Both constitutions contain racially discriminatory clauses, although in both cases they are either repealed, spent, or disregarded in practice. At least in Australia's case there is talk about removing the last of those. To fully remove those clauses from the US Constitution would require moving away from the "stick-amendments-on-the-end" model to actually changing the original text.
And that odd approach of sticking the amendments on the end instead of changing the actual text is probably one of the most distinctive aspects of the US constitution today. It achieves nothing except making the document harder to follow. Can you imagine how difficult it would be if other legislation was maintained in that fashion?
I think the decision in the US constitution to replace the Westminster parliamentary system with a presidential system was a step backward. Donald Trump is a good example of what a presidential system can lead to. Parliamentary systems like the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand avoid that because you can't become the leader of the country without a majority support from legislators, which makes it much harder for fringe/out-there characters like Trump (or Jair Bolsonaro).
It is nothing about being a monarchy vs a republic. You can have a parliamentary republic in which you have a non-political president appointing a political prime minister who commands support from a majority of the national legislature – that's exactly the system used in Ireland, Germany and Israel, among other countries. It is also what was proposed in the failed 1999 Australian republic referendum, and I'm sure eventually Australia will become a republic and it will be a parliamentary republic not a presidential one–the failure was largely due to a dispute about how to elect the President, but I think everyone wanted a non-political President appointing a Prime Minister, not an American-style political President–the dispute was just about whether to have that President elected by Parliament, as in Germany and Israel, or elected by the general public, as in Ireland.
(Israel did briefly experiment with something closer to the American system, in 1996–2003, with direct election of the PM, but the experiment was abandoned and is generally considered a failure.)
How does that even matter? That's like complaining that a log-structured file contains the old value. What, are you going to complain that blockchains have old transactions in them? This is the same false propaganda-logic people use to justify destroying statues.
What are the technical benefits of the "stick-the-amendments-on-the-end" model used by the US constitution, as opposed to the "change-the-original-text" model used by most other contemporary constitutions (including even many US state constitutions)? I can't see any.
What really matters is who protects human rights better, and who is better at the rule of law and individual freedom. From what I can see, and from what you yourself have said above, there's not that much difference.
Again, it's the principles that matter. The principles in action, more specifically.
I've already said – it makes the document harder to follow and harder to understand. I don't see how that's a mere triviality. The ability of citizens to understand the law is a valuable thing, and especially when dealing with the most foundational law of a legal system, its constitution.
> The principles in action, more specifically.
Principles and their application matter, but form matters too. I'd agree that principles and their application are more important than form, but form still matters. Imagine you had a constitution with the best possible principles and the best possible application of those principles, but the text itself was significantly harder to understand than it could be – changing the text to make it easier to understand would make that constitution even better.
AFAIK, this circumstance has no significant effects of this kind. Still, the burden of proof is on you, and all you've provided is an opinion.
Principles and their application matter, but form matters too.
Woo.
It's better, in my opinion, that people know the messy history and can see it in the law. This way, they can know the nuanced history of how we all got to the present day. Otherwise, dishonest "activists" might try to sell young people some B-movie version of history.
> Which is all you've done too.
You've fallen into the trap. You just admitted that your "effect" is not any kind of proof, just an opinion. On the other hand, my opinion has no material effect on my position that your points are trivial, woo, and the bandying about of opinion. That was kind of the point, of my using the word opinion.
Thanks for playing.
If you aren't interested in opinions why do you bother? That's all this site has. Yours, mine, those of however many other users there are here.
Pretty much all of it is.
But much (but not all) other adopted legislation in the US consists largely (but also often not entirely) in its raw form of English-language patch instructions for codified law like the US Code. So the legislation itself is added to the cumulative register, but then the main effect most people are aware of is a change to codified law. (Actually, that's true of Constitutional amendments to, but the diff is invariably in practice “the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified ...”; there's nothing stopping the diff from being more in edit form if desired.
But even though most of the text of most legislation is that way, there is lots of uncodified law, too.
(My understanding is that the UK still mostly does uncodified lawn though it does sometimes include specific amendments to earlier named acts in later ones.)
Honestly, though, on a document the size of the US Constitution, there's little impact (and given the original open-ended model, though newer amendments tend to be proposed with expiration dates for ratification that limit the potential problem, the diffing instruction approach would be problematic since the target of the alteration might be reorganized between proposal and ratification.
> I think the decision in the US constitution to replace the Westminster parliamentary system with a presidential system was a step backward.
The US Constitution didn't replace a Westminster-style parliamentary system with a presidential system; the system the US had under the Articles of Confederation wasn't a Westminster-style parliamentary system.
The technical benefit is that the the multistage amendment process, with long ratification windows (originally typically unlimited, though 7 years is typical now; normal legislation, including most state Consitutional amendments, have much shorter windows because even if they are multistage it's usually a second vote of the same legislature or a single ratification vote of the people), creates a greater risk for crossing amendments with unintended consequences. Simply stating the final effect has less possibility of unintended consequences.
My point is that how the US Code and how the US Constitution are amended is fundamentally different: amendments passed to the US Code say things like "insert this section here", "delete this section", "replace this one with this one". And then the edits are applied, and the US Code is published with that edits applied. The amendments of the US Constitution aren't even made in the form of textual edits.
> My understanding is that the UK still mostly does uncodified law
Even though UK law largely isn't codified, they still mainly print Acts in consolidated form – repealed sections are omitted, amendments are incorporated into the text, etc. The main thing that stops it being a code is you have lots of acts on different topics listed alphabetically, whereas codification would imply merging all those into one big act (or a few big acts) with its contents being organised topically
> The US Constitution didn't replace a Westminster-style parliamentary system with a presidential system; the system the US had under the Articles of Confederation wasn't a Westminster-style parliamentary system.
Actually in a lot of ways the Articles of Confederation was closer to a Westminster style parliamentary system than the US Constitution is. The defining feature of a parliamentary system is the executive is practically subordinated to the legislature, rather than being an independent seat of political power. The Articles of Confederation had that – the national executive was quite limited in extent (there was a treasury, the army, navy, foreign affairs, and the postmaster-general) but it was wholly subordinate to Congress and had no independent seat of power.
And in practice all amendments are proposed by Congress, and Congress always knows what amendments are already pending, and should be able to foresee any potential "merge conflicts" and address them. You can always use conditional patch instructions: "Replace section A with B; however, if amendment C has entered into force before this amendment, instead replace section A with D". There are other tricks too, like one proposed amendment inserts section 29A and the next inserts section 29B, and maybe if the first one never gets ratified but the second one does you end up with a section 29B without there ever being a section 29A.
(Technically there is a process where a convention proposes amendments independently of Congress – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_to_propose_amendmen... – but it has never been used, and who knows if it ever will be. Anyway, the same point applies to such a convention – it knows what amendments are already pending so it can write its proposed amendments to include solutions to any merge conflicts)
I think the real explanation – the US constitution is really old, a late 18th century document, before a lot of the contemporary English-language culture around maintaining legislation had developed. And now it is the way it is, and nobody wants to change it. But if they started again tomorrow it is unlikely they'd organise the amendments in the same way. And a lot of US state constitutions are newer, and they are maintained in the more usual manner precisely because they were adopted after the usual manner was invented.