We learned today that Donald Trump “ordered” a security clearance be given to Jared Kushner. This was despite the fact that multiple individuals at the highest levels of US Government security recommending against granting him one. Even White House Chief of Staff at the time, General John Kelly, appeared to express serious misgivings about this, and insisted on documenting his role in the matter as stemming from a POTUS order.
It seems like Trump’s defenders are basically saying, ‘at the end of the day, who else but the POTUS should have the final say in security matters?’
It seems to me that such a line of reasoning leads to what’s been called ‘Godel’s Loophole’ - that the US Constitution contains an intrinsic ability to negate and destroy itself. Coming from Godel, the legendary logician of Godel’s Theorem fame, it was, to some, disconcerting.
I used to think such stuff, even if possible, was so far beyond the pale to be impossible in practice; it could never happen. Now, I’m not so sure. I am getting disconcerted.
If I had to pick one or the other, I’d give Kushner security clearance over Trump any day of the week. That’s WAY down there in the republic threat level list imo.
I wouldn’t say the constitution has an intrinsic ability to destroy itself. Rather I’d say the constitution isn’t sufficient, by itself, to sustain a republic.
A Constitution is a piece of paper, and no document - no matter how brilliant, thorough, and prescient its authors might be - can resolve every controversy. A constitution is only is strong as the political culture and institutions that support it. This problem isn’t unique to the American constitution, either.
Godel seemed to be saying that there was a logical flaw in the Constitution.
What we’re seeing is that there are instead possibly millions of unexamined possibilities that the text fails to consider because the Constitution is not intended to spell out every possible event that could take place in human history.
We’ve had dozens of threads about what if’s that are not explicit in the language. Nor should they have been. The Constitution is the framework under which laws are made. The Federal Register, the volumes in which all governmental rules and regulations are published, comprises tens of thousands of pages. More thousands appear every year. The founders couldn’t have written those if they had the will and time. And they still don’t account for the variety of actions human invent on the fly. Our entire federal court system - also vastly huger than they could have imagined - struggles to adapt the laws to the specifics of cases.
I don’t believe that Godel ever found what he thought was there. Or at least I bet he would have changed his mind if he talked to a lawyer.
I’ve Googled in an attempt to find out what Godel specifically thought was the Constitution’s undoing and it seems that he was particularly concerned with Article V. Scholars appear to have paraphrased Godel in saying that Article V enables unscrupulous leaders to essentially rewrite the Constitution, and that’s true to a point. But it’s not as though a single president or even a House majority could do it. In my mind, Article V is what ensures the Constitution’s stability: it allows for amendments, but amendments aren’t easy.
I absolutely believe that this Constitution permits the devolution from democracy to autocracy, but not necessarily for the reasons that Godel seems to have proposed. Germany should have been the great lesson for American democracy: the lesson being autocrats can use legitimate, democratic means to gain power, and destroy those same mechanisms once elected.
I don’t see it; that involves passing an Amendment under the existing rules before doing stuff — which seems uninteresting, saying that big enough supermajorities can vote for an ‘on second thought, cancel all of that while empowering a tyrant’ change. If you already have a big enough supermajority that’s glad to toss aside key parts of the Constitution, you’ve already won.
To me, an interesting one wouldn’t require a supermajority or a change; the point is a tyrant using the unchanged system (a) without a supermajority ever okaying a change, and (b) while technically committing nary a misdemeanor. He’d still presumably need some strength-in-numbers support (from folks who can honestly claim they’re simply obeying the law), but not enough to pass an Amendment.
Consider:what’s currently stopping a big-but-not-that-big number of partisans in one shirt or another from violating federal laws? And what, until and unless a change is made, can a president legally do with the pardon power?
Say he has — well, not enough supporters to pass an Amendment, but just barely enough support from legislators who’ll (a) vote against changing the law, and who’ll (b) declare “look, I’ll vote to impeach and remove if he ever commits a high crime or misdemeanor.” And say those legislators, in turn, have — well, again, not the support of a supermajority or anything; but enough to stay in office.
The Constitution already had one major flaw, which ratification without ever resolving the issue of slavery. It wasn’t Article V that amended the Constitution; it was a disastrous civil war that did the trick - the Constitution was only changed after the Northern states basically shoved the post-civil war amendments up the South’s ass. So we already know that the Constitution can fail; successful constitutions are supposed to, you know, help us avoid that sort of thing - it didn’t. But that’s not inherently attributable to a flaw in logic; it’s a cultural flaw that found its way into the Constitution.
And that’s how Constitutions fail, when the political and social culture fail. If a society is presented with sets of problems it believes that the Constitution and its institutions cannot solve, it loses faith in those systems, and when it loses faith in those systems, they participate less in democracy; they end up not voting and they end up voting for bad candidates. In such a political climate, corruption is no longer hidden, it occurs in plain view and people can eventually become inured to it. They begin accepting, even rationalizing, corrupt behavior. And when an opposition comes to power, they might even encourage even more corruption and malfeasance as a way to settle perceived debts and imbalances.
There can, of course, be flaws in the design of the Constitution which make momentary perturbations, which are inevitable, more challenging to respond to and resolve. Or there can be designs in a constitution which might make it easy for factions to disrupt and exploit. One of the things we value in our constitution, for example, is the mechanisms which provide stability. There are separations of power, checks and balances, which on the one hand function well in terms of preventing a populist legislature or autocratic minded president from simply grabbing power. On the other hand, this system is susceptible to paralyzing gridlock, which itself can undermine confidence in our system. In particular, systems like ours, with two (or three) coequal branches of power are prone to debates about which branch is more or less legitimate, such as what we’re observing now in Venezuela.
I agree that Godel’s analysis might have been simplistic, but our constitution can indeed fail.
who is this Godel? Surely not the theoretical mathematician?
okay, I googled it. I’m surprised this gets any attention at all. He merely stated the obvious, that no document that can be amended can prevent itself from being negated. The founders made amendments a non-trivial exercise, so I don’t think we can expect the Constitution to be overthrown anytime soon…unless…the congress and courts and executive all fail to do their job… or, naturally, if the military decides to take control.
So, yes, can a dictatorship arise? Of course it can, simply by elected officials failing to honor their oath of office.
I think you’re underselling how bad this is. Kushner has supported foreign policy to directly benefit his personal businesses (Qatar). Do we think he’s not using classified information as a bargaining chip or as a threat?
After meeting with Kushner, MBS arrested a lot of dissidents. It’s conceivable that Kushner passed along information about who holds certain views in order to gain favor with MBS. Something like that wouldn’t be low on any list.
I agree. I think Godel was observing that freedom can’t be absolutely guaranteed. If you have freedom, it includes the freedom to destroy your own freedom. And it you aren’t able to destroy your own freedom, then you don’t have freedom.
What framework of government would you create that would not be negated and destroyed if you had a supermajority of the legislature, executive, and judiciary (or however you divide the government) in favor of negating and destroying it? ‘Godel’s Loophole’ has never seemed that interesting - since the consitution can be amended, you can amend it to be something else. If it didn’t have an amendment process spelled out, then when you had supermajorities that wanted to get rid of it, they’d just create another one and replace it. It’s not like it’s an inescapable mathematical construct or something.
Godel’s actual flaw was never revealed. He started to explain, but was interrupted by his colleagues under the understandable concern that you should not be talking about how to turn the US into a dictatorship in your citizenship interview.
There has been speculation, but from what I have seen, he never brought it back up.
My speculation is not that it requires the amendment process, but merely the presidency and a senate majority, along with a couple of SCOTUS vacancies to fill.
If the president wants to become a dictator, it is up to the other branches of govt to stop him. If those branches are aligned with his wishes, then there are no checks to his power.
This. The language of the Constitution itself is relatively unimportant. What is important is respect for democratic norms and traditions. The Constitution becomes irrelevant the moment the POTUS or Congress decide to ignore a Supreme Court mandate, because SCOTUS itself has no way to enforce its judgments. Fortunately, that hasn’t really happened yet.
The story has it that Godel discovered a flaw that nobody else had ever thought of. And that to this day, nobody else has ever rediscovered it.
This is palpable nonsense. Godel was brilliant, sure, but the world is full of brilliant people. They might not have noticed something they weren’t looking for but once the story was out there they would have searched for it, as indeed they’ve done for seventy years.
And nothing. Nobody’s seen it. Nobody’s solved it. Nobody’s exploited it.
Surprised, given some of your reactions to some of the more dictatorial directions this administration has taken, that you had not heard of Godel’s loophole.
I have mentioned this specific loophole a couple of times on these boards, specifically in relation to some of the recent republican actions. I heard about it years ago, before Trump had ever descended the escalator.
What are you claiming to be an urban legend, BTW? That it exists or that Godel thought it exists. If you think that the story itself is urban legend, then I have to disagree, as it is well enough documented at the time when contemporaries were around to dispute it.
If you think that Godel’s discovery is the legend, then it stands to ask the question as to why one of the world’s greatest logisticians in history, someone looked up to by the likes of Einstein, thought differently.