Comment by solidsnack9000

2 days ago

I'm not sure any country actually has a Constitution with rights that are not up for a vote. There is generally a separate, harder procedure for changing the "basic law" or Constitution of a country -- for example, 2/3 of delegates or a 2/3 of states or something of that nature -- but I'd be surprised if there's a country where they have literally no way to change it at all.

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solidsnack9000

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kevin_thibedeau  2 days ago

The US constitution doesn't grant rights. It's sort of the whole deal which the rest of the western world doesn't really understand, much less Americans themselves.

  • solidsnack9000  1 day ago

    Everything in the US Constitution is amendable, though -- in other words, the whole Constitution can be changed with a vote.

    The US is founded on certain ideas about natural rights -- hence not granted, per se -- but that's somewhat orthogonal to this whole issue. Even if there were an unwritten constitution, a country could base its institutions, philosophy of lawmaking, jurisprudence, &c, on natural rights doctrine (and for a time, the British did exactly that).

    The earlier post mentions "That's why you have a constitution with rights that are not up for vote." but if what they mean is natural rights, that goes well beyond any procedural issue around the basic law.

  • WatchDog  2 days ago

    The US constitution is one of the few constitutions that _does_ grant rights[0].

    [0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights

    • ToValueFunfetti  2 days ago

      That page specifically says the constitution grants rights to the government and reserves the rights of the people. There is a lot in there about the case against the bill of rights, a big part of which is that itemizing the rights implies that they are limited to the list.

      Editing to clarify that this isn't just semantics: under the 'grant rights to the people' model, a government that grants one set of rights is just as legitimate as one that grants another. It was the position of the founders that governments which deny certain rights are infringing on the pre-existing rights of the people. This is the basis for their position on revolution.

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int_19h  2 days ago

Germany is one prominent example for obvious historical reasons.

But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrenched_clause are not all that uncommon in general.

  • solidsnack9000  1 day ago

    The page you link contains many interesting examples; but many of them are simply cases of making the vote harder -- requiring unanimous consent to change English-French bilingualism in Canada, for example -- rather than cases where the law simply can not ever be changed by a vote.

    With regards to Germany, the page says:

    ...if a constitution provides for a mechanism of its own abolition or replacement, like the German Basic Law does in Article 146, this by necessity provides a "back door" for getting rid of the "eternity clause", too.

    It's really hard to have a legal system that literally can not be changed by any legitimate vote -- only by revolution -- because what sits at the bottom of most of them (all of them?) is that the consent of some body politic is necessary and sufficient to legitimate a law.

nine_k  2 days ago

Amending the US Constitution takes a lot of voting, with very large majorities in Congress / Senate and state legislatures. This has been achieved a number of times, and some of these decisions were rather unwise, like the Prohibition (18th amendment).

  • solidsnack9000  1 day ago

    Yes, there is a separate, harder procedure for changing the Constitution of the United States -- but that procedure is also a vote.