One'll Getchya Five

countenance

Sep 1

Berlin

Auron Macintyre, writing at The Blaze (H/T OD):

…Technically, the sovereign citizens are correct that the Articles were never legally dissolved, but this has never stopped any of them from going to jail.

The point is not that the sovereign citizen crowd is right. They are very very wrong, but they are wrong in a very interesting way. In a formal sense, the Constitutional Convention's replacement of the Articles was illegal, but it hardly matters. The Constitution is the key governing document throughout American history. It is the foundation on which the majority of law has been placed, and the values enshrined in its words have become the critical binding narrative of the nation. Most people have no idea about the Articles, but everyone knows about the Constitution. Debating the legitimacy of its ratification hundreds of years later is irrelevant. The Constitution became the functional law of the land and shaped every aspect of America as we know it today. Trying to argue that fact to get out of an arrest will get you nowhere, and people will simply laugh as you are thrown into the back of a police cruiser. The formal letter of the law is less important than how it is enforced and followed. Making arguments based on the technicalities of a document that fell into irrelevance long ago is the act of the desperate or the delusional…

HW linked to this piece noting how things have changed in terms of American rightist politics in pretty short order. As late as thirteen years ago, anything on any Glenn Beck platform would have been balls to the wall MUH CONSTITUTION. Pieces criticizing it and detailing its ultimate futility were only to be found on our sector's platforms. Fast forward thirteen years…

My point is somewhat the same and somewhat different.

A legal document is only as good as the desire of incumbent elites to abide by it. Full stop.

Let me give you an example. If you've already read my comment at that OD thread, then you already know.

Basically, more or less, the same document served as the constitution of a loose mishmash in the uncertain years not long after the 1848 Revolutions and the formation of the North German Confederation in 1866, then again warmed over a bit as the constitution of the NGC itself, which was a pre-Empire Empire, from 1866 to 1871, then warmed over a bit as the constitution of the actual Empire from 1871 to 1918, and then warmed over a bit as the Weimar Constitution during the liberal democratic republican era ("Weimar Republic"), 1918-1933, and then after that, Mustache Man Bad claimed to be abiding by the Weimar Constitution during the Nazi Era, of course 1933-1945.

So what it means is that basically the same document served five vastly different ideological zeitgeisten in less than a century.

The reason it could is because there was nothing profound or special or unique about it, nothing that suggested that there was any real serious political brain power given to its framing, definitely nothing along the lines of 1787 in Philadelphia. It could be whatever whoever was able to gain power wanted it to be, anything from a post Holy Roman Empire like rigor mortis arrangement all the way to fascist ultranationalism.

And, even the 1787 Constitution ain't what it used to be and ain't what it was originally intended to be for the country it was designed to govern. In spite of all the brain power used in its framing and development. Thereby further proving the point.

You'll also see that at OD I mention the Reichsbürger, which I have mentioned here several times in the past. Now you know two reasons why their fundamental contention is off base, the first is that no political arrangement exists beyond the desire of those with power to abide by it. Which means, even though, "technically," the Empire wasn't legally dissolved, presuming that the Imperial constitution even had a formal self-destruct button, it was morally dissolved because Official Germany didn't want it anymore, and of course the occupying forces after WWI weren't going to let it anyway even if it wanted. The other answer is that the Weimar Constitution was basically the Imperial constitution anyway, warmed over, and without actual ruling hereditary monarchies.

Note: The current Bundesrepublik Deutschland Grundgesetz ("basic law") does have a self-destruct button. In fact, it came up back during the reunification era as a possibility, in that a reunified west and east would draft a whole new constitution, but, just to keep things from getting bogged down, and because everyone was tired and wanted it to be over, they opted for the easy way, which was the provision for reunification by the mere addition of territory ("Article 23"). Which the framers of the 1949 Basic Law put in there in anticipation of it being used precisely that way. It's like I wrote here some time back, using English language colloquialisms, all that happened with reunification in 1990 is that East Germany went out of business and joined West Germany. After that, the Article 23 ladder was pulled up, and the current amended Article 23 does not have a provision for adding territory, mainly as political mollification to comfort those who were anywhere between nervous about or opposed to German reunification.