Comment by j45
Comment by j45 a day ago
It’s odd people don’t push for laws to prevent for these kinds of laws to keep bubbling up every few years.
Comment by j45 a day ago
It’s odd people don’t push for laws to prevent for these kinds of laws to keep bubbling up every few years.
This is what constitutions are for. When you have the support, you install a constitutional protection that says the government can't do this. Repealing the protection requires the same super-majority needed to pass it, so changing the law isn't just a matter of the tyrants needing to get back to 51% from 49%, they have to get from 33% to 67%.
Then you layer these protections against multiple levels of government so they'd all have to be repealed together by separate legislatures before the government is allowed to do it, discouraging the attempt.
Hah, I was going to say that sounded needlessly heavy handed.
Then I checked what the Netherlands does and found that changing the constitution doesn’t merely require you to get a majority, it also requires you to survive at least one election and keep that (super)majority before you can even begin.
Even that sounds easy compared to my country. In Australia a constitutional change requires a referendum, with a double majority condition to pass. Specifically it requires the vote in over half the states to be in favour, in addition to the overall national vote in favour.
I'd argue that this is unnecessary in Switzerland due to the existing referendum system.
After the government passes a new law, opponents have 100 days to collect 50000 signatures. If they manage, the law will not take force until it's approved by a vote by the populace.
The way authoritarianism work is they pick some enemy to rally against and convince people that the ends of stopping that evil justify the means of becoming evil. The problem with this is that it can garner 51% support within the population for temporary periods of time, so you need a system that can prevent it even in that environment. This typically means that violations of fundamental rights should require significantly more than 51% popular support or require changes in public sentiment to stick for a period of time before they can make foundational changes (e.g. only a third of the US Senate being up for election every two years).
> After the government passes a new law, opponents have 100 days to collect 50000 signatures. If they manage, the law will not take force until it's approved by a vote by the populace.
I generally hate ballot propositions within the context of California (or American States really, but I put my energy towards the State I actually live in and care the most about), but that's an interesting way to do it. Have there been any significant downsides to this specific clause[1] in Switzerland?
[1] Let me emphasize: "this specific clause" being the one I quoted. I'm not looking for a general discussion on all forms of ballot propositions whether pro or anti.
Constitutions can still be ignored, at least temporarily, by incumbent governments, as evidenced most recently by some actions of the current US administration.
Also, the sort of majority needed to enact a constitution change to install a protection in the first place, can be very difficult to attain.
In Switzerland you can change the constitution with popular votes. That only requires for 50% of the voters to agree and half of the cantons.
Then get half the voters to agree to make it two thirds. After you put the other protections in, naturally.
And then you make it so when the tyrants do get back to 51% that they can just ignore the constitution instead. And might as well make sure there are only two major political parties so even though the tyrants ignore the constitution, that the other 49% will stay busy stuffing their pockets with foreign donations.
These are independent problems.
To prevent the government from ignoring the constitution, create remedies in each of the other branches of government. The US doesn't make this as strong as it should be. Constitutional challenges in the judiciary get shut down as a result of standing or sovereign immunity when that ought not to happen, and there should be a better mechanism for states to challenge federal constitutional violations.
The two-party system in the US is caused by first past the post voting. Use score voting instead. Not IRV, not some other nonsense, a rated voting system that removes the structural incentive to avoid spoilers by limiting the number of parties.
"The existing system isn't perfect" is why you improve it, not why you give up.
If preventing the government from abusing the population is ossification then the government should be made entirely out of bones.
The Indian Supreme Court introduced the Basic Structure Doctrine in 1970, allowing the judiciary to overrule constitutional amendments if they are found to contradict the "basic structure" of the constitution.
It's original purpose, if I understand correctly, was to guarantee that fundamental rights were an essential part of the constitution and couldn't be amended away.
Wikipedia says that multiple countries appear to have adopted the principle: Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Uganda.
No it's not. Constitutions are the bones of a republic. They are the framework that gives the government power and that checks that power. Letting it mess with that too much or too often is bad.
Constitutions should be simple. They should delegate very little power to governments and focus mostly on constraining those governments. They should be changed very rarely.
Adaptable government with changing scopes belongs at lower levels of governance (mostly very local) or nowhere.
In the USA we have amendments to the constitution, which take considerable political effort to change. These amendments can restrict the types of laws that may be passed.
This system works because the changes are not just recorded in the paper of some lawbook, but in the minds of the people.
This is not true in practice. Inertia and international law / agreements bind future lawmakers. If one government joins the EU, the next still has to follow EU law even if EU law changes.
This was my understanding, which is why I was so surprised to read of Trump's edict preventing state-level AI laws for ten years.
Either the people living in the country at the time rule (directly or through representatives), or its not a democracy, but (if they are ruled by the people, or their representatives, of the past) a thanatocracy.
> It’s odd people don’t push for laws to prevent for these kinds of laws to keep bubbling up every few years.
People don't have a lot of money and a revolving door with the government, like the lobby industry has. As long as corruption is legalized, in the form of lobby, regular people will find it very hard to influence the government.
The law can't bind future lawmakers. That's a common feature of every legal system.
Any legal system can pass a law saying "we revoke this previous law".