To elaborate on the second point, the US Constitution having been in continuous effect for nearly 250 years truly is rather impressive from a legal history perspective.
Nonsense, What you are claiming isn’t even true… The latest amendment stems from 1993. Your definition is based solely on some completely irrelevant parameter defined entirely to fit only one single country.
The amendments were passed/ratified in accordance with the rules within the Constitution itself. So it’s a philosophical distinction in the sense that the Constitution was not scrapped or discarded, and that any modifications came within the permissible framework that the Constitution prescribes.
A much stronger argument than 1993 is that the Constitutional system itself did break during the civil war, and the Union forcibly installed new state governments, through military conquest, to pass the Reconstruction Amendments. Arguably, that military and legal history did step outside of the Constitutional framework in order to preserve the Constitution, but the Supreme Court did rule in Texas v. White that secession itself was impermissible, and that the Guarantee Clause of the Constitution required the federal government to quash an insurrection and reinstate loyal governments.
It’s not a clean legal analysis, and lots of people had to kill or be killed to make it work in principle, but you can still see how it fits within the legal framework.
That being said, applying that standard to other governments shows that plenty of other governments have been in place for longer. In the UK, the relationship between parliament and the crown have evolved over the years, including periods of violence and usurpation and even the occasional regicide, but the basic framework is that truce of competing bases of power agreeing to share that power, or distributing that power (see all the independent nations that have emerged from that British empire), such that the government of the UK can truly be traced back far longer than the government of the United States.
Nonsense, What you are claiming isn’t even true… The latest amendment stems from 1993. Your definition is based solely on some completely irrelevant parameter defined entirely to fit only one single country.
The amendments were passed/ratified in accordance with the rules within the Constitution itself. So it’s a philosophical distinction in the sense that the Constitution was not scrapped or discarded, and that any modifications came within the permissible framework that the Constitution prescribes.
A much stronger argument than 1993 is that the Constitutional system itself did break during the civil war, and the Union forcibly installed new state governments, through military conquest, to pass the Reconstruction Amendments. Arguably, that military and legal history did step outside of the Constitutional framework in order to preserve the Constitution, but the Supreme Court did rule in Texas v. White that secession itself was impermissible, and that the Guarantee Clause of the Constitution required the federal government to quash an insurrection and reinstate loyal governments.
It’s not a clean legal analysis, and lots of people had to kill or be killed to make it work in principle, but you can still see how it fits within the legal framework.
That being said, applying that standard to other governments shows that plenty of other governments have been in place for longer. In the UK, the relationship between parliament and the crown have evolved over the years, including periods of violence and usurpation and even the occasional regicide, but the basic framework is that truce of competing bases of power agreeing to share that power, or distributing that power (see all the independent nations that have emerged from that British empire), such that the government of the UK can truly be traced back far longer than the government of the United States.