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Constitution and Government

The Basics - The following content has appeared on most of the New York examinations

• Once the United States was freed from Britain, its citizens had to decide how they were going to rule themselves. A government is put in place to keep order and the United States, having just been under a King and fearing a strong federal government, made a mistake. The Articles of Confederation was the first government for the US and had a very weak central government consisting of only the legislative branch.

• First, we must understand the three branch system of government. A government must make laws in order to keep society orderly. That job falls to the legislative branch. To enforce those laws, the government must have an executive branch to serve as police. Finally, to decide if the citizens were fairly arrested, you must have a judicial branch or court system. The job of the judicial branch is to look at what the law says and how it is to be appiled to a certain situation. Because the Articles of Confederation only had a legislative branch, it could make laws, but it couldn't enforce them, nor could someone go to court to prove their innocence. Finally, a government must have a way to raise funds to pay for its actions. The government under the Articles of Confederation could not tax people, but it could ask for people to voluntarily give money. Of course, this system did not work.

• The government under the Articles of Confederation had been stumbling long for a few years when one event clearly showed this government to be a failure - Shays' Rebellion. Daniel Shays, a farmer in Massachusetts, led others to burn banks and destroy records of loans they coulndn't pay back. When the government struggled to stop a group guilty of causing violence, everyone knew the time had come to create a new constitutiton.

• A constitution sets up the rules for the operation of a government. The meeting to create this new government was held in Philadelphia in 1787 and was called the Constitutitonal Convention. We know what happened at this meeting largely from reading the notes of James Madison.

• Virginia Plan or Large State Plan - It was decided that the new government would have all three branches - legislative, executive, and judicial. The first great debate was how the legislative branch would be constructed. Representatives of Virginia, the largest state in the union in terms of population, proposed that the legislative branch should have one house and that the number of votes each state gets should be based on the population of that state. In other words, large states because they have more people, should get ore votes than small states.

• New Jersey Plan or Small State Plan - Small states, of course, objected to this idea, saying that the four large states (VA, NY, MA, and PA) would always outvote the 9 small states. Instead, New Jersey proposed a two house legislature, with an upper and lower house. Each state would get one vote.

• The Great Compromise - To solve this debate, the two sides compromised. The Founding Fathers created a two houses legislature. In the lower house, called the House of Representatives, the larger your state, the more Representatives you received. In the upper house, called the Senate, each state received two Senators regardless of the population of the state.

• 3/5s Compromise - In another compromise, it was determined that slaves would count as 3/5s of a person.

• The government was intended to have three branches that have separate jobs but were even in power. To maintain this balance of power, a system checks and balances was introduced. Each branch of the governemtn has the ability to control parts of what the others do so that no one branch becomes more powerful than the others. For example, Congress (the House of Representative and Senate together) can create a bill, but the President, head of the executive branch, can veto it. Likewise, Congress can impeach the President for misbehavior. Supreme Court can declare a law passed by Congress to be unconstitutional, and therefore illegal. Senate must approve Presidential appointments to fill seats in Supreme Court.

• When the United States Constitution was finally completed, it had to be ratified, or approved by the states. This proved to be difficult becasue many states felt that there was no guarantee that the federal government would not take away the rights of the citizens. Virginia demanded a Bill of Rights, stating exactly what the government could and could not do to individual citizens. Thus, the government promised to add a Bill of Rights to the Constitution as one of their first actions.

• People who supported a stronger federal government at the expense of a weaker state government were called federalists. They tended to be northerners who were bankers and businessmen. People who felt the federal government was too strong and took too much power from the state governments were called Anti-federalists. They tended to be southerners who were in agriculture.

• Bill of Rights - The Bill of Rights is the first ten amendments to the Constitiution. When creating the government, the Founding Fathers knew they would have to make changes to the Constitution so they created a way to do this with the Amendment process. The first test of this syste was to add the Bill of Rights, which outlines what rights individual citizens have under the United States Constitution. The First Amendment guarantees the right of freedoms of speech, press, assembly and religion.

• Judicial Review - One important power not given to anyone in the Constitution is the power to declare laws created unfair, or the right of judicial review. Supreme Court, the head of the Judicial Branch, gave itself this power as a result of the 1803 Marbury vs. Madison Case. The right to declare a law unconstitutional is perhaps the most vital power of Supreme Court today.