The party of El Salvador President Nayib Bukele approved constitutional changes in the country’s National Assembly on Thursday that will allow indefinite presidential reelection and extend presidential terms to six years.
Lawmaker Ana Figueroa from the New Ideas party had proposed the changes to five articles of the constitution. The proposal also included eliminating the second round of the election where the two top vote-getters from the first round face off.
New Ideas and its allies in the National Assembly quickly approved the proposals with the supermajority they hold. The vote passed with 57 in favor and three opposed.
Bukele overwhelmingly won reelection last year despite a constitutional ban, after Supreme Court justices selected by his party ruled in 2021 that it allowed reelection to a second five-year term.
Focusing just on the constitutional changes: it’s a bad sign when your constitution can be changed by a single political party.
In El Salvador’s case they have a unicameral legislature and Bukele’s party has 54 of the 60 seats. So, there’s no way to prevent this by requiring a bigger supermajority.
But, it seems like since a constitution is meant to last as long as the country exists, amendments to it should have to be reaffirmed or they get automatically repealed. So, there’s an automatic re-vote after 5, 10 and 20 years or something.
If they had done that with prohibition in the US they wouldn’t have needed the 21st amendment to repeal prohibition, they could just have decided not to continue the 18th which established prohibition.
With a dictator as president, and absolute control over the legislature, I would bet that those guys are also going to make it impossible for any other person to win a presidential election, or any other party to win the legislature. And then, the only way to restore democracy will be a coup or an uprising.
That would pretty much go against the point of a constitution. It’s meant to be both extremely hard to change it and extremely hard to revert changes put in as a matter of how it’s done(though never impossible -that would be bad).
You can only put as many safeguards in as possible to prevent dictatorships, but if they control more than 2/3 of the government your screwed no matter what laws you have on the book
That’s why I think confirming after 5, 10 years might be a good idea. A supermajority is rare. Unless the supermajority screws with the laws to guarantee they stay in power, the next congress might have enough votes to undo any meddling they did. If they do cement their power, then you’re screwed either way.
Thanks for the grammar correction 🙏
Ah, so do you mean it as a one time confirmation rather than repeating? In which case I’m a lot more inclined to agree with you
My idea (not very well developed) was to do it once 5 years after the amendment, once 10 years later, and once 20 years later.
The 5 year window would be for obviously bad amendments that really should never have passed. You just have to wait 5 years to try to fix things because that’s enough time for a set of elections to happen and power to change hands, so you don’t just have the same people voting on something.
10 years is for something that seemed like a good idea at the time, but a decade later has some obvious problems. Something like prohibition, or new amendments that might have been written in the wake of some major event like a terrorist attack.
20 years would be so the next generation has a chance to weigh in. Maybe older people were scared of the world changing to they wanted to enshrine something in the constitution to keep the world the way they liked it. Younger people would then have a chance to reverse it.
The idea is that there’s a 20 year trial period for new amendments. If they’re still thought to be a good idea, it should be pretty easy to rubber-stamp their renewal at the 5, 10 and 20 year marks. If the support for them has faded, they automatically get repealed when there aren’t enough people to support them.
I also just think it would be a good idea for amendments to be pretty common, even if all they’re doing is clarifying parts of the constitution that are vague. Like, whatever your position on the US 2nd amendment, you have to admit the wording is horribly vague. So, rather than supreme court justices trying to determine the historical context around those particular words, or people making weird analogies between railguns and muskets, you just open up the document, add a few clarifying words, and close it back up again.
As a counter point, the US would have to re-vote for the 14th Amendment.
As a counter counter point also the 2nd.
You know, I think I like the established way of doing amendments - passes by Congress and a plurality of the states.
Rewriting the 2nd seems like a very smart idea to me.
It wouldn’t matter because the amendment would just flip flop back and forth every few years and be an endless political football.