The US Constitution is still the best one in the world.
The 18th Amendment (Prohibition) is an example of what can go wrong with amendments.
The 18th Amendment (Prohibition) is an example of what can go wrong with amendments.
Constitution design is an academic field, a very niche area of political science, and nobody would ever implement anything like the US Constitution today. It would be like using ALGOL for a new project today instead of Python or Java.
The US Constitution was very much a version 1.0 project, written before people even knew political parties would be a design constraint. Constitutions are on like version 5 or 6 now. (I'm making up numbers but you get the idea.)
While the latter has a vast test bed of real world utilization that reveals PL efficacy, the former can only be evaluated from the standpoint of theory, with a heavy heap of ideology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_politics
Lest you think this is ideological or theoretical, no -- it's entirely about collecting data of real-world political operation, how similar or different constitutional structures result in similar or different outcomes given similar or different populations and histories.
It's incomparable to PLs, which have perhaps billions of case studies on which comparative analysis can be done.
Because there are probably only ~200 PL's with truly significant usage, and they tend to have a variety of purposes and be used in historically different contexts -- much like constitutions.
The same arguments that programmers have over declarative vs imperative is much like the arguments political scientists have over parliamentary vs presidential. Static vs dynamic type checking is much like civil law vs common law. Perhaps the rise of congressionally-created federal agencies is akin to the rise of object-oriented programming?
And there's similarly nothing "scientific" in proving that one programming language is "better" than another, but people have strong opinions, and experience will tell you which ones are good ideas to pick for a project and which ones are not.
By the way, I'm not sure you know what a case study is -- it's a report written by a person. Nobody's written billions of those. And you don't do comparative analysis on case studies -- a comparative analysis is a case study, where the cases are countries (or programming languages).
I can agree with the broad point that inertia is a major cause for constitutions to stay the same over time. But I disagree with the original commenter's implication that more recently-written constitutions tend to be better than older ones due to lessons from the past, because of the idea (perhaps relating to yours) that contemporary political and ideological considerations can introduce weaknesses into more recently-written constitutions, which overlook potential lessons from the past.
Even while many people in the US might like the things a parliamentary system has to offer, there is no viable way to transition to one culturally. As much Americans hate how politics works presently, they hate the idea of replacing it even more. The socio-cultural hesitancy is real, paradoxical, and cannot be ignored.
..cites two of the most important examples
Hm... Germany's system changed at least 3 times in the 20th century. France is on its Fifth Republic. Italy is a shitshow.
To me it seems that the oldest democracies (UK, US) are the most stable (even today!) and they're majority systems (first-past-the-post).
The worst case for representative democracy is literally Hitler. The second worst (you could argue that Hitler was a unique set of circumstances) is the dysfunctional German, Italian, or French states.
The best case is probably Switzerland (party proportions barely change, I assume because the power of parliament is diminished because of elements of direct democracy that Swiss practice).
What's the worst case for first-past-the-post democracy?
Only if you believe fake news media propaganda who equated "mostly peaceful protest" with "coup" (for real examples of a coup, look no further than Libya, Ukraine, or Myanmar; hint: it usually involves guns & people getting killed).
The modern approach is generally a parliamentary system rather than a presidential system, and multiparty proportional representation (sometimes with multi-member districts) rather than two-party first-past-the-post single member districts. Some places to start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation
If you want to look at more "advanced" constitional forms, then consociationalism is a good place to start, although much less widely adopted and more controversial as to whether it's progress or not:
I’m not a constitutional scholar but I take issue with that characterization.
Federalist #10 by James Madison is all about factions, how they are inevitable, and how the system of government should be structured so that their self interests balance out for the good of the nation. Madison wrote the Virginia Plan which proposed the three branches of government and he wrote down exactly what his thinking was at the time. For most of the 18th century the British empire was a single party state ruled by the Whigs which is what they were trying to avoid by explicitly allowing room for many factions.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=bouie+s...
From The Economist's article: "[...] But academics have noticed patterns. Frequently changed constitutions are often a symptom of political corrosion, and tinkering can cause chaos in turn. Attempts to amend charters have led to violence in Burkina Faso, Burundi and Togo among others in recent years. The world’s longest charters, such as India’s and Brazil’s, are also among the most changed.
"There is a strong case for brevity, too, in which constitutions establish the ground rules of how a state functions and leave the specifics to politicians. Overly long constitutions often create conflicts between articles that can only be resolved with further tampering. And “if everything is highest law, then nothing is highest law anymore,” points out Dr Versteeg. Omnibus amendments require voters to balance the merits and drawbacks of many changes at once, making it harder to generate consensus."
The viewpoint by the writer of The Economist's article would actually conflict with the view held by the original commenter, as it notes that many more recently-written constitutions that have taken different approaches from older constitutions have contributed to political instability (though the writer also acknowledges that other factors have also been at play behind instability).
[1] https://www.economist.com/international/2022/08/25/dictators...
I'll take a version 1.0 which is focused on reifying the natural God-given rights of man vs version 3.0 which reifies power of the State & Corporate "persons" over man.
The primitive low-level tech opens the space to what is possible. Improving low level components opens up a large space of possibility that is often inconceivable at the time the improvement is done. The reverse is disimproving low level components restricts the range of possibilities.
This is why we have seen so much churn in the front end & application libraries. More recent programming languages and front end & application libraries have sought to improve the low level apis to improve the development context of complex software.
A more evolved system (e.g. version 3.0) built with worse components is bound by the lack of quality of it's underlying components. So if version 3.0 Constitution is built with disimprovements in version 2.0 or earlier, it could be rendered worse than a version 1.0 built with quality components & quality first principles.
The article argues that newer versions of constitutions are often overly lengthy due to attempting to include too many laws within the constitution, which can cause problems. The article argues: "Overly long constitutions often create conflicts between articles that can only be resolved with further tampering. And “if everything is highest law, then nothing is highest law anymore,” points out Dr Versteeg. Omnibus amendments require voters to balance the merits and drawbacks of many changes at once, making it harder to generate consensus."
In brief, the article's view is that the inclusion of too many laws in more recently-written constitutions leads to greater incentives for constitutional rewrites as times and political views change, which is why the article favours shorter constitutions that guarantee fundamental rights, and are thus difficult to rewrite.
[1] (Paywalled, though I've included a summary above): https://www.economist.com/international/2022/08/25/dictators...
But neither are really great or terrible. Canada didn’t really change much, and South Africa hasn’t been doing great.
The “West German Basic Law” was widely condemned:
* it was unrealistic to have strong privacy protections for a nation filled with refugee camps and few private homes
* the protections for the family were meaningless when so few nuclear families survived (something like 70% of the country was female)
* the mandate to reunify was unrealistic and possibly undesirable
* there were no provisions for the victims of Nazi Germany
* it favored the establishment of strong, stable leaders - which brought back memories of Hitler
* many of the civil liberties - such as abolishing the death penalty - were just excuses to prevent punishment of war criminals (which was true)
* claiming the lands East of the Oder as part of Germany was unrealistic
Buy it turned out to be an extremely effective Constitution that lead to the transformation of Germany and its eventual reunification (mostly).
The amendment process is very onerous. 7/10 provinces haven't ever really agreed on the colour of the sky, let alone something as important as new constitutional rules. It took some very special backroom wrangling to pass it in the first place and I don't see a path to amending it during my lifetime. Meech Lake came close and very nearly broke the country.
The notwithstanding clause was necessary to get it passed at all, but really takes some of the teeth out of the charter of rights and freedoms. When parties hold majority control of the House of Commons or a provincial legislature a lot of what keeps their power in check is mostly norms it turns out. One of the few actual laws that would really impede them is the charter, but portions of it can be ignored.
Overall I'm very happy we have the 1982 Constitution Act, but I certainly wouldn't offer it up as a blueprint if someone came asking for assistance in drafting a constitution. The Charter itself as a portion of the larger constitution (minus the notwithstanding clause) is a very special piece of law that deserves some recognition internationally, but as a whole it wasn't even 10 years before the real issues were exposed with the whole document.
She suggested insurrectionists in Egypt emulate the South African and Canadian Constitutions, rather than the US Constitution.
She wasn’t insulting the US Constitution, just emphasizing it’s the product of circumstances that didn’t apply to Egypt.
Seems like the Canadian Constitution is similarly constructed - taking the specific time, place, customs into account.
Not a bad thing at all.
https://www.factcheck.org/2018/12/ruth-bader-ginsburg-taken-...
> My source for Canada and South Africa is Ruth Badger Ginsburg.
So just the one legal scholar then?
Ruth Badger Ginsburg should be a Supreme Court Justice on a kids show filled with animals who makes landmark decisions the real Ruth Bader Ginsburg would have proud of.
Your own link contains my very point: the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is a modern piece of human rights legislation. RBG specifically calls out the Charter, not the Canadian constitution as a whole.
The Charter is like the US Bill of Rights, a small section of a larger document dealing specifically with civil rights. The rest of the Canadian constitution is a messy bit of parliamentary wrangling from across 2 centuries delegating the country of Canada into existence and separating it from the UK.
So the law can override it as they please? I prefer the US version that says "Congress shall make no law ..."
We're much more like the UK than the US in the function of government and the construction of laws, though Parliamentary Sovereignty is expressly subject to judicial review in Canada, something the UK is going to have to grapple with over the next decade now that they are no longer subject to the European Court of Human Rights.
The government can't just override the charter as they please using the language in the Guarantee. The charter allows for things like hate speech laws, but they have to fall under "reasonable limits", something the Supreme Court of Canada rules on all the time, nearly always in favour of citizens compared to the government. A recent example being medically assist death, where the Supreme Court ruled bans on assisted death violated the Charter.
The US is a free speech extremist country, but since even the US Supreme Court has ruled there are limits on speech (like threats) this isn't a night and day difference between our countries in my view. The US allows far more speech than Canada does, yet we rank higher on the press freedom index.
The thing that really lets the Charter down is section 33, the 'notwithstanding clause'. It allows the federal and provincial governments to pass laws overriding certain rights for a period of 5 years. The charter itself would likely never have come into being without it, but it does take some of the teeth away.
Jeez, it is hardly extreme. BTW, free speech does not include libel, slander, specific threats, or inciting riots.
> we rank higher on the press freedom index
Canada does? Based on what? Note that no matter how extremely negative the press was about Trump, never once did the government make any legal threats against them about it.
Reporters Without Borders maintains a press freedom index. Their justification is detailed here: https://rsf.org/en/index
Canada ranks 19, the US 42
I remember an interview with John Carreyrou, the French-American journalist who broke the Theranos scandal.
He said very clearly that if it had happened in France, no press outlet would have covered it.
Theranos had a board of trustees that included Henry Kissinger, a future secretary of defense, etc.
And the publisher of the, WSJ, Rupert Murdoch, had invested hundreds of millions.
I doubt it would have been published in the UK or Germany either.
I’m shocked to hear this! I thought the UK was still very much subject to the European Court of Human Rights!
Just because you wrote a good constitution doesn't make the government good. You can put anything you want into a constitution if you don't have the institutions set up right to maintain it.
Further, it's intentional that the federal government at times becomes unable to do it's job in times of intense disagreement. That was an intentional design feature.
THAT'S where the "V.1" honor comes from.
Most that seek to change the constitution want to take away rights or add new ones. It is good it is hard to change, especially when many of the change seekers can’t even get the popular support to get a law passed or a veto overridden.
I used to admire the US constitution. I've grown up now.
Who could possibly be opposed to human rights - i.e. human beings having rights? And indeed, the US constitution does appear to be largely about rights.
Over the years I've increasingly leaned to the view that these rights are mostly a legal fiction, and that the things that are supposedly rights are highly subjective political footballs. Nowadays I think of a constitution as a largely non-political set of rules for how government works; i.e. it's a description of a mechanism, not a description of an outcome.
From that point of view, the US Constitution is an awful constitution.
What do you mean? US citizens have pretty much the most rights of any people in the world.
Can you list the countries that guarantee freedom of speech, freedom to bear arms, freedom from unreasonable searches and freedom to stay silent (not incriminate yourself)?
(Of course, the implementation of these rights is ... imperfect.)
In practice the US performs rather badly when scores on civil liberties.
Here is one methodology https://knoema.com/atlas/ranks/Civil-liberties-index?mode=am... but you can find similar results across many others.
Just take our prison population per capita if you want a glaring metric on how poorly we do at freedom.
Nothing says "human rights" like criminalising protests, confiscating money, and prohibiting unvaccinated people from leaving the country.
Which IMO is mostly a reflection of a country in which a large subset of the electorate do not really believe in human rights beyond the extent of a useful legal fiction to be followed in the default case and quietly ignored in the pursuit of specific outcomes.
If the people had a hardline stance on human rights and civil liberties the government would reflect that.
My contention is simply that these rights are legal fictions and political footballs, and should not be in-scope for a constitution. They shouldn't be baked-in; they should be simple legislation.
I mainly don't believe in these "rights". I think people should be treated fairly and equitably; and I think that should be a matter of law. But constitution is about meta-law - how laws are made, not what their effect is.
How many times have you seen people on HN advocating, to much popular support, for infringing upon the 4th amendment for people who are involved in specific types of business or the infringing upon 5th amendment protections for people engaged in certain activities?
The fifth constrains courts from forcing people to testify against themselves.
These rules are often framed as "rights", but they are really restrictions on the power of government officials.
I'm not sure why you have put this in terms of "specific types of business" and "certain activities". What types of business, and what activities, receive special protection under those amendments? What are you getting at?
They're inherent to being a human being - those "inalienable" rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence.
The US Constitution did not create those rights, it recognized them.
/me not subject to USA law.
I've already said that I think "rights" are a fiction; so to me, inalienable rights are an inalienable fiction. Just because they've been written down doesn't make them real.
What are these rights? (I'm not asking for their enumeration; I want to know where they come from, what they're made of, if you like). I did philosophy at University (a long time ago), including a module on political philosophy. I don't know of any basis for the notion of a "right", other than privileges freely granted by others.
So, for example, I have a right to a state pension; I've paid for it all my working life, and I'm over 65. But the government can infringe that supposed right simply by passing a budget that abolishes it. It's a privilege, not a right.
The US constitution claims to protect these "rights" from infringement by legislators, enforced by the Supreme Court. But I have to say, the Supreme Court nowadays looks more like just another legislative body than a superior appeals court.
As far as "communist rights" are concerned, I don't think the idea of rights has much prominence in communist thought.
And your linking of rights (as you conceive of rights) with "thriving" (which you haven't defined, but I assume you mean wealth) is pretty fishy. Many people in the USA are not wealthy at all.
And you still aren't addressing my question, which is what are rights, and where do they come from.
We're 'free' in an Orwellian sense. Freedom to be educated, have health care regardless of one's employment|wealth, welfare with dignity for those in need — none of these concepts come into consideration into what 'freedom' actually means in practice.
My political leanings started libertarian. Over the years, I have traveled and read, and came to see the US for the farce it is, and encounter the deluded population convinced America is 'the greatest nation ever'. It has potential for sure, but when will we unlock it and truly taste real freedom?
None of the Bill of Rights is guaranteeing free stuff.
The US has thrived, meaning its definition of rights is reasonably on the mark.
Anyway, my point was that I don't think these rights exist, and that framing things in terms of rights is arse-over-tit. I'm not interested in arguing whether the US chose the right set of rights; I'm saying I have no idea what a "right" is, other than a privilege granted by law.
Americans love to wallow in "oh, woe is us!" whereas if one reads history books, the US is in a golden age.
Yep, and Constitutions define these privileges and make them supreme, above other laws.
And you're still baldly asserting that rights exist, without explaining what rights are or where they come from.
Ultimately all constitutions are just ink on paper (or parchment depending on age) and are only as good as the people who govern.
> things that are supposedly rights are highly subjective political footballs.
The fabric of society is a pitch where political football is played. The US Constitution is a product of the times when it was created, and so our pitch was created to balance the power of populous states vs. rural states with proportional representation (House) and fixed representation (Senate) and the electoral college. It took great pains to prevent rule by fiat of the executive because of the lesson from English rule. It's surprising it has held up, but a lot of the pressures that existed when it was created are still present (red state/blue state is really urban/rural) in the US today.
> From that point of view, the US Constitution is an awful constitution.
If a slow, plodding government that is largely effective only when faced with unifying crisis or there is a very high level of consensus is what you want, then the US Constitution works.
How Texas draws congressional districts is up to the people of the Great State of Texas.
I think it's crazy that national (federal) elections are held under rules that vary from state to state; and that a congressional district the shape of a snake is permissible at all, whoever gets to draw the district. It seems obvious to me that national elections should be held under uniform national rules. But it's none of my business; I don't live in the USA, and I'm not from the USA.
It’s a delineation of governmental responsibilities between the various federal branches and the states. It wasn’t until the Bill of Rights was later ratified that it has anything to say about individual rights other than to deny them.
The (lack of a) Bill of Rights was a major concern when the Constitution was drafted. It was passed with the promise that amending it with a Bill of Rights would be the first priority.
The Constitution was only passed without it so the convention wouldn't keep dragging on.
The mistake here is thinking that "political science" is actually a science, and so being on "version 5 or 6" is actually some kind of objective marker of progress in knowledge. That's a dubious assertion at best.
Scalia has a great speech on this. Our Constitution has been outdone several times over the centuries, even by Russia. Ours is the best, though, because ours is still standing and the others are not. The bottom line is that the gridlock and glacial pace of progress that others decry is what gives the Constitution its robustness that other lack.
I mean, Americans always talk about their Constitution's supremacy, but they never want to give it to others (not even to Puerto Rico).
Then again, US nation building tends to be an abysmal failure (though, tbf, constitutional structure is not high on the list of defensible reasons for that.)
Besides, what committee ran Japan? McArthur ran it as he saw fit.
The US took exquisite care after WWII, to the point of sharply limiting things like denazification, to preserve civic and administrative infrastructure of the relatively advanced states it occupied to avoid having to nation-build in Germany and Japan.
For the most part I think the constitution is fine, but I also think it's standing in the way of having meaningful debates about the future of the country because half the debates can be quickly shut down with "the constitution".
A key test for a constitution is whether a substantially similar constitution would pass the amendment process today. If it wouldn't, the constitution is obsolete and should be rewritten. If people no longer believe in the spirit of the constitution, they will increasingly try to subvert it. Institutional checks and balances may protect the constitution for a while, but if people don't believe in the constitution, they probably won't believe in the institutions either.
Now these are all very successful societies relative to most of the world but imo its pretty hard to argue that the US is special.