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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8637477" data-attributes="member: 42582">This statement is just false. It has one of the oldest constitutions in the world. When people in Europe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries wanted constitutional government, the United Kingdom was the typical model they had in mind.Here, you state probably the most important element of the UK constitution. You find it scary. So did the Stuart kings!, whose overthrow was given legal expression in terms of the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. So did the nineteenth century Tories, who had to endure the Reform Acts because they were enacted by a sovereign parliament. So did the twenty-first century Tories, whose attempt to enact Brexit by executive fiat was struck down by the British courts because it was an attempt to overturn the laws that had been enacted by a sovereign parliament.There are things to be said for and against the sovereignty of parliament; this board probably isn't the place to say many of them. But I think one needs to appreciate the actual historical ramifications of the doctrine.What, other than (what you call) "decorum", makes the US Constitution binding. It's not as if the constitution has a police and army to give it effect. Abraham Lincoln had to use an actual army to enforce it in the nineteenth century, and so did a number of presidents in the twentieth.Or, if you prefer to frame it as "the sovereignty of the Supreme Court", some account is needed of why this is superior to the sovereignty of parliament. Those accounts are available - see eg everyone who disagrees with Jeremy Waldron. But misdescribing the UK constitution as resting in some unique fashion on "decorum" won't do the job.</blockquote>

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