Michael Pollak wrote:
>
>
> To be fair, that is kind of true. A constitutional democracy is like a
> constitutional monarchy: the constitution constrains what the sovereign
> can do. That's what it means to have a constitution.
I agree. I would add that the original point of of _disctatorrship_ was to remove those constraints for a limited time under major emergencies. A Constituent Assembly also is a sort of dictatorship, because there are no constraints on it (aside, as John Adams remarked, from the constraints of wind and weather, or something like that. From one of the Cantos.)
And if you read the Federalist Papers it is very clear that such constraint on popular will was the first and last goal of the designers. Everything else was mere mechanics.
Carrol