Hacker News Reader

Comment by richmarr | Hacker News Reader

> especially when the UK doesn't even have a constitution

Yeah we do. British Constitution is ace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Constitution_(solitair...

Oh, if you meant the government thingy no, we kinda accept that stuff changes... which I think is more useful than holding any one thing as particularly holy and untouchable. The US has got its knickers in a proper twist with all that "money is speech" "what the framers intended was" stuff. It's fetishised. Your 21st amendment even repeals the 18th amendment, what's the point?

View on HN

By your own admission, the UK is driven by expediency. The state can do essentially whatever they want, as long as they have a Really Important Reason. Get rid of jury trials for northern Ireland for a few years, because it's cheaper than properly protecting juries? No problem!

The American constitution exists to say that there are some things the government ought not do, even if it makes their job harder, and that if you truly must do those things, you have to convince more than 51% of the country that it's okay. Californian cities can take their own people's guns away, but it is not their place to take them away from rural Kansas, where a cop is an hour away at best. You have to have at least minimal evidence that somebody did something before you can ransack their house.

I readily grant that our current practice is to play silly games to say that these lines aren't being crossed when they are (border phone searches, stop and frisk, you name it).

The other advantage of the UK system is that when the government comes up with some dumb new idea to abrogate human rights for people born on Tuesdays or whatever, the public debate is couched as "is this really a good idea?"

In the US it gets hung up on "is this constitutional?", which sort of misses an important point.

> Get rid of jury trials for northern Ireland for a few years

I believe we still have Diplock courts. They were actually put in place because internment without trial was considered too draconian. The kind of thing that would never occur with a constitution (give me a G...)

> Californian cities can take their own people's guns away

How does that work? Is California accepting that the 2nd amendment put in the bit about a militia for a reason or something else? I mean, the US Constitution isn't meant to be a state by state menu is it?

> You have to have at least minimal evidence that somebody did something before you can ransack their house.

I believe you have to have reasonable cause. You don't actually need any evidence. And, as you point out, you've all had a few years to drum up some excuses when it becomes inconvenient.

I'm sure having a constitution is comforting and all but, in reality, you're in exactly the same boat as the UK and for exactly the same reasons. We have checks and balances too.

And when the state, in its infinite wisdom, chooses to bend them, we sometimes get quite annoyed (the UK version of angry).

Quite annoyed is a bit extreme. I'm miffed but annoyed? Rocking the boat mate.

Not having a written constitution isn't as bad as it seems. The government can't do what they want. The courts do rule against them.

We have quite a deep history of law that sets things out. Thousands of years. Sometimes we get silly things, like until recently pregnant women having the right to piss in a bobby's helmet, but it's very much a case of a complex set of rights wrestled from the ruling classes over those thousand years or so.

The government is in a precarious situation at the moment. They are extremely weak. It wouldn't take a whole lot to get this legislation outright neutered. If Tom Watson is working on it, I imagine Labour are doing just that.

America has plenty rules which aren't written down, too. You just lack a good word for them, having decided to use constitution to mean a particular bit of paper, which is periodically found to contain rights unknown to its authors.

A nice example is the slowly shifting norms around executive orders.

A bigger example: didn't both Liberia and Mexico basically xerox the US constitution? The bit of paper, I mean. For clearly the unwritten "ways we do things" in everyones heads were very different.

The problem the US has is that the constitution has two roles. Firstly it specifies the relationship between the federal government and the states (a kind of treaty). Secondly it specifies the rights of individuals.

While the treaty between the states and the federal government has very little reason for change, the rights of individuals need to change as society changes.

But the US constitution does not lend itself to easy modification, so in practice the Supreme Court is used to "interpret" further individual rights into existence.

Three roles — it gives individuals rights versus the federal government, which on the one hand is a fairly logical extension of a treaty between the states and the federal government but which on the other hand has the problems you describe — and it also gives individuals rights versus the states, which is a totally different and very weird kettle of ball games.

On the plain meaning of the text, an amendment like "Congress shall make no law …" wouldn't even bind the states in the first place, but apparently it does.

Yes and when the rights of states clash with the rights of individuals, there are often nonsensical consequences.

For instance, in 2005 the US was one of the last countries to abolish the death penalty for children, not by passing a law, but on the action of the judiciary interpreting a new individual right into the constitution (i.e. to not be executed for crimes committed under the age of 18). Quite how they managed to get the age 18 out of the words "cruel and unusual punishments" is something to ponder.

Prior to that, the states had an inviolable constitutional right to execute children.

So the US was prevented from ratifying the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child because Congress couldn't make a law violating the right of states to execute children, yet the US states could not individually ratify the UNCRC themselves because that would be violating the right of Congress to make treaties.

The outcome of this battle of rights between governmental bodies, is that children in the US are to this day denied individual rights that they would otherwise have under international law, or even national law, and rely on 12 judges to extract their rights from thin air.

>Get rid of jury trials for northern Ireland for a few years, because it's cheaper than properly protecting juries? No problem!

Handily ignoring the fact that juries are suboptimal, and that at least these people had trials, unlike eg guantanomo etc etc.

The fact is both types of constitution have positives and negatives. Neither the British or American system is perfect and both are open to abuse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com