Hacker News Reader

Comment by chris_wot | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, a constitution doesn't seem to prevent weird and perverse laws. Look at Florida.

Nothing is perfect. A constitution is there as a mechanism to make it harder to pass weird and perverse laws that are inconsistent with the state's values. But if the voters keep electing people who work to weaken the constitution or to amend it (or replace it altogether), it'll happen eventually.

A lot of things in modern democracies, or even older ones (like the US's federal constitution) are really there to act as roadblocks and prevent a simple majority of voters from electing some shitty politicians who make wild changes in the law. It's a bit like that scene in "Alien" when Sigourney wants to blow up the Nostromo, and has to go through a ridiculous process of flipping switches and raising and turning and lowering some metal cylinders inside a control panel in the floor: blowing up the ship doesn't really need all that stuff, but it's just there to make it hard to do quickly and easily.

>A lot of things in modern democracies, or even older ones (like the US's federal constitution) are really there to act as roadblocks and prevent a simple majority of voters from electing some shitty politicians who make wild changes in the law

I wonder if this creates a feeling among voters that it is OK or even desirable to vote for batshit politicians, because they'll be constrained by the constitution and "nothing ever changes anyway".

And then those politicians decry the constraining checks and balances as the "deep state" or "the blob".

The "deep state" was never meant to be part of the checks and balances; it was meant to be prevented by such. Yet Hobbes's Leviathan grows unchecked.

The principles of Parliamentary Sovereignty, Rule of Law, Democracy and Internationalism are all mechanisms used to also ensure that laws must be consistent with the state's values.

I dunno. Parliamentary systems are supremely malleable. Look at what is happening in Israel.

I don't think Israel, a theocracy, is representative of parliamentary systems. Almost all of Europe is governed by parliamentary systems, and most of the EU countries are fine.

Look at the federal gov.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com