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Hot take of the day: no judge should dare review the will of the people, be it expressed in a constitutional or merely legislative vote.

The plebiscite/referendum is the ultimate authority.



There's no such thing as "the will of the people", though -- "the people" is a loose aggregation of lots of different individuals, communities and factions that are not uniformly aligned in their interests and values.

The point of having a political process is to define a structured way of resolving the conflicts that arise from those divergences of interests and values, not to pretend that the output of specific elections somehow represents the singular will of the entirety of society. Presuming that is a grave error that inevitably results in the strongest faction imposing its will unilaterally onto all others.

Democracy is a great way of deciding political questions, but without safeguards in place to ensure that that it's kept within defined bounds of what qualifies as a political question in the first place, it will degrade into authoritarianism pretty rapidly.

We absolutely need judicial review, and plebiscites in which narrow majorities approve of policies that are unconstitutional, or otherwise violate people's fundamental rights, should unquestionably be struck down, just as equivalent policies enacted by a legislative body would.




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