hours of footage arranged sequentially of the events on January 6th. It was available on YouTube and put together by a left-leaning individual (so not concerned with making things "look good"), but has since been taken down. It shows a much more tame (but not free of violence) series of events that run very contrary to the extreme characterizations among some major media outlets.
There are a lot of different people in the world. Some of them crave structure at the expense of anything else. Some crave symbolism at the expense of everything else. If a despot or coup leader writes a constitution, those people will get on side for free. It costs nothing to have a constitution.
And I doubt either of us have done a survey of dictators; a lot of them probably do just ignore the local constitution.
It is important to remember that people who think we should follow the intent of a 100 year old law (or even a 10 year old law) are a tiny minority group. The majority of humans are here-and-now, what-looks-like-a-good-idea-today?, what-do-I-see-in-front-of-me people.
Sure they write new ones to justify their rule. I’m thinking of constitutions in working democratic countries who protect the rights of citizens and how they only provide rights as long as institutions are there to provide a a theoretically just enforcement. After all constitutions in most western countries came about to restrain the sovereign.
What's the difference between the US and a despotic regime? We have a gulag system. There is a degree of legal nihilism that borders on lawlessness. For example, the DOJ charged someone with a federal crime for throwing an imported tequila bottle. When the laws mean anything and nothing, you have rule by fiat. There's corruption everywhere...
I’m sure there’s corruption to be found everywhere, however in some places you have recourse, in others you don’t. Borders are quite special areas that one ought to take with utmost seriousness anywhere. You can imagine what would happen if you threw out some coke in the Kuala Lumpur or Singapore airports.
Who said anything about a border? A person was arrested in Seattle for throwing a Jose Cuervo bottle imported from Mexico. The importation was the "foreign or interstate" nexus. Do you own anything that is not imported? That's legal nihilism.
> It took him some time, but at Justice, at CoS, at OMB, at USTR, at NEC, at Treasury, at NSC, and now at ODNI Trump has found people broken enough to serve him as he demands to be served.
The writing and amendment of constitutions does seem to correlate with the importance of conscription. The French adopted their first constitution and the "levee en masse" in quick succession. The British famously avoided conscription as hard as they could, up to the point of going into WW1 with an all-volunteer army; and they also avoided a written constitution. Israel, still relying heavily on conscription, made significant changes to its basic laws as recently as 2018.
As for the US, the longer gaps in amending the constitution: 1804-1865, 1870-1913, 1971-present (yes the 27th was adopted in 1992 but proposed in 1789) correspond within a few years with periods of little to no conscription. This doesn't bode well for prospects of further amendment, by the way.
It is a little insane how many wars were happening during those time periods.
I wonder if constitutions really did anything or it was just all technology's doing.
Maybe, unsurprising to HN, but I believe more in technology's impact than anything else. I can get onboard with the printing press having an impact, the same way social media is having one today. Technology enabled the wars, and probably similarly ended them.
I think mutually assured destruction thanks to nuclear weapons has ended large scale warfare. That technology ensures even the leaders die if a war starts. That makes it a tool of what we would consider a truly insane person.
So, I agree that technology has likely ended large scale wars for our lifetime but I think we will see evolving forms of conflict. To fight is human. We are still animals after all.
> I think mutually assured destruction thanks to nuclear weapons has ended large scale warfare.
Needed to fact-check this claim.
Wars [1] since the first and last nuclear weapons used in war - the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 - roughly ordered by death toll:
Bangladesh Liberation War, 3M
Second Congo War, 2.5M..5.4M
Vietnam War, 2.4M..4.3M
Korean War, 1.5M..4.5M
War in Afghanistan, 1.2M..2M
Second Sudanese Civil War, 1M..2M
Nigerian Civil War, 1M..3M
Rwandan genocide, 0.8M
Soviet–Afghan War, 0.6M..2M
Angolan Civil War, 0.5M
Ethiopian Civil War, 0.5M..1.5M
First Sudanese Civil War, 0.5M
Iraq War, 0.4M..0.7M
Algerian War, 0.4M..1.5M
First Indochina War, 0.4M
Syrian Civil War, 0.4M..0.6M
War in Darfur, 0.3M
Burundian Civil War, 0.3M
Somali Civil War, 0.3M..0.5M
Iran–Iraq War, 0.3M..1.1M
War on Terror, 0.3M..1.3M
First Congo War, 0.3M..0.8M
plus some 4M combined from wars smaller than 250K
TOTAL 23M .. 41M
The estimated death toll of the last big war before that - Second World War - 56M .. 85M people.
For comparison, over 100M people died in warefare in the middle ages.
>Maybe, unsurprising to HN, but I believe more in technology's impact than anything else.
Technology is a facilitator for better and more impactful wars. Has always been historically.
>Technology enabled the wars, and probably similarly ended them.
The loss of the role of Europe after WWII (when they couldn't hold the colonies anymore or fight between them for global control) that ended them.
Plus tons of national barriers have been established by then (the break-up of empires and the unification of feudal arrangmenets into countries having brought many wars between populations wanthing their own state and fighting for its borders with neighbors).
The US, on the other hand, which picked up the "top dog" role after WWII, got into countless wars during the Cold War, but it was between them the USSR and their proxies - Europe did not need to apply anymore.
And the US got into all those wars despite the US having the most advanced technology of that era. It wasn't the technology that started/stopped the wars, it was the opportunity they offered (or lack thereof in Europe).
In the next economic vacuum/opportunity we'll see a revamp. We already see it with the current trade wars...
Maybe it's more of smokeless powder that did not obscure target to the nearby shooter, and faster firing rifle that made the case for mass armies - line infantry that took years to train so there can't be too many of them coz economy won't be able to feed so many people who don't plough the land, for so long - made way for huge conscript armies you can raise in months. Suddenly everyone had so many more men able to fight, and when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Contains a rebuttal to the book's central thesis that wars beget constitutions:
"It’s not hard to demonstrate that war in this period, swelling monstrously in its global extent, army numbers and killing power, could shake existing states and empires to their foundations. The cost of modern conflict – the enormous human mobilisations, the new battle fleets – emptied treasuries and laid crushing burdens of taxation on populations. The relentless search for recruits brought grief and often violence to every village. Disruption led to discontent, sometimes to revolt. But there’s no simple and direct link between warfare – and the social turmoil it provokes – and constitution-writing. Colley shows, shrewdly enough, how rulers desperate for cannon-fodder devised a connection between soldiering and the new idea of citizenship. Join the army, and you will be entitled to a vote and to the protection of new-fangled constitutional rights, all set down in writing. (This condition effectively kept women out of political life.) In that sense, warfare did sponsor some constitutions. But was it more than a single powerful factor in a bundle of upheavals, class conflicts and royal or plebeian ambitions, any combination of which could move somebody with a pen to design a new order? It would have helped to be given at least one detailed example of the way the pressures of a specific war led to a constitution. Colley cites America’s 1787 constitution, which, she argues, was not intended primarily as ‘a blueprint of a liberal democratic society’ but was a ‘grimly necessary plan for a more effective and defendable union’ in the face of military threats from Britain, Spain and even Russia. Perhaps. On the other hand, Britain in 1815 emerged emaciated and simmering with unrest after three huge wars in a generation, but developed no written constitution. The best that can be said is that people start scribbling most frequently in stormy times, when the existing state of governance no longer carries conviction with subjects, rulers or both."
> Colley shows, shrewdly enough, how rulers desperate for cannon-fodder devised a connection between soldiering and the new idea of citizenship. Join the army, and you will be entitled to a vote and to the protection of new-fangled constitutional rights, all set down in writing.
This sounds like Starship Troopers. Can you quote a constitution where being a soldier gives you rights to vote, and where the chance of being killed (and generally brutalised) was taken up widespreadly by the general public? It's my impression that for several hundred years when even the idea of voting became widespread, most people were not going to put their lives on the line for it.
Probably should mention that the US constitution was written largely to protect bond speculators (against state legislatures trying to protect debtors).
Annapolis convention fizzles out in 1786, the economic crisis leads to states providing relief to debtors, then 1787 Philadelphia convention rewrites the constitution to protect the bondholder class.
