Zelaya says the constitution protects a system of government that excludes the poor, but has not specified what changes he will seek.
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For that reason, the new constitution tweaks the voting system in favour of smaller parties.
Point out that the U.S. Constitution does specify a system for the election of the president, known as the Electoral College.
Scoop Jackson would have been affronted by the dire implications of such behavior for the system of checks-and-balances that are enshrined in the Constitution and that are supposed to limit the scope and potential for abuse of the government it charters.
In Thailand, for example, it has brought down one government, and eased the passage of a new constitution aimed at cleaning up a political system long operated on commercial lines.
Three days after Musharraf suspended the constitution and declared a state of emergency, Pakistan's judicial system is in lockdown, with thousands of lawyers jailed and many judges detained in their homes.
With a new constitution and a shift to a parliamentary system in the summer of 2010, observers, especially Americans, hoped Kyrgyzstan might become a model democracy in a region largely run by unsavoury strongmen.
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Republicans claim to love capitalism and the Constitution, but when the capitalist system sought to cleanse itself of failed concepts on the way to a healthy economic recovery, the GOP ignored strict constitutional limits meant to restrain federal power on the way to propping up businesses that the markets had left for dead.
Both cases, along with hundreds, if not thousands, of other federal prosecutions currently lodged in the bloated federal criminal justice system, raise the question of whether the federal Constitution, which supposedly guarantees defendants a fair trial, prohibits the feds from bringing unnecessarily complex charges and then financially disabling defendants from engaging in a fair fight.
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While the patent system is enshrined in the Constitution, Congress has the job of specifying the rules.
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After outlining the principles contained in the South African constitution guaranteeing freedom of expression and the restrictive definition of its limits, Thloloe described the system of self-regulation of the press in force in his country.
These cases involve a complex web of federal laws and legal principles, including the patent system established under the Constitution, antitrust law, and the Hatch-Waxman Act, a 1984 law that was intended to give generic manufacturers an incentive to challenge patents.
Messrs Zeman and Klaus, whose parties together won 60% of the vote and 137 of parliament's 200 seats, want to amend the constitution so as to change the voting system from proportional representation to first-past-the-post.
What makes Mr Thaksin's case so awkward, however, is that the drafters of the 1997 constitution also set out to fix the other chronic flaw in Thailand's political system: divided and ineffective governments with hopelessly short lives.
Our Founding Fathers recognized the enormous benefits of such a system, which is why they placed the patent and copyright clause in the Constitution.
The constitution also shifts power back to member states, and so citizens, in another way: by reform of the presidency system.
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