Abstract: What is the added value – or disvalue – of a “right to effective governance”? That question is phrased in relative terms, and needs a baseline. If the baseline is the United States Constitution, then suffice it to say that the US Constitution is notoriously an eighteenth-century constitution with a few later additions, and that it includes rather few “positive rights” (meaning affirmative rights to government action, as opposed to negative rights to government forbearance). Assuming that the “right to effective governance” is defined in a manner that actually requires the government to do something, and especially if the right is enforceable by private persons, then it would add a great deal to the requirements of the US Constitution. (Whether the result would be a net benefit is a different question.)