Sorry this is a bit long, but any shorter and I risk losing some of the points being made.
No, you don't get to take home the whole basket because I decided to stop arguing over your use of terminology.
This is not merely terminology.
You said, “So be it. The king is not the final authority.”
That is the central point. If the king is not the final earthly authority, then we are no longer talking about the form of constitutional monarchy Bob was defending. It's another form of government that has a king in it.
Even with my modification, it is still a constitutional monarchy, who's king is the sovereign of the nation so long as he doesn't abdicate that authority by ignoring the law that gives him that authority in the first place - your fear of grand conspiracies against the king not withstanding.
But “sovereign so long as” is doing a lot of work there.
If the king is sovereign only so long as some earthly process or group agrees that he has not forfeited his authority, then he is not the final earthly civil authority. His sovereignty is conditional on the judgment of the men who administer that process.
You are describing the king’s violation of law as a kind of forfeiture or abdication. Okay, but forfeiture still has to be determined. Someone has to say, “This act qualifies. The law has been violated. The violation is egregious. The evidence is sufficient. The king has forfeited his authority.”
That is where the abstraction ends.
The law may provide the standard, but men apply it. Men have to interpret the facts, weigh the evidence, decide whether the violation rises to the required level, and enforce the consequence.
Appealing to “the law” does not avoid the authority question. It only pushes it back a step.
If those men can declare that the king has forfeited his authority, then their judgment controls the throne at the decisive point. That means the king is not sovereign in the final earthly sense. He rules subject to the approval of the mechanism that can declare him to have forfeited his rule.
No, it does answer it. You just don't want to see it.
No, I see the answer you are giving. I am saying it does not reach the actual objection.
You are answering, “What if the law contains a procedure for removing the king?”
I am asking, “Who administers that procedure, or at least controls the process, perhaps not legally, and what authority do they have once they can remove him?”
The problem as has been described is not merely that one evil king might rule. The deeper problem is where final earthly authority should terminate in a nation ruled by sinful men.
One basically evil man with final earthly authority is dangerous. I have never denied that. But more basically evil men with final earthly authority are not an improvement merely because they act through a process. It just relocates the danger from one visible ruler to a less visible ruling mechanism.
The law may define the standard, but men apply it. And if those men, or the men influencing them, can remove the king through that process, then final earthly authority no longer rests with the king at the decisive point.
That is the objection your answer has not addressed.
Semantics.
It was men who installed him on the throne in keeping with the law to begin with. The same men can remove him by the same law they used to install him.
No, not semantics.
Installing or recognizing a king according to the law is not the same kind of act as judging and removing a sitting king.
The first is ministerial. The law says who the king is, and men recognize that fact according to the lawful succession process.
The second is judicial and coercive. Men would have to accuse the king, judge the facts, determine that he violated the law, decide that the violation forfeits his authority, and enforce his removal.
Not the same thing.
The men who recognize that a man has become king do not thereby stand over him as his superiors. But the men who can judge, condemn, and remove a sitting king do.
Appealing to “the same law” here does not solve the problem. Law still has to be administered by men. And if those men can use that law to remove the king, then those men possess authority over the throne at the decisive point.
You speak of it as if the law was giving judges the authority to remove the king by fiat, which of course would be a recipe for the sort of conspiracies you're afraid of, but that isn't what I'm proposing.
It does not have to be removal by fiat for my objection to stand.
And these are not “conspiracies.” They are hypotheticals meant to test the structure of your proposal. Testing a mechanism by pointing out that it can be abused, captured, or turned against the very office it was meant to protect, is not conspiracy-mongering.
A mechanism does not have to be easy, simple, or immediate in order to be superior. It only has to be capable of removing the king. If it can remove him, then it exists above him at the decisive point. If it cannot remove him, then it does not restrain him when he refuses to be restrained.
If the installation of a king according to the law is not outside the purview of a nation's people, then neither is removing him in accordance with the same law that was used to install him.
That doesn't follow.
Recognizing the lawful king is one thing. Judging and removing a sitting king is another. The first acknowledges who has authority under the law. The second exercises authority over the man who already holds the throne.
Appealing to “the same law” does not make those acts equivalent.
If that mechanism can only be enforced as a result of the king violating the law in some egregious manner then that is precisely the effect it should have! The fear of the law should exist within the mind of the king as much as it exists for his subjects.
You keep sliding between “the law” and the men who administer it.
Yes, the king should fear the law. He should fear violating God’s law, violating the Constitution, violating the Criminal Code, being exposed as wicked, losing the trust and cooperation of his people, and ultimately answering to God.
But that's not what I'm objecting to.
I am objecting to an earthly mechanism, controlled or administered by other men, that can declare the king to have forfeited his throne. That is not merely “supervision of the law” in the abstract. Law does not supervise anyone by itself. Men supervise. Men interpret. Men accuse. Men judge. Men enforce.
When you say the king should fear the law, I agree.
But what I was talking about is that the king would instead fear the men who control the process that can remove him, rather than God, because they have the final say on whether he remains king.
And that sword cuts both directions. It may restrain an evil king, but it may also control a good king. The same mechanism that can remove a tyrant can also be used against a righteous king by men who call him a tyrant.
All an evil king need do is appease the men who can remove him, and he need not fear their ire. A good king, however, is constrained by principle. He will not flatter, bribe, compromise, or play institutional games merely to keep the throne.
Any opposition would be in spite of his good behavior. Remember, evil does not need some complicated reason to remove a good man from power. If his position stands in the way of evil spreading, that is reason enough.
Supervision of the law! That's the whole point!
Again, I wasn't referring to supervision by the law, as an abstract standard. I was referring to supervision by the men who control the removal process, because men are the ones who interpret, apply, and enforce the law, as it doesn't do those things on its own.
The question is who has authority to apply the law against the king in a way that removes him from office. If some men have that authority, then they stand above the king at the decisive point, and the problem has not been solved, only relocated. Instead of asking only, “What if the king is wicked?” we must now ask, “What if the men who can remove the king are wicked?”
And more basically: who, not what, defines “wicked” in practice?
Do you see the problem yet?
Again this statement is presupposing seditious behavior which could occur whether my suggested modification existed or not and for which the law already has provisions in place to deal with.
“Presupposing seditious behavior” is the wrong frame.
I am not assuming men will illegally overthrow the king, though that is certainly a possibility. I am asking what happens when the legal mechanism itself becomes the path by which corrupt men remove him.
That is not sedition in spite of the process, but rather, sedition laundered through the process.
Without your modification, wicked men who want to remove the king have to act against the structure. With your modification, they can work through the structure while claiming to defend the law.
And saying “the law already has provisions to deal with that” does not solve the problem, because evil men do not care about provisions in the law, except when those provisions can be used for their own benefit. They will violate the law when it restrains them and appeal to the law when it helps them.
Such legal provisions only push the same question back one step:
Who enforces those provisions?
And what happens when the men responsible for enforcing them are themselves wicked?
It's an entirely irrelevant example because the legislature in Britain can enact new law and all sorts of other things that no party in the proposed system has any means of accomplishing.
You're missing the point of the Britain example.
I was not saying your proposed judiciary would be identical to Parliament. I was using Britain to illustrate a more basic point: a nation can retain a king while final earthly authority has moved somewhere else.
The crown can remain, the titles can remain, the ceremonies can remain, and yet the king can cease to be the final civil authority.
Whether your judges can enact new law like Parliament is not what I'm saying, but whether some earthly process outside the king can determine whether he remains king.
And in Britain, Parliament can, under certain conditions, do exactly that.
Thus if such a process exists, then final earthly authority has moved away from the throne at that decisive point.
As I've said repeatedly, the judiciary in the proposed system are not grouped together in any sort of unified political body of judges that meets regularly and takes votes on various things that effect the policy of the nation. They are individual judges with very clearly defined jurisdictions.
That still does not solve the problem.
Again, I am not claiming they become a parliament or a legislature. I am saying that if they participate in a process that can remove the king, then they possess authority over the throne at that point.
Distributed authority is still authority. Clearly defined jurisdictions are still jurisdictions. A removal mechanism does not stop being superior to the king merely because it is spread across multiple men rather than gathered into one permanent political body.
Whether they vote on national policy is irrelevant.
The question is whether they can determine whether the king remains king.
If they can, then final earthly authority has moved away from the throne at that decisive point.
I've explained repeatedly how this is simply not the case.
You've repeated your answer, but the same problem remains.
When I call it a standing authority over the throne, I don't mean that the judges are constantly meeting, voting, or actively pursuing a case against the king.
I mean that the threat of removal always exists above him as a permanent feature of the system. Whether the mechanism is being used at this moment is beside the point. If it can be invoked against him, justly or unjustly, then the king rules under the shadow of that mechanism.
That's the authority I'm talking about.
In short, it is an overreaction to what seems to me to be a very common sense provision designed to help (not guarantee) prevent the existence of a king that ignores the law.
It may seem like common sense, but “common sense” is not always correct. Sometimes it's just the assumptions of one framework being treated as self-evident.
And this is not an overreaction. It is the central structural issue.
The question is not whether the provision might help restrain a wicked king. It might. The question is what authority must exist in order for that provision to work.
If the mechanism can remove the king, then someone other than the king has authority to decide whether he remains king, in which case the problem has not been solved, only relocated.
Instead of asking only, “What if the king ignores the law?” we now also have to ask, “What if the men who control the removal mechanism ignore, twist, or weaponize the law?”
That is the same concern you have about the king, applied consistently to the men who would be given authority over him.
Once again, this fear would only be justified if there was a judge or set of judges that could remove the king simply because they desired to do so, which very clearly would not be the case.
The reason is largely irrelevant for why a judge or set of judges would want to remove the king.
The danger is that the mechanism exists at all as a standing authority over the throne. If the king can be removed through that process, then the men who control or administer that process have leverage over him, even when they are not actively using it.
And abuse does not have to look like, “We remove the king because we want to.”
It can look like, “The king has violated the law. The evidence is sufficient. The violation is egregious. The Constitution requires his removal.” Even if it's completely made up.
That is exactly why the problem remains. Whoever controls the process also controls, in practice, whether the king is treated as lawful or lawless.
I think that the theory is based, first and foremost, in the notion that "monarchy" means the rule of a king who has carte blanche to enact any law he sees fit to enact by fiat command and by divine right.
As such, it seems not to apply to the proposed system, at least not directly, because the proposed system very explicitly denies the king the power of enact new law by fiat command. In other words, the proposed system is very much predicated on the idea of the rule of law, not the rule of a monarch. The monarch is there to facilitate, oversee and manage the affairs of state including the enforcement of the law, not to be any sort of tyrant. Indeed, it would require the king (and likely several others in government positions) to violate the law in order to even start down the anacyclosis road of becoming a tyrant and/or breaking the government down into some form of government other than the constitutional monarchy we are discussing.
That's not really an answer to the question I asked.
I wasn't asking whether you think anacyclosis applies to Bob’s proposed Constitution. I asked what you understand anacyclosis to be, and why you think I keep bringing it up.
Anacyclosis is the cycle by which forms of government decay: monarchy into tyranny, tyranny into aristocracy, aristocracy into oligarchy, oligarchy into democracy, democracy into mob rule, and mob rule back toward monarchy.
Your own statement shows why it is relevant. You say the system would have to be corrupted by the king, and likely others in government, before it starts down that road. Yes. Exactly. Political decay usually begins when sinful men violate, manipulate, or weaponize the law, not because the written law openly authorizes tyranny. But a wicked king is mortal. He will die, and long before he could ever corrupt the system enough on his own to restart the cycle. On the other hand, a standing authority over the throne can outlive him, recruit successors, preserve precedent, and keep corrupting the system long after the original actors are gone.
Saying the king has no lawful authority to become a tyrant does not answer the concern. Of course he doesn't. The concern is what happens when sinful men corrupt the structure anyway.
My point is not that Bob’s king can enact law by fiat. He cannot. My point is that your proposed remedy for the danger of one wicked ruler creates another authority above him, controlled by some set of other men.
In fact, your proposal almost skips the “rule by one” stage before it can even get out of the gate. You are trying to prevent monarchy from decaying into tyranny by placing a removal authority over the monarch. But that means final earthly authority no longer rests with the one. It rests, at least at the decisive point, with the few who can determine whether the one remains in office.
That is why I keep bringing up anacyclosis. The danger of the one is answered by empowering the few, and the few become the next locus of authority.
And from what I understand, the advance of that cycle often produces longer-lasting destruction than the particular danger men were trying to avoid. So the question is not merely, “Can this mechanism prevent one rogue king?” The question is whether preventing that danger by empowering the few actually accelerates the nation into the next stage of decay.
I have a question for you...
Assume my proposed mechanism works exactly as intended. Assume for the moment that it only removes kings who have clearly violated the constitution in an objective and demonstrable way. Would such a mechanism reduce the likelihood of a rogue king successfully ruling the nation?
Yes, by stipulation.
If we assume the mechanism works exactly as intended, removes only genuinely wicked kings, cannot be captured, cannot be manipulated, cannot be weaponized, and cannot be turned against a righteous king, then yes, it would reduce the likelihood of a rogue king successfully ruling.
But that assumes away the very problem I am raising.
A perfect removal mechanism would be useful in the same way a perfectly righteous king would be useful. The problem is that we are not dealing with perfect men. We are dealing with sinful men.
Of course a flawless mechanism would restrain a rogue king.
The real question is, “What happens when sinful men control the mechanism that decides which kings are rogue?”
That is where your proposal moves the danger. It does not eliminate the evil-ruler problem. It relocates it from the king to the men who are empowered to judge and remove him.
Let me ask another direct question:
What happens if both the king and the men who are supposed to remove him when he becomes wicked are themselves wicked?
If the answer is, “the law has provisions for that,” then we are right back to the same problem. Wicked men do not care about legal provisions except when those provisions can be used for their own benefit.
At that point, your mechanism has not solved the evil-ruler problem. It has only added another set of evil rulers to the equation.
That is why I keep saying the problem has been relocated, not solved.
