TL;DR: "A removal mechanism controlled by the king cannot restrain him. A removal mechanism not controlled by the king outranks him."
Clete,
I'm going to answer posts 303 and 307 together, because the removal mechanism in 303 depends on the altered judicial structure in 307.
Let me start out by saying that I completely understand the concern. An evil king is a real danger. I won't deny that. The question is whether your proposed remedy actually solves that danger, or whether it creates a deeper structural problem.
As I understand your proposal, an accusation against the king would begin low in the judicial hierarchy and then be escalated upward. If the accusation survives that process, the highest-ranking judges would hear the case, determine whether the king had systematically violated the Constitution or Criminal Code, and, if necessary, remove him. Then, in post 307, you propose a judicial structure that is not merely appointed at the king’s pleasure, but derives its authority from the Constitution itself, with judges selected from below and confirmed upward.
That is a more careful proposal than a democratic recall or parliamentary impeachment. But I still think it fails.
The problem is simple:
Either the king has meaningful control over the judiciary, or he does not.
If the king has meaningful control over the judiciary, then an evil king need only appoint, promote, confirm, or favor men loyal to him, dependent on him, or at least unwilling to oppose him. He does not need to abolish the removal mechanism. He only needs to control the men who operate it. A patient evil king would not wait until charges were brought against him. He would spend years shaping the judicial hierarchy, rewarding cowards and loyalists, marginalizing righteous judges, and making sure that by the time a charge was serious enough to escalate, the men above it were already compromised.
So in that case, the removal mechanism only works against a careless evil king. It does not work against a calculating one.
But if the king does not have meaningful control over the judiciary, then the judiciary has become an independent power center. And if that independent judiciary can indict, try, condemn, and remove the king, then the king is no longer the supreme earthly civil authority. The judiciary is.
That is the dilemma.
A removal mechanism controlled by the king cannot restrain him.
A removal mechanism not controlled by the king outranks him.
And that second option is not monarchy in the meaningful sense Bob was defending. It is judicial oligarchy with a king beneath it.
You say this would not put anyone above the law, because the judges would merely be enforcing the law. But law does not enforce itself. Men enforce it. Men interpret it. Men decide what counts as “systematic violation.” Men decide whether the accusation is credible. Men decide when the king has lost legitimacy. Men decide whether he is removed. Men command the force necessary to carry out the judgment.
So the question is not whether “the law” is above the king. The question is which men have final earthly authority to interpret and enforce that law against the king. The law may be above the king morally, but the men empowered to enforce it against him are above him civilly. If the highest judges have that authority, then they are above the king at the decisive point.
That brings us back to the larger principle (the overview) behind Bob’s proposed constitution. His objection to juries, committees, democracy, and bureaucracy was not merely that they sometimes make bad decisions. It was that they diffuse responsibility. They conceal blame. They create power without clear personal accountability.
Monarchy locates responsibility. One man bears final earthly responsibility. His actions can be named, recorded, judged by history, resisted by righteous men, and ultimately judged by God.
But your mechanism reintroduces diffused institutional authority at the highest level. The king may wear the crown, but the judicial class holds final power over whether he keeps it.
And history gives no reason to think such a mechanism would remain limited to obvious monsters. The first generation may use it only against a manifestly wicked king. Later generations may use it against an “unstable” king, or a “dangerous” king, or a king who “undermines confidence in the constitutional order,” or finally a righteous king who obstructs the dominant faction.
That is not hypothetical paranoia. That is what wicked men do with legal mechanisms over time.
The U.S. Constitution had checks and balances, divided powers, federalism, courts, elections, amendments, and enumerated rights. Yet those safeguards did not prevent the growth of a permanent ruling class, bureaucratic inertia, judicial invention, executive overreach, and massive violations of liberty when the ruling class decided circumstances justified them.
So I do not think the question is merely, “What do we do about an evil ruler?”
The question is whether there is any civil structure that can finally prevent an evil ruler, whether a king or a ruling class, from becoming the very vehicle that carries the nation down the path of anacyclosis.
Polybius is useful here. In Book VI of The Histories, he explains how forms of government tend to decay: monarchy into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into mob rule. So yes, monarchy can decay into tyranny. And in Polybius’ cycle, tyranny gives way to aristocracy, rule by the few who overthrow or replace the tyrant. That is a real danger. But it does not follow that the solution is to create an aristocratic or judicial power over the king, because that power has its own predictable corruption: it becomes oligarchy.
In other words, answering the danger of a tyrant by empowering the few over the one does not escape the cycle. It advances it.
A tyrant will eventually die. That does not make tyranny harmless, but it does mean the danger is personal, visible, mortal, and historically accountable. A ruling class, however, can become functionally immortal. It can reproduce itself through appointments, promotions, credentials, panels, procedures, precedent, and institutional culture.
If the answer to the rogue king is a standing judicial structure with final authority over the throne, even if its individual members change over time, then the monarchy has already been compromised. The rogue king problem has been answered by creating a rogue ruling-class problem.
That does not escape the cycle Polybius describes. It merely moves the point of corruption from the one to the few.
There will always be a ruling class. The issue is whether that ruling class is visible, personal, mortal, and historically accountable, or hidden behind panels, procedures, offices, and institutional language.
A tyrant dies. An oligarchy recruits.
Your proposal tries to keep the king under law, which is a good instinct. But structurally, it does so by placing the king under the judiciary. And once that happens, the judiciary becomes the true final earthly authority.
