[solidsnack9000]

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.

[kevin_thibedeau]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[Jensson]

So that means there it offers zero protection against private corporations? It seems like that is a bad idea, isn't it better to say people have rights that nobody is allowed to violate instead? Like freedom of speech doesn't matter much if private corporations are allowed to silence you.

[solidsnack9000]

There are plenty of protections against private entities in the US legal system -- other people, corporations and organizations. Those were not the issues the founders were trying to address, though -- the common law offered many such protections.

[ToValueFunfetti]

Oh, believe me, I've been on the losing side of that issue with you for ages. I absolutely agree it is unethical for anybody to violate anybody's free speech, etc, and that that multiplies with corporate power.

But that means I'm familiar with the counterpoints. A government has the power to use violence: to operate a military that can kill non-citizens and a police force that can put citizens in prison. It's a lot more important to put a check on this than on a corp, even though quantity has a quality of its own. One thing to suppress dissidents by saying they can't use your website; another to put them in the gulags.

And then the other big issue is that corporations are just a bunch of people shaking hands. You have the right to free press, so you can write a newspaper that says what you like. You can sell that paper and you can publish people's op-eds if they give you the copyright permissions. You can refuse to publish the ones you disagree with. You can make agreements with the printing company to scale up and with other authors to contribute as you become popular, and, while this shifts the practical considerations, no amount of these agreements changes your principle right to free press.

For these reasons, it's best not to include this in your constitution. I have no idea what to do instead apart from shaming and boycotting unethical companies, which of course doesn't work when most people don't care an iota about the principle of free speech. Look at Athenian democracy and sigh?

[kevin_thibedeau]

That is a list of restrictions on government power, not a grant.

[thaumasiotes]

Those are the same thing, with no difference existing between them in any context. You're complaining about the difference between a document that describes party A buying something from party B versus another one that describes party B selling the thing to party A.

Think about what it might mean for

(a) the government to give me the right to live in your house; or

(b) the government to restrict you from expelling me from your house.

[ToValueFunfetti]

The difference is whether you say "thank you" to the government that does (a) or "screw you" to the government that fails to do (b). It's the difference between me not killing you and me granting you the right to be alive- if I am doing the latter, you are my subject rather than my equal. It implies that I have the right to take it away. Welfare, the FDA, and protectionism are examples of (a) while your basic human rights fall under (b).

[nine_k]

Mr Madison, and a bunch of other Founding Fathers, might disagree a bit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights

[nine_k]

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]

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

[int_19h]

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]

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.

[int_19h]

Ultimately it doesn't matter what the constitution says if a large enough supermajority is unhappy about it. Constitutions by themselves are pieces of paper, they only work when society as a whole chooses to treat them as more than that.

[solidsnack9000]

That is true; but that is also something fundamentally different.

[maxweylandt]

The bill of rights section of the Namibian constitution may not be amended