In this day in age, there are many potential threats to our nation and we must protect the American people with tact, and perceptiveness. When handling foreign affairs our main goal is to insure the welfare of our nation. While it may seem at times immoral not to police the world, we’ve tried that approach and it has been extremely unsuccessful. We’ve lost American lives for wars that we haven’t needed to be in. Although upholding the blessings of liberty wherever they may be violated is paramount to the American way of life, it is not as important as the welfare of our nation. By voluntarily getting involved in foreign conflicts we do just that, and put the safety of our nation in jeopardy, both by creating unnecessary enemies, and giving up thousands of young American lives for nothing, but policing the world. As our founding fathers believed, America is ready to take more of an isolationist approach again. This does not mean ignoring currents threats like ISIS, and nuclear capabilities in nations that are a danger by wielding such weaponry, this does not mean ignoring atrocities such as the civil war in Syria, this does not mean neglecting the fact that Russia is a loose canon with a box of matches. What this does mean is assessing the situation with aplomb, and making decisions as a nation that values a majoritarian policy rather that brash decision making that leads to an outcome that will effect our children. Foreign Threats/Plan of action- With threats in
From its humble beginnings, the United States of America has expressed its intention to assist individuals who desired freedom by serving as an exemplar of liberty. Originally, Americans sought to preserve their republic by avoiding all foreign altercations and external constraints. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, in his first inaugural address Thomas Jefferson warned his audience of the potential dangers of foreign affairs by stating, “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none,” pleading for a delicate balance between national security and commerce. This sentiment on foreign policy was reiterated on July 4, 1821, by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams when he said, “America does not go abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.” At the dawn of the 21st century, the implications from Adam’s statement are no longer consistent with the demands of American national security. The key tenets of the Bush doctrine, democratization and preemption, have deviated from Adam’s vision and redefined United States foreign policy for the 21st century.
Contraceptives are widely used throughout the United States in today’s age and age, but in the early 1950s, Connecticut and Massachusetts were the only states in the union that still had anticontraception policies such as the 1879 Connecticut statute prohibiting the distribution of contraceptives (Johnson 6). Estelle Griswold accepted a job as executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, and began a fight to give access for women to use contraceptives legally. It was very predictable the verdicts for the lower court cases during Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) as many judges took the side of the 1879 precedent. However, by the time it reached the Supreme Court, the main issue focused was the right to privacy which
The Bill of Rights is easily one of the most important sections within constitution, and this is because of the way that it protects the citizens of the United States from the government. One of the items therein the Bill of Rights is the 4th Amendment which states that, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Broken down, this one sentence gives the people the right to be secure and not be violated by the government when it comes to their property, papers and effects. This keeps them from being searched or having items seized without a warrant. This warrant that can be created has to be specific about the places that are going to be searched and the items that will be seized. This article will be divided into multiple sections that overall encompass the meaning of, how it came to be, and why it is important. The importance of this specific amendment is absolutely endless, and without it, our country would not be in the place that it is today.
From the time that the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1787, the definition of the second amendment had remained the same. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected into office and carried a gun rights enthusiast along with him. At the same time a Republican senator from Utah, Orrin Hatch, was handed the reigns of chairman of an important sub-committee. Senator hatch stated that he had discovered proof that individual citizens could rightfully own firearms under the second amendment. The National Rifle Association then began biased studies to corroborate with Senator Hatch’s opinion. After many disagreements and debates, Senator Hatch rose victorious.
The “Move to Amend” organization has put forth a proposed twenty-eighth amendment, that if ratified to the U.S. Constitution would take the constitutional rights away from all artificial entities such as corporations, and limit all campaign expenditures including the candidate 's own contributions and expenditures. The Supreme Court has ruled on multiple occasions that according to the fourteenth amendment corporations are individuals that have constitutional rights. If corporations have the same rights as individuals, then under the first amendment they have the right to spend their money on political campaigns as they choose. I am against both parts of this proposed twenty-eighth amendment, the Supreme Court has already set precedence and I believe that the addition of this amendment would directly contradict the first amendment since political speech is at the core of the first amendment. If you set limits on campaign expenditures, you are limiting someone’s ability to effectively campaign and get their message out. If a corporation chooses to spend large sums of money on political advertising then that is their choice, most people don’t want to be told how they can spend their money and neither do corporations.
In the United States, citizens have rights, and the United States Constitution guarantees these rights. The Bill of Rights states the basic liberties of the people of this nation in the first ten amendments in the U.S. Constitution. However, these liberties can be met with denied liberty, while sacrificing freedom, as people live in fear threatened by racism, religious beliefs, police brutality, invasion of privacy, and the horrific terrorism acts on United States soil.
Most people believe that they deserve the rights they are granted by the government. A prime example of this is the right to do what you want with your body, as long as you don’t hurt anybody else. This is considered a basic human right and is provided for in the constitution. One example of where you should be able to do whatever you want with your body is prostitution. The government always has too much power over our health. It can draft us and make us go into internment camps like the Japanese in WW2. It certainly shouldn’t say whether or not we have the right to pay for sex with a consenting adult.
Many people are not aware of their own rights, let along the fact that there are rights for victims. Before this class, I knew of a couple rights for victims, but not very many. I was uneducated in this area. For a long period of history, victims’ rights were not recognized, because they were not seen as necessary. Now there are thirty-two states that have added an amendment to their state constitutions including the rights of victims. However, these laws are not perfect. They do not apply to all victims of all crimes, and they do not always specify at what point after the crime these laws go into affect. In fact, only about half of the country affords rights to all victims, regardless of the crime. This number is too absolutely too low, but because people in general are unaware of this, there is no movement for change.
The U.S. Constitution was a set of fundamental laws and certain rights that each American citizen was meant to live by. The Constitution was signed by delegates during the Constitutional convention in Philadelphia on September 17, 1787. The constitution was created because many belived that the current governing document (The Articles of Confederation) were weak and allowed the states to operate like independent countries. At the Constitutional convention, the delegates created a plan for a stronger federal government that included three branches–executive, legislative and judicial. They also included the system of checks and balances to ensure no single branch would have too much power. The Bill of Rights–10 amendments guaranteed basic individual
The Bill of Rights was passed because concepts such as freedom of religion, speech, equal treatment, and due process of law were deemed so important that, barring a Constitutional Amendment, not even a majority should be allowed to change them. Rule of law is a principle under which all persons, institutions, and entities are accountable to laws that are: publicly promulgated, equally enforced, independently adjudicated, and consistent with international human rights principles. The United States, as a democratic republic, derives ultimate authority and power from the citizens and runs the government through elected officials. Our elected officials follow the same rule of law as the people they govern, and it is the electorate’s hope that the laws they enforce are inevitably followed. However, this is not always the case, and during the thirty-seventh presidency of the United States, the people’s trust of our executive office was shaken by a corrupt Nixon administration and its scandalous ways.
Here in America, people have the right to protest and speak their views granted by the first Amendment in their Constitution. Reading or watching the news lately, there are a lot of protests happening. People are gathering and protesting so many different things all over the world right now and America is no different. However, what the media shows in America are arrests of protestors by security and police, both of which attack them at times, using pepper spray and other brutal methods. How is this behavior allowed? Pauline Maier sums up what the issue at hand is, “The affection with which Americans regard the three “founding documents” of the United States has not been constant over time.” (Maier pg3). American protestors are at times fighting for equal rights as equal citizens. While many others are asking for justice due to corruption in Wall Street, Banks, and American Government; however, the people who don’t hold affection for the first Amendment have been shown in the media as an increasingly violent force against those who support it. Should people be allowed to protest regardless of their cause, and without any execution of force unless provoked? I believe they should have this right and be guaranteed safety in acting on it. With these ideas in mind, America’s first Amendment is being contradicted by US government authority and private authority figures because these same people have enacted numerous assaults on people using their first amendment rights.
The United States Bill of Rights was created in September 25, 1789 and ratified December 15, 1791. The Bill of Rights are the first ten amendments to the Constitution that were established to defend our rights as individuals and as American citizens. The Bill of Rights describes the rights of its people. The first four articles of the amendments deal specifically with the balance of power between the federal government and state government.
What is a bill of rights? What is an amendment? How are the different? A bill of rights is a formality such as the Declaration of Independence and it is the outline of what the citizens feel their born rights are as people of a union. An amendment is the changing or altering of a legal or civil document. Specifically amendments in the United States Constitution include the changing or detailing of what the people need. These two phrases differ in what their purposes are. The bill of rights was set as a clean-up for the Declaration of Independence requested by the general population used to form a more structured government. An amendment is used to overcome a specific objection like slavery or details are government processes.
John F. Kennedy once said, “ Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Indeed throughout the course of U.S. history, people’s liberty has been emphasized as one of the most important rights of American people. Liberty is understood as a basic right of freedom to which everyone can engage in certain actions without control or interference by a government or other power. Based on that principle, selective incorporation is a process of constitutional law in which some provisions of the Bill of Rights are nationalized to the states through the nationalization of Fourteenth
Government has the capability to alter the United States to meet their standards. They change the United States in several ways, but what they cannot change and take full control over are Americans’ unalienable rights. Unalienable rights have also been known as God-given rights, which means that they cannot be given or taken away by the government. In The Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson, he takes John Locke’s theory of live, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to express how unalienable rights gives Americans the chance to live their lives freely.