stolen from *eddit
Was there anyone operating under the illusion that it was bulletproof? Every constitution has loopholes in the same way that all code has bugs: they’re written with implicit assumptions about the universe they’ll operate in, the rules of interpretation and the people using them. I’d like to see one constitution that doesn’t have an “emergency powers” escape hatch.
Expanding the scope of explicit prohibitions and protections only adds more points of failure and contradiction. You can’t “solve” a human society any more than you can predict the future.
We’ve been baggaged with the enlightenment era’s struggle for perfect rationality for hundreds of years now. Every political conversation has an implicit (and absurd) backdrop that ideals need to be indelible for all time and policy needs to constantly drive toward perfection. That’s the least rational perspective when we now know for an empirical fact that we’re ephemeral electrochemical meat sacks floating through a mostly lifeless universe of entropy.
The earth’s magnetic poles will flip, super volcanos will decimate agriculture, the moon will drift away, the sun will explode and humanity doesn’t have the resources or evolved inclination to escape to terraformed utopias for eternity. These are simple facts. No revolutionary or reactionary political action can change them and no constitutional commandments set down today will be useful to our Nth-great grandchildren in those scenarios.
I’m waiting for a politician to acknowledge that and let us grow past paternalistic feudalism and arrogant 19th century doctrine. Let’s treat our future generations as capable equals instead of children; gift them what knowledge we have and preserve the resources they’ll need instead of dictating instructions.
No one should expect any legal document to be bulletproof, but the real problem is that the threshold to fix bugs in the constitution is so high that the bugs are rarely fixed.
Was there anyone operating under the illusion that it was bulletproof?
Like, a lot of people? They treat their Constitution like a sacred text instead of something that should have been scrapped and rewritten after the Civil War.
What’s more interesting, it seems we don’t know exactly what the loophole was because it was never published. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel’s_Loophole
That’s not true. It was published. Wikipedia in Spanish even has some archived links https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallo_de_G%C3%B6del
Rickrolling doesn’t work if u use the Voyager App, cos it prints a thumbnail of the link below it lol
Stop it with the rick rolling, it was never funny
It was funny, for like a week
As a child of the internet, yes it was.
As another child of the internet
No it wasnt
First of all humor is subjective. Second, what the fuck is your username?
Their username is “Raccoonwithbenefits”.
No need to thank me, I’m happy to help.
I feel compelled to thank you anyway. Thank you!
If some people are laughing and you say no one is laughing, you’re wrong.
If some people are laughing and you say people are laughing, you’re right.
I’m myself always glad to be rickrolled
You were glad to be told “Hey, I think I found an answer to your question! Check this page!” when asking for help with a hugely frustrating problem that you had worked for weeks/months/years to solve, only you be digitally laughed at and the thread to die without getting any help?
I mean, you are entitled to your own reaction, but I had that happen several times, and my reaction was never anything even close to feeling glad.
Getting to hear a great song is a nice consolation, though.
I clicked the link on purpose, since you pointed it out. 😜
Chief, it’s okay to not like something. It’s not okay to tell other people they shouldn’t like it. What are you, a church?
What?
I clearly specified that he obviously was entitled to his own opinion, how do you get that to mean that I am trying to force him to share mine?
Oh yeah, you did, my bad. I haven’t had my medicine yet, sorry about that
I always wonder it’s what we see now.
Supreme court justices are lifetime appointments and can freely reinterpret the law to mean what ever they want.
Yup. We need a method of removing justices who ignore the literal text of the document in favor of their own opinions. The birthright citizenship thing is the hole that’s going to sink our country. It’s only a matter of time before some originalist decides that, while the first amendment literally includes the phrase “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” the founding fathers would have really wanted us to jail all the catholics.
all while lying about “considering xyz settled law” or “boofing in college” before being sworn in
The executive power being vested in a single person is a much bigger issue on paper. Jackson already proved the Supreme Court is toothless even when it works as intended.
I think what they are saying is that SCOTUS could simply declare someone (like the current president) to be king if they wanted, because there is no legal check on their authority
Of course. But Jackson proved you don’t even need a corrupt Supreme Court. The executive branch led by one person can decide not to enforce their ruling. I think our impeachment mechanism for removing someone from power isn’t enough to prevent a dictatorship (or even fraud in the case of Santos and Fetterman). Outside of federal judges who have very little political capital, there’s been zero full impeachments + removals of federal officials. I’m not counting resignations before removal in that.
This is the supreme court working as intended. The Supreme Court was intended as a backstop against democracy, not a system to preserve it. Less than 7% of the population was allowed to vote at the US’ founding, does that sound like a country founded by people who gave a single solitary fuck about anything besides protecting their control over “their” women and slaves?
The amendment mechanism is specified in the constitution itself, but doesn’t have an exemption for the section on amendments. Hence you can make an amendment that makes the state a dictatorship and forbids future amendments.
The loophole is obviously the amendment mechanism - it always is. You can try to close the loophole, but it’s an impossible ask.
And besides, there’s no perfect constitution. Most countries change them pretty often. The US is an outlier in that regard with its 200+ year old constitution.
Times change and so do circumstances. Any constitution that wants to stay relevant long-term needs a way to change things to match the times and stay current.
What’s important is the entire system and bureaucracy around that sole document: it can turn the most totalitarian core democratic, or the other way around. Laws, rules of conduct, procedures… They all make a stable and coherent system. It’s not all in the constitution.
It’s that the executive has so much control of judicial. The president can fire the attorney general until he gets the one he wants. Together they can pick and choose which federal laws are enforced.
I assume he passed? There’s nothing more American than loophole abuse.
The loophole is that SCOTUS decisions are arbitrary and institutions are meaningless if the rules aren’t enforced.
But that ain’t a loophole.
That’s negligence.It’s worse than that. If they don’t enforce rules for “their side”, that’s the definition of corruption. Impeach, investigate, and prosecute those we can…
Well, we need stickers that read
GÖDEL WAS RIGHT
Slightly disappointed that “Garfunkel and Oates” isn’t Art Garfunkel and John Oates.
Well played
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
Why censor re**it?
Specially since it says Reddit in the image lmao
Woah, woah, woah! A little warning before you write that word, please! I had to get my smelling salts…
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There’s lots of things he could have been concerned about. The president can direct people to commit crimes and then pardon them for the crimes committed on his behalf, and that’s ignoring more novel legal theories about pardons, like issuing preemptive pardons or self-pardons. Article 5 places little restrictions on what amendments can be made. One could imagine a dictatorship being established under the pretext of a constitutional convention packed with supporters of the dictator and ratified under state conventions similarly packed.
Yeah the pardon mechanism is pretty much a zero-day vulnerability.
Humans make the rules and enforce them. If they choose to change them or not follow them then it is up to the people to enforce them, we are the government.
TBH this is dumb. I’m just a dude yo. If I try to do anything at all effective, violent people will either murder me or lock me in a cage. That’s what the state actually is. It’s not just “humans”.
Here’s a link to wikipedia for the interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel’s_Loophole
Something is wrong with the link :/
classic issue, it got double url encoded. replace all “%25” with “%”
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Term limits are for Presidents but not Vice Presidents. Theoretically, you could abolish the office of the President, rule as the unlimited term VP forever. Also casting the tie-breaking vote in the Senate too.
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If all 3 branches of government were in agreement, Congress could declare a king and void the constitution.
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A compromised Supreme Court, with lifetime appointments, could go rogue. Legislating from the bench. Installing themselves, not the President, as the top of the government.
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Slavery is legal, ‘as punishment for a crime.’ Door remains cracked open for abuse.
I mean the idea that a democracy can vote to end democracy is a pretty well understood problem with democracy. So is the idea that the ability to enforce statute is conditional on the willingness to enforce it. In reality it really boils down to adding structural complexity to the monopoly on violence, but it’s fundamentally the same social contract as a stop sign.
Term limits apply to the VP, but they apply through the 12th amendment.
Number 3 could only happen if both legislative branches were completely useless simps who never accomplished anything at all, so basically, expect that to happen as soon as next week.
They almost overturned birthright citizenship. We’re there.
Yes 3 is already happening. The Court see themselves as high priests, with no obligation to uphold any precedent they dislike.
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Looked into that, and I think with some assumptions you can figure out what it is.
One assumption is thats constitution exists in the vacuum, the other is that it’s the president that wants to turn state into dictatorship similarly as chancellor introduced Nazism in Germany. (This is the context Godel lived in)
IMO The issue seems to be with President being able to control senate and senate picking supreme court members.
Constitution itself gives President ability to replace absent senators - > Therefore president can replace any senator unfavorable to the change, and senate can pick favorable supreme court members. Once president controls supreme court, he can redefine any law into anything.
Constitution itself gives President ability to replace absent senators
What are you referring to? Governors replaced absent senators prior to the 17th amendment, after which it’s either the governor or a special election depending on the laws of that state.
Article 2, section 2 of US constitution:
“The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.”
I’m not native English speaker, but that very much sounds like president having a lot of power to replace absent senators while it’s not in session
OK, thanks for explaining, now I understand where you got things confused.
That’s not granting the president authority to appoint Senators. It’s granting the authority to (temporarily) appoint executive officers without needing Senate approval.
Things like Secretary of State, Attorney General, etc.
NOT Senators, though. The process to replace them is explicitly defined by the 17th amendment and is entirely up to the respective state.
I’m not a lawyer, and neither was Godel. I don’t know what sort of logic is being used for legal interpretation, but “all Vacancies” is as defined as it gets. For logician, if two procedures are defined without one explicitly excluding the other, both are legal.
The text immediately before that spells out what appointments the president can make:
he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.
In context it’s clear that the vacancies being referred to are the vacancies of the positions the president has appointment power over, and that explicitly excludes senators since their method of appointment is already provided for by the Constitution.
Waiting for Godels loophole.
There’s so, so, so many obvious ways that the constitution allows for the rise of authoritarianism. It’s almost like the US constitution was designed to protect the property rights of slavers and not establish a durable democracy. The United States wasn’t even REMOTELY close to being a democracy at its founding, less than 7% of the population was even legally allowed to vote.
Much like God’s Loophole which also involves getting fucked in the ass.
I mean yeah, duh. The US constitution is fucking stupid. “Yeah lets have a bicameral legislature where states with a population of 6 get as much representation in the upper house as ones with a population of 60 million” said no one ever with a fucking brain in their skull. I spent my entire life growing up being told how the US constitution protected our “democratic norms” (as if this wretched shithole ever paid more than lip-service to democracy), while I watched hordes of illiterate racist degenerates continue to elect fascists and the systems I was told were supposed to protect democracy actively aided and abetted them.
On the issue of the senate here I present my opinions nobody asked for: I live in a country with a unicameral parlaiment with both party list and local representatives serving in it and boy it has it’s problems too. To be fair they are caused by shitty election laws and I’m fairly certain most of the USA’s problems are a result of that too. The two party system is way more harmful than the senate in my opinion and while every state getting two senators sounds stupid I do see it’s advantages.
For one it does not guarantee a good system but it does guarantee a stable one. Obviously the people who came up with it thought their system was pretty good so it made sense to make it hard to temper with. Then people figured out the system wasn’t as good as they initially thought and turns out you can change stuff if enough people around the country agree.
In my country it’s election (for everyone in the parliament) every four years, whoever wins probably gets to rewrite the constitution if they are into that and the other half of the country goes to the streets for like two days before realizing they will just do it back all in four years.
If I had to summarize I think the senate good be a good system. It isn’t but it could be.
So yeah I do envy that kind of system even if just a bit (well the fact that more than one person here seems to think things would be better if their system was more like someone else’s seems to indicate the system itself may be irrelevant), but this may not be my best take ever, given it’s 4 AM when I’m writing this lol
The US’s origin as a settler-colony shines through with how its legislature is set up, it effectively gives land a vote. A few settlers in the great state of Nowhere have as many Senators as the much more populated coastal states.
The bicameral legislature, with proportional and equal representation, has valid arguments to support it. That isn’t to say it’s perfect, but it was a compromise made for some justifiable reasons. Where we really went wrong was the Reapportionment Act of 1929, that capped the size of the house, and guaranteed small states at least one seat. This has given small states extremely outsized impact, that gets worse every year (as the growth of other states continues to out pace them). Even with a single chamber legislature, capping the members in this fashion would lead to the same problem. If the house was truly proportional, as originally intended, we’d be a very different country, regardless of the senate.
To see why this really matters, see this CGP Grey video about the electoral college and it’s relation to Congress (equal voters as reps in Congress). Then consider how the President gets to nominate judges, and consider the cascade of nonsense that follows.
The Senate should be abolished. The existence of 2 legislative chambers, both of which need to approve each piece of legislation, is an obvious flaw that leads to deadlock and cynicism about “government not working” (rightfully so), and often lets both parties plausibly blame the other. No rational consensus algorithm involves an even number of peers.
Of course, the Senate will never be abolished, because doing so would require 2/3 of the Senate to approve its own abolition, which no rational Senator would vote for. So we’ll just have to wait for the US government lose a war to a foreign adversary or some sort of revolution.
There’s an advantage to a “reactive body” and a “contemplative body” to have short term advocating for your direct constituents and a mediating push for better longer term results, but not the way we do it.
Giving votes to land is foolish.
Keep the two houses, but apportion senators by population as well.The senate is there so the rich only have to bribe as few people as possible.
