JohnMMD

Perhaps. I tend to think of rules as not simply means for order, but safeguards. Parliamentary rules tend to focus on conducting meetings, and they go beyond that: the business of an organization can shift wildly back and forth, damaging the organization. Supermajority votes are a sort of method of order in the longer term operation of the organization: they prevent it from changing its organizational goals or methods on a whim as small sets of opinion shift between the pluralities to create temporary majorities. You can't change a binary voting method because there is only one: threshold voting (majority, supermajority). Election voting methods are different: selecting between alternatives is a sort of negotiation of broad sets of conditions, and we can simulate that in interesting ways. I come from a background where I attack things. A lot. I once suggested a method for getting a constitutional amendment passed with only 0.017% of the nation in favor, under the right conditions. My first reaction to any weakness is to create an effective defense, and I can't find one here.

You're right, of course. There's an obvious problem in political theory called the Tyranny of the Majority. In modern times, this has gotten us Gorsuch. We can argue over the political merits of a heavily-conservative judge and gain no ground (and Gorsuch's most-famous action to date was to ignore a statement in a law claiming the law didn't apply to a thing, and apply it to that thing, so the problem of ignoring the rules because the rules let you do so is pervasive); yet one thing is clear: Gorsuch was elected by a simple majority due to the type of point of order tomfoolery described above. The Tyranny of the Majority is guarded against by many things, and the best we had at the time was a Supermajority: three fifths must concur to prevent a momentary, slim grasp of power from making actions of long-term and extreme consequence. Turns out there's no such thing as a Supermajority if your Majority can just force the rule out. This must be a problem faced by all parliamentary organizations. In a voting theory sense, we have other protections. Proportional representation for multi-seat elections (single transferable vote), and Smith-set single-seat elections (Ranked Pairs). The Smith Set is interesting: it's the smallest set of candidates who each would win in a one-on-one election with any candidate not in the Smith Set. When the Smith Set is one candidate, it's the Condorcet candidate, and represents the candidate by whom all are best served. In a Yea or Nay vote, however, you have no protection. You can't change the voting method to protect against the simple majority. If the simple majority can violate any parliamentary rule, you have no protection against anything.

Yes. My point is that the majority has the capacity to eliminate such silly things as requiring a 2/3 or 3/4 vote to amend Bylaws, for example, by simply raising the point of order, then appealing to the floor when a simple majority wishes to amend the Bylaws. What is the defense against this?

In situations where a point of order concerning a voting rule is appealed to the assembly, does it make sense for such an appeal to require merely a majority vote? It would make sense to me that such an appeal should need a vote as per the minimum (if not the maximum) most-specific written rule concerning the vote being appealed, as understood by the assembly. I find a difficulty here: how do you handle the material facts of the rules in such a case? One can cite the written rules, but the vote on the rule of order is on the interpretation of the rules, and is pointless if you can simply cite rules. One can cite historical understanding of the vote, but the assembly can essentially pretend to remember history differently. You could take the nuclear option and suspend the vote until such time as the Board or an appropriate Committee can assemble evidence and create a defensible ruling, although then you have to deal with minority-owned committees creating a farce. In some sense, this is the problem with all rules: we can simply ignore them.