Comment by sidewndr46
5 days ago
One of the failings of most modern democracies is that if a measure doesn't pass, nothing prohibits it from being introduced again immediately. I've seen ballot initiatives simply get copy pasted onto each election by city council until they happen to pass.
The deck is stacked. They only have to win once, and it's law. You have to win over and over every time it's introduced.
Heinlein in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress proposed a bicameral legislature, where one half needs a 66% majority to pass a law. The other half’s only job is to repeal laws, which they can do with a 50% majority.
At the end of that book, the protagonist explains that all the high minded Luna libertarian values broke down and were more or less abandoned in the years following their revolution, and they returned to more normal political processes.
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This is a dumb and outrageously anti-democratic idea, and is a much worse cure than the disease it's attempting to fix. If 65% of the population supports a law it's favored by 30 points-- far higher than the margin of most elections-- and yet would not exist under this system.
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It's analogous to information security.-
PS. Maybe there's something there ...
Is this really true, though? Couldn't you pass a law specifically banning the thing you don't want to happen, so any future law that contradicts it needs a supermajority to pass or something?
Depends on the system, but usually no, a parliament cannot restrict future parliaments.
e.g. the law to make changing thing X require a supermajority could itself be repealed with a simple majority here, unless it was approved as an amendment to our constitution. Which _does_ happen more often than it does for the US here, but usually just for large nationally popular things.
Privacy is a fundamental right. Politicians have passed all kinds of surveillance laws which then got declared illegal by the courts. The problem is that courts are not fast enough and the bad laws linger around for a while until they are repealed.
There is a system like this in Switzerland. The voters can change the constitution by a public initiative+vote, which binds the parliament. Only another public vote can revert the constitution.
This is e.g. why there was an initiative to constitutionally forbidding some religious buildings: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_minaret_controversy
A well-funded institution will always outlast an individual or smaller organization in a war of attrition. I think a modern Constitution needs to consider 19-20th-century concepts such as game theory if it has any hope of preventing eventual corruption.
Look at SOPA/PIPA. They simultaneously pushed the same bill through both chambers to try and guarantee it would pass. Grassroots efforts led to it being overwhelmingly blocked in both cases. And then they just slowly slipped most of it's provisions through other legislation over the years.
I think we should be at least several decades past looking at the USA as a particularly functional democratic system...
The US constitution, despite its biblical status in their culture, manages to be more of a distracting throw-word ("LOOK at how this bill helping provide healthcare OBSTRUCTS your CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT to NOT CARE ABOUT THE POOR!" (Ok, not a great example)) than a functional constitution that limits institutional overreach.
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Except for a few types of bills that customarily originate in the house, most bills are introduced roughly simultaneously in both houses so that the information for debating the bill doesn't have to be brought twice. This obviously doesn't guarantee a bill will pass because it is required to pass both houses.
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The same game theory that could make a modern constitution so robust could also be used by the bad guys to thoroughly corrupt the drafting of any modern constitution you could get enacted.
I'm of the opinion that our failure (as a society) to prevent this type of attrition of democracy — death by a thousand papercuts — will be lead to catastrophic tipping points.
As a ChemEng, I can't help but compare the current coordinated attack on the democratic rule of governments worldwide to having multiple batches of emulsions undergoing phase-inversion [0]: only so much fascism can be added before things collapse into a greasy turd.
That democracy is not robust does not mean it is not good nor something worth aspiring to. I would argue that the root cause of the sad state of democracies is the fact that we were coaxed into a snafu by virtue of accepting the false equivalence of capitalism and democracy: the first does not warrant the other; in fact they are most times at odds.
I am also reminded of the Behind the Bastards podcast and their episodes on Adolf Eichmann's careerist pursuit enabling the Holocaust... leading me to wonder how many people are burning the world down as part of a KPI... Or, in other words, are our economic systems and forms of government vulnerable to the paperclip problem?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_inversion_(chemistry)#In...
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Meanwhile, they make the dismantling of legislation near impossible. You have to go through the same process, but in inverse; and hope that miraculously the representatives in gov't become altruistic with a desire for less power.
It'd be nice if bills were one item only and on failure or passage, there would be a timeout before it could be brought to vote again either to try to pass it again or to repeal it. Like at least a year. For some things maybe five years.
That's what constitutional amendments are for, right? (or in this case ECHR updates)
Not really. There have been multiple times that California passed ballot initiatives that violated their own constitution.
At the federal level in the US we have the annoying problem that effectively everything is interstate commerce.
This system would make a lot more sense if the number of people you had to get to agree to a bill with a bunch of riders was more than 50%.