Part III — The public power that serves it

22. Changing the Rules

Changing a constitution requires agreement on both the decision and the text being changed. Approval of a proposal cannot authorise a different replacement, and a technically compatible replacement cannot supply the missing approval. The design therefore distinguishes political authority, certification of an exact candidate, publication and the version in effect.

The political route requires a current record for the exact proposal: a full-membership Assembly result, national referendum result, any required Regions Council and affected-region consent, separate completeness assurance, constitutional review, challenge, correction and a current certificate. The thresholds are two-thirds of the full Assembly membership and more affirmative than negative valid referendum votes, with no turnout quorum and failure on a tie. Additional regional approvals apply where the federal settlement is directly affected.

Those are legal requirements over supplied results. The model does not count a changing electorate, authenticate submissions or discover an omitted voter. The resulting authority is bounded to the supplied proposal and current source; it does not identify, publish or install a replacement by itself.

Certification, publication and effect

The exact-change route connects the political result to the existing text, proposed replacement and transition. Independent compatibility review must concern the same candidate. Its review of effects must match that replacement, including any vocabulary change. Consent and compatibility are separate premises; neither substitutes for the other.

The cases test a candidate without matching consent, a different candidate inserted into an upstream record, and competing selections. None supplies a shortcut through the missing match. Conflicting selections grant neither candidate priority. A transition cannot be reused against a later base. Returning to earlier wording needs fresh authority and a new transition while preserving the intervening record.

These checks can test whether the supplied records concern the same text. They do not establish that democratic approval was authentic, publication occurred or an institution adopted the replacement. The method distinguishes the formal evidence requirements from the separate checks of exact text and version changes.

Anyone may request independent review without the operator's permission or a valid candidate certificate. A current reviewed source defect withholds the affected permission and requires preservation and correction. Positively established nonresponse assigns a duty to an independent alternate. Silence supplies neither consent nor an adverse finding about the requester. A source correction does not itself undo an individual judgment or perform a remedy.

The protected core

The economic constitution entrenches no single ownership form, provider mix, market share, profit, bailout, immunity or monopoly. Democratic law may change economic instruments above the floor. It cannot use that freedom to evade universal standing, equality, the floor, core liberty, due process, effective remedy or protected commons.

Direct protection of credibly sentient animals and the prohibitions on severe avoidable suffering and dispensable killing are also unamendable. Exact-change certification requires separate positive review of each core. A generic compatibility statement cannot override an independently established breach tied to the actual base, candidate, proposal and transition. In the animal-core sequences, that breach blocks certification, authorised publication and effective selection through the affected route.

Refusing authority for such a candidate does not forbid discussing it, remove anyone's human rights or suspend necessary animal care. It remains a conclusion over supplied evidence of the candidate's effects. The model does not discover every concealed change or authenticate the evidence for itself.

What a proposal entry establishes

A name on a docket records a proposal. A declared target records what it says it changes. An approval entry records an outcome. None supplies the exact candidate, current political certificate, independent effect review, publication or effective selection required above.

The examples include an ordinary recognition proposal, a proposal declaring a protected floor target, and a proposed change to the protected register itself. Their names and target entries confer no separate becomes law status. Amend_Sneak, proposed and approved without a target, obtains none either. Amend_Decoy gains none by naming a harmless recognition target. The register names the floor article, prisoner personhood and itself; those names do not inspect the text or the effects of a candidate.

Tests that edit the source directly examine a different boundary. A manually edited copy can remove the food promise, including through a grammar change that leaves its structural safeguard against food-dependent confinement intact. Directly editing the writable vocabulary can likewise change what the record accepts. Those are consequences of the supplied candidate source, not authorised transitions. The exact-change route requires review of the actual replacement, including its vocabulary disposition.

People and proposal names

A proposal decision concerns the proposal and its candidate text. It does not supply a finding about a person's credibility. The test dockets Jala's name, declares a protected target and supplies an approval. Those entries produce neither a void nor a recognition loss against Jala. Her recorded contribution still identifies her act; it confers no general recognition status. The proposal called Amend_Floor likewise receives no personal recognition-loss verdict.

A personal finding needs its own legal grounds and process. Conversely, an absence of personal wrongdoing supplies no authority to amend the constitution. The exact-change cases test the legitimate route through certification, publication and current selection; a bare proposal entry completes none of those stages.

What entrenchment requires

An unamendable core limits even a large majority and binds later participants who did not choose it. Its stated purpose is to preserve the equal standing, rights and living conditions within which democratic choices can remain meaningful. That purpose does not by itself prove the chosen boundary adequate or justify every mechanism used to protect it.

The present route therefore has to be assessed at each connection: whether the political result includes the entitled electorate, whether approval concerns the candidate actually reviewed, whether review protects the core, and whether the resulting text is the one selected. A target-name register answers none of those questions by itself.

The integrity of the record those rules are written in also remains necessary. A person with access to a source file can change it outside the authorised process. Formal refusal of a candidate is not physical prevention of that edit, and a passing suite is not authentication of its authors or effects. The current checks establish bounded relationships between supplied objects; they are not a self-enforcing republic.

The child with nobody

Nell is a person and is owed food in the supplied constitution. The registered floor and personhood names do not secure those source rules by themselves. A concealed source edit can change what derives without supplying any authority for that change.

The exact-change route instead requires positive compatibility review tied to the actual candidate, including the universal floor. Its conclusion remains conditional on that evidence. The child needs preservation of the entitlement, not a proposal with an acceptable name. The next chapter examines another claim that needs more than a name: who may sign a finding about someone else.