The Rights Of The United States

When The United States came into being, the heads of the country made a great deal of emphasis in making sure the country fulfilled one requirement: the United States needed to be the living image of freedom. This image of freedom needed to exist not only as a geographical and political entity, meaning free from the English, but as a society as well, and that is why it opted for a democracy as a system to rule, to let the citizens be able to live freely. Despite the obvious issues presented in the country on that moment that we might call hypocrite, like slavery; the founding fathers knew what they wanted the country to achieve, and laid a great base for getting there, The Bill of Rights, the document that preceded the Constitution in

In 1791, the Bill of Rights was created to specify the individual rights of every human being. Madison James is the creator of the 10 Amendments, he believed it was necessary to create the document to further explain what the Constitution will provide for each person. The Bill of Rights gives every citizen the right to freedom of religion, freedom of speech, as well as the freedom of the press, and lastly the due process rights. This document was formed when the Constitution in 1789 was drafted. Federalist viewed the Bill of Rights as an unnecessary document that the Anti-federalist wanted in order to feel safe in knowing what the Constitution was really about and what was entitled to them.

While all the Court Justices in Griswold v. Connecticut agreed that the legislation prohibiting the use of contraception was purely irrational, Justices Douglas and Black differed with the Court’s judgment about the case decision. Justice Douglas expressed the majority’s opinion in which he stated that the Connecticut law that banned the use or supply of contraception was unconstitutional because it failed to obey the “right to privacy” derived from certain privacy rights listed on the Bill of Rights. On the other hand, Justice Black disagreed with Justice Douglas by stating that the rights enumerated by Douglas were a mere implication of privacy and that the “right to privacy” didn’t reflect anything stated directly on the Constitution.

Former U.S. President 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”(“John,” p.1). Indeed, throughout the course of history of United States, peoples’ liberty has been established as the most important aspect of American people. Liberty is understood as a basic right of freedom in which everyone can engage 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 Fourteenth

After the Civil war in the late mid 1800’s constitutional amendments were made to abolish slavery, give former slaves citizenship and give the right to vote regardless of race. Even though these laws were passed throughout the rest of the 1800’s and 1900’s segregation of race was a major part of the lifestyle of southern states in America. From area that was built on slavery and use a human labor, accepting change wasn’t an easy task for southerners. It wasn’t until 1964 that an actual Civil Rights Act was passed to end segregation of public places and banned discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, religion or sex. With these laws being passed, the south still decided to live in their own way and continued to oppress blacks. These ways of the south made way for one of our most famous civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr.

While there are many rights guaranteed within the U.S. Constitution, these rights are not always protected. Today many rights are limited within the U.S; In schools students do not have all of their rights, and the rights that they do have can be limited. Also today many government programs, such as the NSA, limit the right to privacy which is implied in many of the amendments to the U.S. constitution. Lastly today the right against unreasonable search and seizure is not protected, and the due process for some people within the U.S. is extremely limited. Overall the rights of Americans today are limited because students in public schools lose many of their rights, many Americans also lose their right to privacy in many situation due to the need for ‘safety’, and because the right against unreasonable search and seizure as well as due process is limited for many individuals.

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 United States Constitution was designed to enfranchise the white men who, in 1787, were the only citizens included in John Locke’s conception of the social contract (outlined in his Second Treatise of Government). At this time in history, women were not invited to be free and equal, in relation to their husbands and fathers or as citizens in the founding fathers’ new republic. Therefore, the Constitution never addresses abortion, contraception, or marriage. Arguments made in laws and court cases on these topics, specifically reproductive rights, have therefore traditionally rested on a right to privacy the court has interpreted as being found in the first, fourth, fifth, and fourteenth amendments to the Constitution, rather than a right to freedom from sex-based discrimination found in the nineteenth amendment. The landmark supreme court cases Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade were both won on these grounds, both setting a precedent for the expansion of the right to privacy. This protection has also been affected by the 2003 Partial-Birth Abortion Ban and the Hyde Amendment.

“Under modern Supreme Court jurisprudence, the right to petition, along with the right to peaceable assembly have been almost completely collapsed into Freedom of Speech.” (www.heritage.com). The U.S. Constitution was written as a new set of rules for the nation in place of the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution consists of three parts known as the Preamble, the 7 articles, and the 27 amendments. Of these amendments, the first ten are referred to as the Bill of Rights. “The Bill of Rights sets limitations on the government.” (www.constitutioncenter.org). Our five most important rights are Freedom of Speech, Press, Assembly, Petition, and Religion which are all provided by the First Amendment. To understand Freedom of

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.

The Bill of Rights is a historical documents that has the first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution. The purpose of the Bill of Rights is for greater constitutional protection for our own individual liberties. It has a list of specific prohibitions on government power. There were only 12 amendments originally for the state legislatures and only picked 10 for all the states and those are known as the Bill of Rights, but there are 27 amendments in total. Amendments 3 through 12 were adopted by the United States to become the United States (US BILL OF RIGHTS) and were written down on December 15, 1791. James Madison was the one who wrote the Bill of Rights and there were 56 people to sign for approval.

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

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.

When a government that is created for the people, violates the rights of the people, its value will diminish and the core principles that uphold the State will decay leading to the downfall of the State. This is precisely the reason why I choose to affirm this resolution. Mass surveillance is a direct violation of the basic rights the United States of America was built upon. The core values, principles, beliefs, and morals that make the United States a democracy will be directly dismissed if mass surveillance is considered a justified method of governmental intelligence gathering. Mass surveillance does not only metaphorically rip apart the entire U.S. Constitution, but it would lead to the political demise of the United States of America. Privacy is considered of the basic Lockean rights which include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Although, one important thing to note is that some forms of mass surveillance such as shop cameras or street cameras, may be justified, anything more is a direct breaching of rights. If the government cannot uphold these basic human rights, these basic rights of the people, how can it even serve as a public aid? If the government wants to gather intelligence from its people in order to protect the people, is it really protecting the people if the basic rights of the people are thrown away in the process? If this is true, then it must mean that the protection(the government) has turned in to the danger(the government). It is basic

A lot of bills have been passed and written as legislation under the falsification that they would better outline the citizens ' freedom and guarantee their rights. Yet once in a while these laws are made with dismissal to what is expressed in our Constitution. At times they twist and distort the main purpose of the amendment, counter acting the purpose of why the Amendments was written. They were to guarantee that there would not be a rehash of what the founding fathers had encountered when they set out to draft the amendment that would represent our nation for a considerable length of time to come. Little by little our elected official have disregard our Constitution.