Martin Meenagh blog

  The Irish Parliament 1297-1800 There was a semi-autonomous Irish parliament between 1297 and 1800. From 1537, this body was divided into an Irish House of Lords and House of Commons on an highly restricted franchise, and whereas it purported to a national authority, it should not be misinterpreted as a national assembly. From 1495, its laws had to be cleared by the Irish and British Privy Councils, for instance, as ‘Ponying’s Law’ subordinated the Irish parliament to the English one. [1] From 1607, in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot, until 1778, Catholics in Ireland were excluded at various times from public office, voting, the army, many forms of ownership, and effectively from public worship and burial. This process was from time to time interrupted, and was not systematic at first, leaving some Irish catholic lords and MPs until the late seventeenth century, for instance. From the early seventeenth century, however, constituencies were changed to give the Irish House of...

The 2021 May elections have not seen the overwhelming Scottish National Party ‘breakthrough’ that the nationalists were clearly hoping for, although this was arguably a matter of a few chance votes. The election did, however, see a significantly higher turnout than was present in other British elections, with 63.2% of eligible voters voting (as opposed to just over 42% in London, for example.) Despite this, only three out of seventy-three constituencies changed hands, and the winning party had single-digit majorities in sixteen seats. The second Party prioritising independence, Alba, did very badly, and the third, for whom independence was not an overwhelming priority, the Greens, gained seats. This leaves a mixed argument for those who claim that the vote was a ‘mandate’ for independence. The idea of a mandate is that an election is defined by one issue, and that a majority produced amongst diverse districts can be said to settle a question put by those who call the election. This is ...

    Nullification is the idea that a State government, within its own jurisdiction and in pursuit of its own sovereignty, can ‘nullify’ a federal law which the government of the State believes to be unconstitutional. Interposition is a related idea that the State can interpose itself between a bad federal law and a State citizen by declaring the law unconstitutional but not taking any further action other than the application of moral pressure to other states and federal bodies. Neither idea is viable as a legal recourse, and both have been rejected by the Supreme Court and the evidence of constitutional scholars at almost every point they have been mooted. They have persisted as ideas because of a series of attempts to employ them, many associated with racist and specious arguments wielded against native Americans and minorities, but also out of partisan fervour. The ideas emerged from the Quasi-War of 1798-1800 and the fears of the Democratic-Republican party in the 17...

    The Constitution of the United States is a document with seven articles and twenty-seven amendments at the time of writing in 2020. It does not represent a codified body of law, but nor is it the changeable Act of a sovereign parliament, as British constitutional documents are. Instead, the Constitution creates a flexible system of checks and balances which lay out the ‘ground rules’ for the institution, allocation and limitation of government power at the federal level. In itself, it makes any sort of positive governance difficult to begin beyond the core functions of foreign policy and defence, but once capacities and elaborations have been added, they have proven very difficult to reform. It is certainly the case that the original document, ratified in 1788 was both a response to the perceived weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation which preceded it, and a document which was less idealistic and more informed by Hobbesian and tough-minded ideas of power and capa...

  The Missouri compromise was a legal and political construction of the US Congress. It was built into the accession of the Missouri Territory to Statehood in 1820, and held that a line on a map could be used to differentiate southern slave territory and northern free territory across that part of the North American continent controlled by the USA. It was drawn from the division of Virginia and Carolina in 1665 and then reinforced by the use of 36 degrees and 30 minutes by surveyors as a way to delineate the borders of Tennessee and Kentucky, and allowed for the future introduction of ‘slave’ and ‘free’ states into the American Union. The Compromise must be seen in the context of other acts of expansion. During the time when it was mooted, the United States in the form of the Monroe Administration was seeking the conclusion of a treaty with Spain that would incorporate the Territory of West Florida into the Union, but also settle the boundary line of the USA in regard to what was...