The American Constitution And The Constitution

Writing the United States Constitution required perseverance and compromise, it was challenging to satisfy fifty-five delegates at the Constitutional Convention as well as the later audience of the citizens of the thirteen colonies. Below will be outlined three compromises that were crucial to the establishment of the Constitution as a replacement to the Articles of Confederation.

The Articles of Confederation caused many problems for our founding fathers. There were many important factors that were abandoned in order to run a functional nation. Some of the problems were: no federal army, no national currency, the federal government could not tax, there were no centralized courts for interstate crimes, and it was extremely difficult to pass a law and almost impossible to pass an amendment. Lucky for us our founding fathers met in Philadelphia and discussed how they can approve on the Confederation. Eventually they came up with the Constitution of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Before the Constitution was created there was a lot of arguing and compromising done. Without compromise it would be impossible to

The U.S. Constitution is the document of the principles and system of the United States government. It covers the goals of the new government, the system and purpose of each branch, how the states will work, how to amend the constitution, the supremacy of the national government, and the process of ratification. The U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of America, that must be followed by everyone. The Constitution of the United States was established at the 1787 Constitutional Convention and signed in 1787. The Constitution is the structure of America, it tells us how everything will work in this nation of ours. Without the Constitution, there would not be any specified rules of how this country is set up and how it works. The Constitution makes us who we are today, it establishes our system of government, our rules of what we can and can’t do, what the government can do for the people, and how everything in America is set up.

James Madison ensured that the American government did not become a Tyranny by writing a new Constitution. The Articles of Confederation became a problem for the United States because they did not work. So in 1787, 55 delegates were called to Philadelphia for a Constitutional Convention. They faced the challenge of creating a new Constitution that could hold the federal government and the states government together without letting any one person gain too much power. The new Constitution guarded against Tyranny by using federalism, separation of powers, checks and balances and fair representation in Congress.

The debate over the effectiveness of the Articles of Confederation has been a long lasting one. In order to create a document that would adequately protect the American people and their interests’ the Founding Fathers embarked on a journey to create a document that would address all of the discrepancies found within the Articles of Confederation Therefore, the purpose of this paper is threefold. First, to compare and contrast the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution of 1787. Second, to analyze the drafting of the Constitution. Third, to compare and contrast the debate over ratification of the Constitution between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists.

The 3/5th compromise was brought about by the question of how to count slaves when deciding sets for the House of Representatives (Monroe 65). Deciding how to count slaves would decide how many seats in the House of Representatives each state would get. If slaves were counted as part of the population then both the north and the south would have equal representation (Monroe 65). The fraction of 3/5ths was agreed upon when James Wilson thought of a way to count the slaves. His idea came from when Congress was trying to raise revenue, they decided that slaves were most likely to make 3/5th of what a free man would make (Monroe 65). Although the idea of one slave counting for less than one man is terrible to think about, this was the beginning

With all of the problems in America during 1788, the talk about a new constitution was the top of that list. The challenges that followed after the victory of the Revolutionary war made America a weak and unstable country. Having so little authority in our national government was something that the Americans wanted. The government was set by the articles of confederation, which made the thirteen states governments strong. It developed a loose association among the states and set up a federal government with very limited power. After a while they started to notice that without a central government, America was weak and that they needed to revise the Articles. This then led to the federalist vs. anti-federalist debate. In this paper I will show

At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the original purpose of the convention was to revise the Articles of Confederation. However, despite this original goal, many of the delegates sought the creation of a new government. Leading this movement were James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. Both men sought change but had significantly different causes for action. Madison believed the best solution was for the executive power to be checked by the legislature as a means to best represent the people. Hamilton instead believed that the federal government should be based upon the British constitution and monarchy. At the convention 's conclusion, the delegates had created the U.S. Constitution which included several major political compromises

The U.S. Constitution, as adopted by the Philadelphia Convention on September 17, 1787, sets out three distinct branches of national government and provides powers to each that serve as a check on the others. The branches include the executive branch: the president, the legislative branch: congress and the judicial branch: the Supreme Court. The Constitution is referred to as a living document because it is open to constant change. Additionally, the Constitution is open to constant interpretation by the Supreme Court. When the document was written over 200 years ago, abortion and automatic weapons were not issues, but the Constitution can be interpreted to protect or restrict rights on an assortment of issues. Article 5 of the United

Although the constitution was written over 200 years ago, the constitution continues to form the foundation to our modern day america. Nowadays the general consensus is that the constitution is a reliable document that is still relevant to this day. However the trust that we now place in the constitution wasn’t always present. During the time of its ratification there were two political factions ,the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, whose view on the power vested by the constitution clashed. Creating a massive political debate that would shape the future of the nation.

America was founded by people who possessed a deeply held belief in the idea of a fundamental right to freedom of religion and freedom of speech. These fundamental beliefs were traced back to the traditions of the English Common Law and the English Constitution. After the American Revolution the first amendment took the form of a collection of fundamental rights contained within State Constitutions. In response to a lack of national power and unity the form of U.S. Government was altered. The newly ratified U.S. Constitution created a form of government of with three branches with stronger enumerated powers. While the new structure a Supreme Court it but did not expressly protect personal liberties like freedom of religion or freedom of speech. In order to ease antifederalist fears of federal encroachments on person freedom, the first ten amendments were added to the Constitution know as the the Bill of Rights. This altered the new form of government by providing federal restrictions. However during Reconstruction the addition of the14th amendment altered the form of government by requiring due process and equal protection for all citizens. Consequently the Supreme Court in the 1920’s changed the form of U.S. government through Judicial activism by applying the protections of the Bill of Rights like the first amendment to include prohibition of infringements States laws. This opened the gateway for further Judicial activism to define the scope and limitations of these

Before dealing with individual amendments I would like to deal with the entire Bill of Rights and the constitution itself. The framers of the Constitution were wary of ceding too much power to the federal government. They rightly believed many local citizens would never make it to the capital but would interact with local government, so the power should be kept at the most local level possible. It was impossible to foresee in 1791 a world with video conferencing, 24-hr news and the ability to fly around the world within 36 hours. Because of the world we live in, I believe it is more necessary to make the Constitution and the Bill of Rights the foundational laws of the land. In 1833, the Supreme Court ruled in Barron v. Baltimore that the Bill of rights was written out of fear by the Antifederalist to constrain the federal government. We have given the individual States the power to make laws that conflict and contradict with Federal law, the laws of other states and national norms. It is these contradictions that allowed the Jim Crow laws and the doctrine of Separate but Equal to flourish in the aftermath of the Civil War. I believe that the law should be formulated at the highest level and filter down to the lowest. Make the Constitution and the Bill of Rights the total law of the land and no other law in any state may contradict them to ensure the beginnings of equality among all citizens.

“The Three Fifths Compromise” settled this particular debate when it was stated that a slave would officially count as 3/5 of a free person. In section two the Constitution, it defines how the population number is counted. Southern States, like Virginia, for example, opposed this because the slaves was what most of their economy was based on, and their population was bigger due to this.

In the 1700s when the United States had detached itself from British rule it was then seen as a plutocracy. The U.S established as a democracy; a government of the people and by the people. However, this establishment was in favor of the rich, educated, and powerful and anyone who was categorized or known as elites and it has remained in favor of these people ever since. Yes we can say we have witnessed variations and seen a semi-democratic rise in the past two centuries, but we have remained a plutocracy hidden behind the word that people use to cover its true identity, democracy. Those like the framers, the public opinion role, interest groups, and money all portray our hidden plutocracy.

Any nationwide endeavor across the world over is always faced with a myriad of challenges when one factor in, the interest of different individuals or groups. During the early years of the USA, there were many problems that politicians at the time faced when trying to create and strengthen the country’s Constitution. In the early 1780’s the young country was in a deep depression, and this played a key role in influencing the exercise as it ultimately led to a heated debate about the powers of the National and State governments. Most of the conservative politicians at the time preferred a stronger federal government while state radicals believed that states should have more power since it was in a better position to determine what was best for their citizens (Jilson, 2009). More sticking points divided the founding fathers which threatened the stability and establishment of the USA, such as slavery and federalism.