¶ … United States Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, the Declaration of Independence, and the Great Compromise
The Articles of Confederation was the first document attempting to govern how the newly independent states were to act together in their union. However, the Articles of Confederation had significant flaws that rendered them an unrealistic tool for the government of the new states. While not all inclusive, the following are some of the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation: the federal government could not tax or regulate foreign and interstate commerce; each state had a single vote in Congress; there were no federal Executive or Judicial branches; Amendments required a unanimous vote; and a significant majority (9 of 13 votes) was required to pass legislation. The result of the Articles of Confederation was that the states engaged in constant bickering, which could not be resolved by the Federal government. The states failed to provide financial support for the federal government or really recognize its power, instead acting like their own countries; states each had their own currency, many states maintained their own military, and states entered into independent agreements with foreign governments. The result was a practical lack of a federal government.
The Constitution addressed the weaknesses in the Articles of Confederation by providing for a much more powerful federal government. First, the federal government was divided into three branches: Executive, Legislative, and Judicial. Each of the three branches played a unique role in governing the emerging nation. Furthermore, the Constitution not only granted power to the Federal government that it lacked under the Articles of Confederation, but also specifically granted many of those powers exclusively to the Federal government. The Constitution gave Congress the right to tax. In the Commerce Clause, it gave to Congress the exclusive right to regulate interstate and foreign commerce, which makes sense because allowing...
Filburn harvested nearly 12 acres of wheat above his allotment. He claimed that he wanted the wheat for use on his farm, including feed for his poultry and livestock. Fiburn was penalized. He argued that the excess wheat was unrelated to commerce since he grew it for his own use. The question in the matter was: Is the amendment subjecting Filburn to acreage restrictions in violation of the Constitution
GOVERNMENT Government: US ConstitutionState laws cannot conflict with the Constitution, which is a constraint for state laws. It is so because if the conflict occurs, federal law shifts the state law under the Supremacy clause of the Constitution (Cornell Law School, n.d.).The Fifth Amendment implies that the death penalty cannot be rendered without due process of law (The New York Times, 1994). It appears that the death penalty could be
Bill of Rights The United States Constitution was originally adopted at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, after the perceived failure of the colonies' first attempt at a foundational document for federal government, the Articles of Confederation. This is important to recall because in many ways the Constitution was written with an awareness of how such documents may fail in practice, and so its drafters included in Article 5 a set of
In addition it was agreed that issues of federal budget, revenue and taxation would originate with the House of Representatives. The Great Compromise issued in a spirit of success to the convention and essentially ended the division between the small and large states. However, it did nothing to alleviate the pending debate between the Federalist and the Anti-Federalist. Decisions on how much power to give to the people and to
Constitution of the United States was ratified after lengthy debate, mainly focused around issues related to the powers that would be bequeathed to the federal government. Although a gross oversimplification, the debate can be loosely qualified as being one between federalists on the one hand, and antifederalists on the other. Federalists, among them founding father luminaries from George Washington and Benjamin Franklin to James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John
Each state and many banks eventually developed their own currencies, greatly complicating trade and issues of security, both through increased potential for fraud and a lack of reliable knowledge about the strength of a particular currency at any given time. These issues were seen as largely responsible for a series of financial crises in the nineteenth century, and even in part for the Great Depression. The establishment of a
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