You can't stop a bullet with a piece of paper. But what's written on the paper can persuade a would-be shooter that the cost of their actions is likely to outweigh the benefits - because it legitimises and encourages counter-actions and severe penalties.
The efficient way to maintain power is by controlling what people believe. It's a lot less effort and mess than trying to torture and murder everyone who opposes you.
This, exactly. I think constitutional guardrails are an effect, not a cause, of healthy democracies. If there is political will to do something bad the law can always be abrogated, edited, reinterpreted or circumvented. The existence of a loophole isn't surprising. The existence of a law without them would be.
(Same applies, mutatus mutandis, to smart contracts.)
Perhaps not, but Myanmar isn't full of Germans.
> Laws, and constitutions, are useful, but in the end: politics is about power, not laws.
The power to make people behave in a certain manner. Laws are quite effective at that.
It is unconstitutional, by the old constitution standards', but the new regime can just ignore it and call it a day (we're talking about a fascist takeover here).
> paragraph 4 in the German constitution states: " All Germans shall have the right to resist any person seeking to abolish this constitutional order if no other remedy is available."
that's cute, but do you think it would change anything if Myanmar's constitution had included such clause? Do you think it would stop the military from shooting protestors?
Laws, and constitutions, are useful, but in the end: politics is about power, not laws.