You're not the only one, though it's very rare these days!
Some clarification is in order, then.
I am aware that you are not proposing a standing body of men whose continuous occupation is watching the king and waiting for an opportunity to remove him.
By a “permanent institution,” I mean the permanently authorized constitutional mechanism itself, including whatever offices, procedures, jurisdictions, and enforcement powers become operative when removal proceedings begin. The personnel may be temporary, but the constitutional power and process are permanent.
That mechanism remains vulnerable to capture. As argued in points 3, 9, and 10 of post #489, and again in posts #493 and #496, a faction could gain influence over the offices that initiate, adjudicate, or enforce the process and then use the lawful threat of removal to control successive kings.
Bob’s Constitution denies such a faction a lawful constitutional mechanism for controlling the throne. Any attempt to intimidate or depose the king would remain outside the law, leaving him free to investigate and prosecute the unlawful conspiracy rather than fear its ability to wield the Constitution against him.
The terminology may have caused confusion, but my objection concerns the permanent constitutional power, not a continuously assembled group of men. The argument therefore does not depend upon the redefinition you attribute to me.
I did not treat God’s oversight as one indivisible function. I listed its various aspects because you had not yet identified which one supposedly created the constitutional vacancy.
You have now answered the first of my three questions. The function you have in mind is the removal of a king who persists in serious rebellion and injustice. The other two questions remain:
- Why is that function necessary to just monarchy generally?
- How does a human removal process rightfully perform it?
There is also a problem with describing this function as one that “no longer exists.” God still reserves the sovereign authority to judge and remove kings through whatever means He chooses. What ceased was Israel’s particular covenantal and prophetic administration of that authority.
God’s removal of Israelite kings was an exercise of divine sovereignty, not a domestic constitutional process administered by officers with jurisdiction over the king. The fact that God removed wicked kings does not establish that every just constitution must transfer a corresponding power to human beings.
Bob’s Constitution also makes a definite decision about this question. It leaves the lawful responses beneath the king already discussed in posts #489, #493, and #496, while denying subordinate civil officers jurisdiction to depose him. You may consider that decision inadequate, but the issue has not been ignored.
The question is whether premature removal by domestic officers is necessary to just government, whether Scripture authorizes that jurisdiction, and whether its benefit justifies the dangers it introduces.
Whether the regress argument succeeds or fails cannot be set aside, because it determines what your proposed mechanism actually accomplishes.
The direct answer under Bob’s proposal is that no subordinate domestic authority has jurisdiction to prosecute, sentence, or remove the king. I have already addressed the lawful forms of resistance available beneath him in posts #489, #493, and #496.
That is a deliberate feature of the proposal. Final earthly authority must terminate somewhere, and Bob places it openly in the king.
Any authority capable of coercively judging and removing him becomes the final authority in that decisive jurisdiction. The question then repeats: What mechanism enforces the law against that authority?
Your proposal therefore does not eliminate the existence of an authority against which no higher domestic enforcement is available. It transfers that position to the men who ultimately control the removal process.
If every constitutional system necessarily contains a point beyond which no higher domestic authority can enforce the law, then the question is where final earthly authority should terminate.
Bob places that unavoidable termination point openly in one visible and mortal king, with God above him. God retains the sovereign right to judge and remove the king according to His will without creating another human authority that must itself be checked.
Your proposal does not eliminate the terminal point. It relocates it to whichever men ultimately control the removal process and adds a permanent constitutional lever over the throne.
That lever may sometimes remove a wicked king, but it can also be captured and used to threaten, direct, or remove righteous kings. Our present government illustrates how offices, procedures, and checks created to restrain abuses of power can themselves become means of exercising and consolidating power.
The unavoidable nature of final authority also does not resolve the question of authorization. A problem does not confer jurisdiction upon men who otherwise lack it. You must still establish that some domestic authority may rightfully exercise coercive jurisdiction over the king.
The decisive asymmetry is that the danger presented by a wicked king ends with his own reign. His heir begins a distinct reign and is accountable to God for his own conduct. The removal power, however, survives successive kings, may influence succession itself, and can be controlled by men whose authority is less visible and whose collective responsibility is more easily obscured.
Bob’s proposal accepts the temporary danger of a wicked reign while preserving final authority in one identifiable ruler beneath God. Yours creates a lawful mechanism capable of dominating the throne across generations without solving the underlying problem of unreviewable final authority.
That is not an improvement.
Okay, now I think we're really making some progress! The discussion has now reached the question that lies beneath nearly everything else we have been debating. The central issue is not simply whether a wicked king might be removed, nor is it merely where final earthly authority terminates. The central issue is whether Bob’s proposal actually establishes the rule of law. It does not.
The rule of law means that the law governs those who exercise governmental power. It does not merely mean that laws have been written down, that public officers are given duties, or that citizens may refuse unlawful commands. Dictatorships have written laws and absolute monarchies establish detailed legal codes. The distinguishing feature of the rule of law is that governmental authority is itself created, limited, and governed by law, the constitution being the definitive and highest law of the land.
That is the whole purpose of having a constitution. A constitution is supposed to be the supreme earthly law of the governmental system. It creates offices, grants authority to those offices, limits that authority, and establishes the lawful consequences of exceeding those limits. If the constitution creates an office but has no means of enforcing its limitations against the man who occupies it, then the constitution is not truly governing that office, but merely creating it. The effectiveness of the constitution then depends entirely upon the voluntary submission of the officeholder.
Constitutions are not intended to be voluntary!
The entire purpose of constitutions throughout history has been to replace the arbitrary will of rulers with the supremacy of law. A constitution that intentionally exempts its highest office from its own enforcement abandons that purpose at the very point where it matters most.
This presents a fundamental problem for Bob’s proposed constitution. If the king may violate any provision of the constitution, commit any crime, abuse any power, and remain legally immune from constitutional consequence, then the resulting government is not, in any meaningful constitutional sense, a constitutional monarchy. It is simply a monarchy accompanied by a constitution that cannot be enforced against the monarch himself.
And that distinction really does matter and sits at the core of our disagreement. In a constitutional monarchy, the monarch rules under the constitution. His authority exists because the constitution creates it, and the limits placed upon his authority are real legal limitations. In an absolute monarchy, the monarch may choose to observe established laws and customs, but no domestic legal authority can compel him to do so. If Bob’s king is immune from the enforcement of the constitution, regardless of what he does, then the constitution is not supreme over the king, the king is supreme over the constitution.
It will not answer this concern merely to say that the king is morally obligated to obey the constitution, that his crimes will be publicly known, that his subordinates may refuse unlawful commands, or that God may eventually judge him. All of those things may be true, but none of them establishes
the rule of law. The question is whether the constitutional system itself treats the king’s legal limitations as enforceable law or as standards he is merely expected to observe voluntarily.
Suppose the king commits murder, imprisons innocent citizens, confiscates property contrary to law, suspends lawful courts, or attempts to alter the succession for his own purposes. Suppose he openly announces that he no longer recognizes the limitations placed upon him by the constitution. Under Bob’s proposal, what lawful constitutional consequence follows?
As I understand your answer, none does. Subjects may resist his unlawful commands, but he remains king. Officers may refuse to cooperate with him, but he remains king. His crimes may be exposed, but he remains king. God may judge him, but the constitution itself remains powerless to enforce its own law against the highest office that it created. At that point, the government is no longer operating under the rule of law. It is operating under the rule of one man whose obedience to the law is voluntary.
You repeatedly answer that final earthly authority must terminate somewhere. I agree. The disagreement is whether the terminal point of governmental authority must also be a point beyond which the constitution has no enforceable application. I do not believe those propositions are identical. The king may remain the highest ordinary civil authority while still being subject to an extraordinary constitutional process when he commits crimes so serious that he has repudiated the lawful basis of his own office.
As we've just discussed, the existence of such a process would not require a standing tribunal continuously exercising jurisdiction over the king. Nor would it require creating a second sovereign capable of directing royal policy, overruling lawful royal decisions, or removing kings for political disagreement or anything else like that. The process could be deliberately designed to make its abuse extraordinarily difficult and to ensure that none of the participants could profit politically from the outcome.
For example, the officers involved in such proceedings should have no authority to select, approve, influence, or advise the person who would succeed the king. The succession should occur automatically according to constitutional rules established long before any accusation arose. No prosecutor, investigator, judge, or other participant in the removal process should be permitted to alter the line of succession or even communicate with potential successors concerning the case.
The participants should also be screened for conflicts of interest. Anyone with a close political, financial, familial, or personal connection either to the king or to the expected successor (i.e. if one exists) should be disqualified. Anyone who had publicly campaigned for or against the king, participated in a faction seeking his removal, or stands to receive an office, payment, title, or political advantage from the outcome should likewise be excluded.
It may even be wise for the principal decision makers not to be current governmental officers at all. They might be selected temporarily from among qualified citizens, retired judges, or other persons possessing the necessary competence but no currently active governmental authority. At a minimum, anyone exercising decisive authority in the proceedings could be permanently barred from accepting appointment or employment in the government afterward. Such a restriction would greatly reduce the temptation to remove a king in exchange for influence under his successor.
The accusations themselves should be limited to specifically defined crimes of the highest order. Policy disagreements, unpopular decisions, ordinary mistakes, incompetence, theological disagreements within the lawful bounds of the constitution, and disputes over the exercise of legitimate royal discretion should not qualify. The process should apply only to conduct such as murder, treason, bribery, unlawful imprisonment, deliberate subversion of the courts, or a sustained and demonstrable repudiation of the constitution which granted him is throne to begin with.
The evidentiary standard should be extremely high and the proceedings should be public except where limited secrecy is genuinely necessary to protect witnesses or national security. The evidence, charges, legal standards, and final reasoning should all be preserved and published so that the process cannot operate as an anonymous political weapon.
Further, the king should receive notice of the charges, the right to answer them, the right to present evidence, and the right to challenge the impartiality of those deciding the case. At the same time, he should have no authority to dismiss the participants, interfere with the evidence, pardon himself for the charges at issue, or use royal power to obstruct the proceedings.
Lastly, the mechanism should also be dormant unless and until the narrow constitutional conditions activating it have been satisfied. Its officers would possess no continuing authority over the king, no supervisory role in ordinary government, and no power to threaten him over lawful policy decisions. Their jurisdiction would begin only upon the formal presentation of qualifying criminal charges and would terminate completely when the case ended.
Could such a process still be abused? Certainly. Every governmental power can be abused. But the point here is that the possibility of abuse is a reason to design safeguards,
not a reason to abandon the rule of law at the point where it is needed most.
Your argument is that a removal mechanism could be captured and used to dominate successive kings. That danger is real and must be taken seriously. My argument is that an irremovable king could commit crimes, destroy lawful institutions, and rule through force while the constitution remains unable to do anything except declare that he is wrong. That danger is also real. Therefore, the proper comparison is not between a dangerous removal mechanism and a perfectly restrained king. It is between two imperfect arrangements involving sinful men. One places the ultimate practical security of the constitution in the voluntary obedience of a single ruler. The other attempts to create a narrow, difficult, and politically unrewarding process through which the constitution can defend itself against an extreme criminal abuse of royal power.
To be clear, I am not insisting that the specific safeguards I have described are complete or that none could be improved. Indeed, I've probably gone into more detail than necessary, which threatens to derail the discussion away from the central point of disagreement. By presenting those details, my purpose is not to open new avenues for debate. It is simply to demonstrate that the answer to the danger of an abusive removal process is to design the process so that abuse is difficult, detectable, unrewarding, and constitutionally punishable, that such a process is possible, and that the answer cannot simply be to declare the king immune from every domestic enforcement of the constitution. Every constitutional power can be abused. We do not solve that problem by eliminating constitutional powers. We solve it by designing constitutional safeguards. Otherwise, what's being designed in something other than a constitutional form of government.
