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I really fail to see what that has to do with living in a democracy. No matter which system of government, rules (in the broadest sense) can always change. Dem
by arrrg 11y ago
I really fail to see what that has to do with living in a democracy.
No matter which system of government, rules (in the broadest sense) can always change. Democracy is just the attempt to better align those rules with the interests of the people (in the broadest sense).
As long as the FBI keeps within the rules they can obviously try again. And that’s got very little to do with democracy and much more with the rule of law which is really central here.
Everyone – even and especially the government – has to adhere to the law, but there are mechanisms to act within the law or to settle questions or even to change the law, all through some sort of proper and defined process. That’s just what the rule of law is.
However, within the system of rule of law (and the particular implementation of that system in the US) there are certainly ways for questions to be more or less settled. Things that are easy to change (e.g. executive orders) and things that are hard to change (e.g. constitutional amendments). There are graduations to this – and graduations that exist on purpose.
Behind that is also the realization that quickly changing things – while sometimes necessary – is not really always desirable. So there is a certain sluggishness built right into the system on purpose. And achieving constitutional amendment levels of sluggishness is actually pretty hard to overcome in the US. It’s hard to get an amendment, it’s hard to remove it. Quite on purpose. It’s for settling questions for years.
(All of this is not to say that some states don’t try to have some core values enshrined for all eternity. The German constitution has such an article that explicitly forbids amendments of two other articles. No amendment can change that Germany is a democratic and social federal state, that there are elections and three branches of government, that there is rule of law, that every German has the right to resist against anyone attempting to remove that order, that human dignity is inviolable, that human rights are the basis of any human society and that the basic rights defined in the constitution bind as law all three branches of the government. Even if you agree that there is really no way to amend this in any way – something which constitutional scholars aren’t super-decided on – there could still be a revolution of some sort that just abolishes the old constitution … things can always change, also in technically illegal ways.)