Constitution of the United States

The Bill of Rights consists of the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution. The Constitution as it stood was a controversial document. During the Constitutional Convention in...

The Constitution provides the fundamental architecture of the US Government. As such, it lies at the very center of the country's political traditions. However, at the same time, US political...

The Constitution strengthened the national government by giving the national government specific powers. With the Constitution, Congress now had the power to tax and to regulate interstate...

According to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), there are six main points of the US Constitution, referred to as the “Six Big Ideas.” They include the following. Popular...

The Constitution grants certain powers only to the federal government. These powers are called the enumerated powers. Some powers are granted only to the state governments. These are called the...

The six foundational principles of the United States Constitution are generally held to be those of limited government, republicanism, federalism, a system of checks and balances, separation of...

The key Founding Fathers, John Adams, James Monroe, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and George Washington believed it was necessary to write the constitution...

The expression of liberties and rights is the main way in which the Constitution creates a balance between liberty and conflict. There will inevitably be conflict between individuals attempting to...

In the Constitution, there are some powers that are granted only to the federal government. These powers are called the enumerated powers. There are some powers that are granted only to the state...

The framers of the Constitution certainly placed limitations on the democratic process. While some of these limitations have been removed through the use of amendments, others remain in place to...

The 6th Amendment, as with all amendments to the Constitution, is a way of protecting individuals against the violation of their inalienable rights by those in positions of authority. It also shows...

The Antifederalists disliked the new Constitution for several reasons. One concern of the Antifederalists was that the federal government would have too much power. They believed that the states...

In our Constitution, there is a supremacy clause. It states that the laws of the federal government take priority over the laws of the state governments. There was a reason for putting this clause...

The ideas and characteristics of the Constitution are largely derived from the Age of Enlightenment. Two important philosophers provided many of the ideas that made the Constitution unique from...

The Constitution is still relevant today because it establishes the governmental framework for the United States. The Constitution allows for three branches of government of equal power. Article I...

The U.S. Constitution reflects the United States of America at our founding, when there was no true model for such a document. The founders were not swayed by the organization of Britain or other...

Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution sets a very high bar for convicting an American for treason. Also, like many aspects of the Constitution, there is debate among Constitutional scholars...

The Framers of the Constitution did not include any other qualifications for membership in Congress because they wanted American politics and government to be as open as possible. The Framers...

Debates over the structure and composition of the federal legislature led to the Great Compromise at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. When the delegates met and decided to get rid of the...

I agree that a characterization of the Constitution as liberal or conservative can be dependent on how one defines those terms. Additionally, these are not absolute terms, I would say, since what...

James Madison has been denominated the Father of the U.S. Constitution; however this is because Madison was appointed by the Constitutional Convention as its recording secretary. His Notes on the...

These two documents are similar to one another mainly in the fact that both of them are concerned (at least in part) with creating a limited government. One of the major ideas of the founding...

The United States Constitution created a system of government that balanced power between the individual states and the federal (central) government. The Constitution also created three branches of...

One of the primary concerns of the framers was controlling the balance of power. This concern led to the creation of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government. It also led to...

The Constitution is designed to protect citizens of the United States from abuses that were commonly suffered by people in European monarchies at the time of the nation's founding. Some of the...

The Great Compromise also known as the Connecticut Compromise was an agreement brokered in 1787 to guide the representation that the states would have in both the lower and upper houses. This...

The framers of the Constitution of the United States sought, through the establishment of a federal system of representative government, to ensure a central or federal government with enough power...

In the United States, the Constitution created a federal system of government. The federal system is a decentralized one. It divides the power of governance between a federal government and various...

The Constitution is indeed a flexible document. One reason the Constitution is flexible is because the language of many clauses in the Constitution is vague, perhaps deliberately so. This has led...

While the United States does not have a provision for entrenched sections of its Constitution (in other words, sections which are not subject to amendment), the structural impediments to any...

Separation of powers and checks and balances are two related, though somewhat different, aspects of the US system of government. They are among the most important things in the Constitution...

At the heart of the anti-Federalists' case was a radical understanding of republican liberty. They believed that a republican system of government was best preserved and sustained in a relatively...

The main reason for this is that so many of the voters of North Carolina were Anti-Federalists. They did not trust the Constitution at first because they felt that it would give the federal...

The American two-party system has numerous advantages. When candidates are running for office, affiliation with a particular party provides voters with policy alternatives. The partisanship between...

While I do not disagree with anything that is said in the previous answer, I think that there is something that should be added here. The first answer does an excellent job of laying out the...

The Bill of Rights came to be included in the Constitution as a way to make people who leaned toward the Antifederalists more likely to accept the new Constitution. These people were worried about...

While it was evident that the framers of the Constitution wished to endow Congress with much in way of powers, I think that there were some significant powers that checks and balances enabled the...

The question is fairly subjective, but one could easily answer in the affirmative. The Declaration of Independence was exactly that: a declaratory statement, including reasons and explanations,...

The constitutional requirements for members of Congress are: Senators must be 30 years old, have been a citizen of the United States for nine years, and a resident of the state which they...

One of the chief complaints about the Articles of Confederation was the limitations of the document. The national government created by the Articles was too weak and left little power to the...

The Constitution of the United States is called a living document because it allows amendments (changes) to occur. The founding fathers were intentionally vague in areas of the Constitution,...

The Constitution, specifically the Bill of Rights, contains specific provisions designed to protect individuals. The above answer notes that no bill of attainder can be passed; the same provision...

The Constitution today does not, for the most part, limit democracy. To the extent that it does limit democracy, it does so by reducing the degree of popular sovereignty enjoyed by the people....

Of the options given here, B is the best answer. There would not have been any cause for anyone (in big states or small) to think that a Bill of Rights would give too much power to the federal...

First of all, we should be clear that the Founding Fathers did not completely leave religion out of the Constitution. They stipulated that there should be no religious tests for holding office....

Although the Constitution has obviously survived to the present day, we can argue that it had a fatal flaw with regard to states’ rights because it allowed the issue of slavery to lead to a...

I would come down on the side of interpreting the Constitution of the United States on the grounds of elastic adaptation to modern problems. To understand this, we need to think about anachronism....

This question seems most like an argumentative one with no definitive answer, so I will present to you both sides of the argument. One could certainly argue that the United States Constitution is...

This clause is the powerful Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution, perhaps the most broadly construed and broadly applied of any provision of the Constitution itself. It allows Congress to...

The Great Compromise (also known as the Connecticut Compromise) was created in response to an argument about how to apportion seats in the national legislature. This was an argument between the...