But as the constitution redistributes political power, and the after-effects of the financial crash reshape the economy, that is changing.
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If so, two founding member nations of the European Community would have rejected the constitution as a new political basis to unite the European continent, and it would be seen as a dead letter .
Yes, in a very narrow sense the Constitution makes the political branches partners for progress.
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If I'm elected president of the United States I will appoint judges who will follow the constitution, not shape the constitution to fit their own political or personal notions about how society ought to operate.
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The 1999 constitution outlaws discrimination on the basis of political beliefs.
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Such decisions are wholly confided by our Constitution to the political departments of the government, Executive and Legislative.
Narrow though the differences seem, the constitution is only part of a broader political battle between two Bolivias: the poorer, mainly Indian western highlands still revere Mr Morales, while the opposition is led by the regional prefects of the more prosperous eastern departments.
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So if the GOP is going to do its job, they need to treat the Constitution as more than a political talking point.
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Any state in a border dispute with another can petition directly to the high court under judicial powers defined in Article III of the Constitution, according to Joseph Zimmerman, a political-science professor at the University at Albany, State University of New York, and the author of several books on interstate disputes.
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Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a judge who has just become president with the support of all the big political parties, has called for reform of the constitution.
The constitution forbids the military from taking political sides.
The polls see Libyans elect a 200-member Constitutional Assembly, which will draft a constitution setting out a political framework for the country after more than four decades of rule under Muammar Gaddafi.
The hard-line Islamist political parties that backed putting Islamic law into the constitution and championed local Shariah laws are slipping in popularity, too.
The Mexican constitution expressly forbids non-citizens to participate in the country's political life.
Mr Morsi also cancelled a recent military order giving the generals special political privileges, including oversight of the drafting of a new constitution.
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.
Did the voters of old Europe turn against the grand political design for the EU, as manifested in the now-rejected constitution, because they recoiled from being governed by a superstate out of Brussels?
The book became popular during the Enlightenment among political thinkers in Europe and America, including those who drafted the US Constitution in 1787.
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The purpose of the political branches is to refine and run the institutional and legal structure the Constitution establishes.
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We all know what is needed -- a transition that is timely, new laws and a constitution that uphold the rule of law, political parties and a strong civil society, and, for the first time in Libyan history, free and fair elections.
America has the world's oldest written constitution (drafted in 1787) and two of the world's oldest political parties (established in 1828 and 1854).
Mr Makki's coalition Co-ordination of Political Parties for the Defence of the Constitution (CPDC), told the BBC it was confused by his arrest.
The guessing is that once the constitution is changed he will seek legislation to oblige political parties to introduce progressively larger quotas for women until equality is achieved.
The billions of dollars Google and Facebook invest in data centers and backbone infrastructure shape the physical characteristics of the Internet while the alliances they forge and the battles they choose to fight determine its political constitution.
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Those French voters that said non to the European constitution do not want to bury the idea of a union based on common values and a certain political consensus, quite the reverse.
The European Constitution is largely the product of a long-running Franco-German campaign to construct an economic, political and strategic rival to the United States.
Kesler brings to his analysis the perspective of the distinctive Claremont political philosophy which is grounded in the founding principles as articulated in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
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.
Nepal gave up its 240-year old monarchy five years ago, but its dreams of the new republic including a new constitution remain in limbo as political parties failed to agree on a host of issues.
Realistically, the country is a community of individuals and private institutions, including the family, with their own interests, bound not by mutual love but by the political principles that are set forth in the Constitution, a document that secures and celebrates the freedom to pursue those interests, varied as they might be.
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