 Thirdly, one could argue that Austin’s reference to a sovereign whom others are in the habit of obeying but who is not in the habit of obeying anyone else, captures what a “realist” or “cynic” would call a basic fact of political life. There is, the claim goes, entities or factions in society that are not effectively constrained, or could act in an unconstrained way if they so chose. For one type of example, one could point out that if there was a sufficiently large and persistent majority among the United States electorate, nothing could contain them: they could elect Presidents and legislators who would amend the Constitution and, through those same officials, appoint judges who would interpret the (revised or original) Constitution in a way amenable to their interests. A different sort of example (and some would say that there are recent real-life examples of this type) would be a President who ignored the constraints of statutory law, constitutional law, and international treaty commitments, while the public and other officials lacked the will or the means to hold that President to the legal norms that purported to constrain his or her actions.