On Fri, Jan 31, 2020 at 9:25 PM Tanner Swett via agora-discussion
<agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote:
> Would this ordinance have any "fighting chance" against the United
> States Constitution? One may say that yes, it would. After all, the
> Constitution is part of United States law, and the ordinance is also
> part of United States law. The Constitution claims precedence over the
> ordinance ("This Constitution [...] shall be the supreme Law of the
> Land"), but the ordinance also claims precedence over the
> Constitution. And there is (as far as I know) no "third law"
> explaining how to resolve conflicts between the Constitution and city
> ordinances.Well, every new judge, lawmaker, and naturalized citizen swears an oath to defend, not United States law as a whole, but the Constitution. That oath can serve as the "third law", although I don't think the existence of the oath is *necessary* for the Constitution to win this hypothetical. > But that's nonsense, isn't it? The Constitution is supreme, and other > laws can't wrest this supremacy away from it simply by saying so. Or, > at least, that's the conclusion we would like to be able to come to. > And in order to come to this conclusion, we have to hold, as an axiom > of law, that supremacy is "sticky"—if circumstances change such that > two laws each claim precedence over each other, then the law which was > supreme before the change remains supreme after the change. > > I think many would agree that the supreme law of Agora currently > consists of those rules whose Power is 3 or greater. I agree that supremacy can be "sticky", but I disagree that it exists implicitly in Agora. The Constitution makes it quite clear that normal laws have a second-class status, both with the supremacy clause itself, and implicitly with the large number of clauses dedicated to limiting what normal laws can do: enumerated powers, Bill of Rights, etc. In contrast, all we have in Agora is a conflict resolution clause, between rules that otherwise seem to be part of the same document, the same "law". We say that Agora is defined by its ruleset, or its Rules; we don't define it by 'its Rules of Power 3 or greater', and then leave it to those rules to recognize any lesser rules. However, I was thinking of proposing an Agoran constitution as a fix for the scam. It would basically just be taking a selection of Power-3 rules and rechristening them 'constitutional articles' or something, but then adding language saying the constitution alone is the platonic successor of the prior ruleset, and the other 'rules' are moved to a new, inferior status. It might also be an opportunity to shake things up a bit, restyling so it feels like a proper constitution...
