"The notion that it is the responsibility of every individual, be he executive, legislator, judge, bureaucrat, military officer, or any other civil servant, to judge the constitutionality of affairs and refuse to support that which is unconstitutional may sound radical today, but it was the intent of the founding fathers and the only conception that recognizes the humanity and agency of American citizens."
Just a warning about this: in Germany we have something called the "Remonstrationspflicht" ("duty for remonstration"), which is actually in the law due to the Nazi experience, and which says that civil servants don't only have a right to refuse orders that are unlawful or against the dignity of the human being, but that they have the duty to do so.
Needless to say, in practice this doesn't work at all. During Covid there had been quite a few civil servants, including teachers and medical officials, who tried to use this law, but they were just laughed out of the room, fired, smeared, whatever.
And of course, Germany's domestic spy agency, whose main task these days is the "battle against the far-right" and who's busy persecuting and censoring citizens and prohibiting political parties, is called "office for the protection of the constitution".
So even if you have explicit laws about this stuff, and directly implement the basic idea you outlined above and that was the founding fathers' intention, unfortunately humans gonna human, and authoritarians gonna authoritarian.
Which obviously doesn't take away from your point, but it's really sad to watch how toothless these things are when they meet a brainwashed population in a state of mass psychosis.
"The notion that it is the responsibility of every individual, be he executive, legislator, judge, bureaucrat, military officer, or any other civil servant, to judge the constitutionality of affairs and refuse to support that which is unconstitutional may sound radical today, but it was the intent of the founding fathers and the only conception that recognizes the humanity and agency of American citizens."
Just a warning about this: in Germany we have something called the "Remonstrationspflicht" ("duty for remonstration"), which is actually in the law due to the Nazi experience, and which says that civil servants don't only have a right to refuse orders that are unlawful or against the dignity of the human being, but that they have the duty to do so.
Needless to say, in practice this doesn't work at all. During Covid there had been quite a few civil servants, including teachers and medical officials, who tried to use this law, but they were just laughed out of the room, fired, smeared, whatever.
And of course, Germany's domestic spy agency, whose main task these days is the "battle against the far-right" and who's busy persecuting and censoring citizens and prohibiting political parties, is called "office for the protection of the constitution".
So even if you have explicit laws about this stuff, and directly implement the basic idea you outlined above and that was the founding fathers' intention, unfortunately humans gonna human, and authoritarians gonna authoritarian.
Which obviously doesn't take away from your point, but it's really sad to watch how toothless these things are when they meet a brainwashed population in a state of mass psychosis.
Ok so once we have PID… ?
……………..
…………….
Leaders will assume tremendous risk.
Well.
Flip the Risk and we’re getting somewhere.
The problem is people only take one side of the risk equation seriously. This is why accountability is essential.
PID doesn’t mean paper
YL:DR There is no such thing as law.
There is only context.
What’s YL:DR?
Supposed to be "TL;DR".
Hard for me to type.
So that was your takeaway or you didn’t read it because of your a priori certainty law doesn’t exist?
Neither.