But that's the point of having constitutional limitations on political power and how it is exercised. Unfortunately, it's all to common to hear arguments that the exercise of political power should have no limitations so long as it's approved of by a quantitative majority.
A sufficient majority can change the constitution though. It’s impossible to have a mechanism that prevents that. So this is merely a debate of 51% vs. 67% (or whatever).
The amendment process is slow and complex by design. It's not just a one-off supermajority, but rather a supermajority in both houses of Congress (or a special amending convention) followed by a supermajority of states each individually ratifying a proposed amendment. The most recent constitutional amendment took over 200 years to be ratified.
The nature of the process makes it very difficult to misuse constitutional amendments a mechanism for implementing policy to deal with ephemeral controversies or emotion-laden causes. The only time that really happened was with the 18th amendment, and that was a disaster, which ultimately was repealed.
The amendment process has indeed become impractical in the US, and given that "nature abhors vacuum", a different and easier route to bending the constitutional law was found - nominate your people to SCOTUS and let the interpret the Constitution favorably to you.
I would argue that this is a very suboptimal solution to the problem.
My comment was about democracies and their constitutions in general. I’m neither Canadian nor American. Yes, there are significant degrees in how easy or hard it is, but in the end if you have a sufficiently large majority that wants to deprive a minority of their rights, the mere fact of having a democracy by itself doesn’t prevent it.
In fact, democracy in itself might enable that, which is why it's important to have strong boundaries around all political decision-making, whether democratic or otherwise.
I don't know of any western democracy that has something this blatant in their constitution, though I might be wrong:
>A simple majority vote in any of Canada's 14 jurisdictions may suspend the core rights of the Charter. However, the rights to be overridden must be either a "fundamental right" guaranteed by Section 2 (such as freedom of expression, religion, and association), a "legal right" guaranteed by Sections 7–14 (such as rights to liberty and freedom from search and seizures and cruel and unusual punishment) or a Section 15 "equality right".[2] Other rights such as section 6 mobility rights, democratic rights, and language rights are inviolable.
I don't think the US or France can just do a simple (parliamentary!) majority vote to override almost every right their citizens have. And this is not theoretical, the non withstanding clause is getting used more and more frequently here in Canada. And remember, since it's just a simple majority in parliament, it's only a matter of getting around 35% of the total votes. So a government that has 35% the popular vote can just suspend any right we have. Is that actually common?
> A simple majority vote in any of Canada's 14 jurisdictions may suspend the core rights of the Charter
This is misleading. It also has to be in their juridsiction.
For example, alberta (25 years ago) tried to use the notwthstanding clause to ban gay marriage. It didn't work because it was out of their juridsiction.
> So a government that has 35% the popular vote can just suspend any right we have.
The notwithstanding clause only applies to some parts of the charter not all of it. It also doesn't apply to rights from other parts of the constitution.
It might also be possible for the federal government to disallow particularly egregious rights violation by provinces. I think its still an open question if fed still has power of reservation or disallowance or not.
> I don't think the US or France can just do a simple (parliamentary!) majority vote to override almost every right their citizens have.
What about the WWII Japanese internment camps? That wasn’t even a legislative action, it was Executive order 9066. There’s also the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act during the civil war.
I agree it’s not as blatantly spelled out in the Constitution but the mechanisms exist.
America is specifically designed not to be this and to prevent a tyranny of the majority because original immigrants to the USA were from minority religions where they lived in Europe and had been terrorized plenty.
And that designed failed spectacularly from the beginning. As the post you're replying to points out, slavery is essentially the majority deciding that a minority and their descendants have no rights whatsoever. This state of affairs lasted until the 1860s and even then those rights for the minority were severely curtailed until at least the 1960s.
I wouldn't say it failed spectacularly. The trade-off was well known amongst many even at the founding of america. There would simply be no America if slavery was disallowed from the beginning.
A hospital could still be a net positive for society, even if sometimes people go there and die who otherwise would have lived if they did not go to the hospital.
Was there a majority that was pro-slavery? My understanding was the agreement was that it was a minority that wanted slavery, and that slavery would be kept to that minorities states?
The Puritans were a minority group among the original settlers to the US, among the Dutch, French, Spanish, other British settlers and others. The founders and architects of the Constitution and US government were not Puritans.
America had human slaves built into its democracy until the majority said otherwise. Unsure why this is so shocking.