Is this true?
It all depends on what one means by Constitutional and Democracy.
Iceland and England (and later Great Britain) surely have some prior claim as does Athens.
Or is it just a debating point?
What’s England’s (Great Britian’s) constitution?
Did Iceland, GB or Athens have a constitution prior to 1787? Are those countries, today, functioning under that same constitution?
What difference would that make to the claim. He did not say he was the President of the World’s oldest continuous Constitutional Democracy.
By 1689 it was clear that the English Constitution made parliament supreme nd the Monarch served only by invitation by the Parliament (it took a civil war and a Glorious Revolution to reach that point.
Representatives were elected by a limited franchise of land or property holders among other categories. In the UK there was never a race bar to voting, and all modern democracies only moved to full suffrage about the turn of the nineteenth century onwards.
And it is certainly the case that Ancient Greece and Medieval Iceland were older constitutional democracies than the US, even if their Constitutions lapsed.
For Iceland and Athens, I would substitute “earlier” rather than “older.”
For Great Britain, I would challenge the notion of “constitutional.”
(For that matter, I am not sure that “constitutional” applies to Iceland or Athens.)
I’m willing to grant him literary license as having meant to say that.
His point being that the constitution delineates the powers granted to the government by the people, and that those powers are limited.
That is to say that even though he doesn’t think he needs authority from Congress, he’s going to ask anyway. And forgetting that he once said the president did need to seek that authority.
Crystal clear. The president does not have the authority to launch missiles, except when he does-- which is whenever the president says he does.
Iceland had/has a representative democracy for a thousand years There’s a body of oral legal tradition, but I don’t know if that can be called ‘a constitution’.
And goodness, as Edward Snowden shoed us, doesn’t he respect that Constitution.
Cool, I needed new shoes.
There are many, many books on the English and Great British Constitution. Although not collected together in one document, there is a body of work that can be seen as a constitution in much the same manner that the US Constitution is not the piece of paper signed in 1783, but the body of law that it engendered.
England from 1689 had Democratic elections, the Supremacy of Parliament and the power to remove a King.
I am aware of the phrase Constitutional Monarchy. I suspect that it is a retroactively applied phrase that does not really invalidate Obama’s claim.
Which, coincidentally, is exactly the same position that Cameron is in. He has the Royal prerogative to act independently of Parliament, but there is pressure for him to seek their compliance. If he does exercise the prerogative, he could find himself removed even more quickly than Impeachment.
Why? England has been a Constitutional Democracy since 1689. We did have to cut off one King’s head, and depose another before the Monarchy woke up and smelt the coffee.
All effective power has lain with Parliament since the Glorious Revolution.
IMHO the oldest MODERN democracy is probably New Zealand which introduce women’s suffrage in 1893.
Can you provide a link to the current constitution of GB?
If the word “written” had been included, it would be true. Iceland has the world’s oldest continuous constitution. Athens had many forms of government over the years. Aristotle summarized the constitutional traditions of Athens as they were in his day, but it wasn’t a written constitution. Aristotle had a project where he summarized the constitutions of many city states. None survive except the Athens one, which was re-discovered in the 1890s. And it is attributed to Aristotle by modern scholars, they are not certain that he wrote it, it may have been one of his students.
Iceland had an early democratic tradition, but it ceased with a revolt of chieftains, and then became a colony of Denmark for centuries- effectively a client state of a medieval absolute monarchy. Not a continuous democracy.
You are assuming that it is written down. It isn’t. But you knew that. The USofA popularized written constitutions as our major contribution to politics. Poly meaning many, and ticks meaning blood suckers.
Not continuous I am afraid in Constitution, nor Democracy. As noted above it was a client state of an absolute monarcy and the Democratic institutions were finally totally abolished in the eighteenth century. The current Parliament dates only from 1845.
I think you’ll find John Kerry has “compelling” evidence.
Wikipedia is your friend:
And for completeness:
http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/ld200203/ldselect/ldconst/168/16809.htm#note92