Comment by ryandrake
5 days ago
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.
5 days ago
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.
Classic "missed 100% of the point" literature phenomenon
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.
There's nothing magical about 50%. The bar for "this policy should be inflicted on everyone" should be very high--I'd argue much higher than 50%. At the same time, the bar for "we should stop inflicting this policy on everyone" should be extremely low. I'd argue a 1/3 minority should be enough to repeal a law. If one out of three people feel they are harmed by something, maybe the government shouldn't be doing it.
7 replies →
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e.g. the law to make changing thing X require a supermajority could itself be repealed with a simple majority here, unless it was approved as an amendment to our constitution.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 The problem is that courts are not fast enough and the bad laws linger around for a while until they are repealed.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